We’re looking at what makes an ideal victim in the eyes of the law, and society, and who is more likely to be believed.
We’re looking at what makes an ideal victim in the eyes of the law, and society, and who is more likely to be believed.
0:11 - The week before Jane's case went to trial
1:57 - The damsel in distress archetype
3:17 - Nils Christie's ideal victim theory
4:51 - Phil's story: when male survivors are dismissed
8:00 - Ann's case: when victims don't fit the mold
9:34 - Race and credibility
11:03 - Vanessa's story: when assumptions are made
12:25 - Lem's experience: becoming your own advocate
13:06 - Mental illness and credibility
18:40 - Why the "perfect victim" stereotype is a trap
All sources, statistics, multimedia clips, and music credits are available on Substack.
Jane Aster Roe: This podcast explores sexual violence and the court process surrounding it. Please listen with that in mind, and be kind to yourself. We have resources in the show notes.
The week before my case went to trial, I was asked back to the Child Sex Crimes Unit so I could watch my police interview. As the most important witness the prosecution had to the crime (because it had happened to me), they wanted me to remember what I had said way back when I'd first disclosed it.
That was when I found out that the police interview I had given where I had been "just talking" to the police officer was their most important piece of evidence. And so I'd better remember what I'd said, and not accidentally contradict it when on the stand. If something was incorrect, the time to amend the statement was now, not in the middle of a cross examination.
They sat me down inside a room full of computers and police officers, and gave me a pair of headphones. I had to take several breaks, and during one of them, a police officer, clearly sensing my anxiety, took pity on me and decided to ease my mind.
"Don't worry," he said. "I know your case. You're pretty but not hot, you're tiny, you're clearly smart, you didn't really do anything to encourage it. You've got this. You're the perfect kind of victim."
My name is Jane Aster Roe. You're listening to The Defendants, an exploration of justice for victims of sexual violence. We want to know what has to change within the system for it to actually work, and we are interrogating what justice means in the aftermath of trauma.
This is Episode Three: The Perfect Victim.
We're looking at what makes an ideal victim in the eyes of the law and society, and who is more likely to be believed.
Voice Actor: Help me, fair sir! I'm a maiden in need of heroic rescuing!
Jane Aster Roe: In general, society loves a damsel in distress, a woman in peril, a beautiful, innocent woman that needs to be rescued. This character turns up in literature, movies, musicals, video games, mythology, poems. Where we have story, you can find this person. She's the girl that needs saving from someone or something.
I'd like to tell you a story about my own made-up damsel in distress. Her name is simply Damsal. She's got honey coloured hair, big blue eyes, and she's kind to everyone who knows her. One day, she's kidnapped out of her room by a giant and several knights have to brave blistering storms and countless dangers to save her. Then of course, the most fearsome knight rescues her and gets to marry her as a reward, and they both live happily ever after.
A damsel is an archetype of a perfect victim, and our ideas of perfect victims were built out of fictions like Little Red Riding Hood, an innocent girl who is stalked and attacked while visiting grandma.
Voice Actor 1: Oh Granny, what big ears you have.
Voice Actor 2: All the better to hear you, my dear.
Jane Aster Roe: In 1977, a sociologist named Nils Christie came up with the theory of the ideal victim, which we've been expanding on ever since. He broke it into five parts. These are his descriptions.
Number one: The victim is weak. Thin, small women, children, ill or elderly people make good victims. Our Little Red Riding Hood is a little girl, and her grandmother is an older woman.
Number two: The victim was carrying out a respectable project, or to put it in other words, wasn't acting in a way that could invite abuse. For Little Red, she's trying to deliver food to her elderly grandmother.
Number three: Similar to number two, the victim is somewhere where they can't possibly be blamed, like in a public place, their home, or daylight. Little Red and her grandmother are eaten in Granny's house.
Number four: The offender is big and bad. For Little Red Riding Hood, this is quite literally the big bad wolf.
The majority of sexual assault cases will check this last box. Society views men as bigger and badder than women, and most assaults are perpetuated by men towards women. However, because number four is so often checked off, when an assault doesn't look like this, say when a man assaults another man or a woman assaults a man, those victims have an astronomically harder time being taken seriously.
We interviewed Phil Mitchell, and he told us this story.
Phil Mitchell: Just before I was 21, I was raped by a bouncer, or someone I assumed to be a bouncer, in Leeds where I live, and I told the police, more or less immediately after it happened.
I kind of ran into the police station saying, "I need help. I need help." I was crying. I was quite inebriated. I remember everything, or most things, but so I wasn't that bad. But ultimately, the police, well, I say the police, two men in plain clothes. I'm assuming they were police officers out of uniform, I've no idea, but there were two men in just jeans and a t-shirt. That's something. And they looked at me, and I just said, "I've been raped." And I said, "Look, I've been raped. There's this man. He raped me. He is on this bridge." And I said, "No, and I told him to stop." And they basically said, "Oh, right, you've been raped, have you? Yeah, course you are. Go home, sober up and see if you've been raped in the morning."
Jane Aster Roe: The last metric on Christie's list is that the offender is unknown to the victim.
This almost never happens in sexual assault cases. RAINN, the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network, estimates that eight out of ten assaults are committed by someone known to the victim.
This does happen in most damsel in distress stories. In fact, it's one of the morals of the story of Little Red Riding Hood: Don't talk to strangers!
See, in damsel stories we aren't expecting to have to think too hard about the damsel. In fictional stories, the victim is designed to be an obvious victim and the villain is designed to be the obvious big bad villain. This completely falls apart in the real world when we're dealing with real people, and yet we still look to these stories to inform how we want victim stories to play out.
Going back to my story, if once upon a time there was a woman named Damsal who really loved her best friend and agreed to go on a picnic with him in the forest by themselves, and in that forest her best friend kissed her and she tried her very best to reject him kindly and say, "I'm sorry, best friend, I only think of you as a friend," and best friend couldn't accept that and assaulted her, well, when she asked the knights to help her, they wouldn't know what to do. They would probably tell Damsal she was overreacting.
Here's the thing: We want the perfect victim to exist. The justice system wants the perfect victim to exist, even in how they relate to the system itself.
Be polite. Be grateful, and sit tight while the experts do their jobs. Be patient, and wait for an update.
As I was told by my prosecutor, "Don't worry, we deal with people like you every day."
But while they may be used to encountering people like me every day, that doesn't seem to make them better at meeting victims where they're at, without discounting them. To some extent, I understand. Getting a guilty verdict in these cases is incredibly hard, and they're looking for the kind of victim with the kind of story that's going to get all the way through the process. Someone worth investing in, for lack of a better word. Cause it's hard out there.
When we spoke to Ann, whose name we've changed and whose transcript is being read by an actor, she told us this about her trial.
Ann: I was treated like this like insane junky witch slut. I had my Facebook place of work, I think I had written "Vengeance Witch," it was like my place of work, and it was just like a stupid joke. The defense lawyer quite literally accused me of being a witch on the stand. And I'm like, what the fuck is happening right now? And he took it up to be this kind of like vengeance thing, where I was getting revenge. And I'm like, again. I'm like, for what? If nothing happened. But also this, this, this demonizing of like women and women who use drugs, especially, the slut shaming, like the asking me to go through who, like, every single person I'd slept with and why, and all this stuff.
Jane Aster Roe: Ann didn't hit any of the metrics of the perfect victim. And she felt that the more she tried to reveal herself as a whole person, the more punished she was, and the less she was believed.
Ann: I had this idea that if people get to know me, that they'll believe me and see me for who I am. And so I carried that with me into the trial. And I felt that I had the opportunity to show a jury who I was. But of course, I now know that it doesn't matter what they think of me, really. It's not really about who I am. It's about whether I'm reliable or not. And I realized that the reality was, like so many other people, as soon as you take drugs or do anything, or just, you know, be a bad girl in any way, now you're no longer credible, and you kind of deserve it.
Jane Aster Roe: There's another key element to being the perfect victim. A perfect victim is a white woman. But white women are obviously not the only people who are assaulted.
Here's activist Clairandean Humphrey talking about how the ideal victim is a racialized category.
Clairandean Humphrey: It's the way we've been told that whiteness equals innocence and purity. Black and brown folks have to scream pretty loud to even just be believed that something happened. Or even like larger narratives saying that we deserve it.
Jane Aster Roe: Black women are disproportionally at risk of sexual violence. According to the National Black Women's Justice Institute, close to one in five Black women are survivors of rape, and forty-one per cent of Black women experience sexual coercion and other forms of unwanted sexual contact.
But despite being at higher risk, they are less likely to be believed. Black women are seen as promiscuous and have been hypersexualized for centuries, which leads to people believing they invited sexual violence. There's also the stereotype of the strong Black woman, which makes it hard for people to ever see them as victims. Additionally, the justice system, which is deeply racist in its founding, is hostile to Black folks and makes it extremely hard for Black women to report. We've put books and resources in the show notes for you to learn more about this and other issues of racial profiling when it comes to victims of sexual violence.
Vanessa, who is an Indigenous and Black woman, told us this story.
Vanessa: For me, I actually didn't go to the police right away. I've had negative experiences with the police in the past. By the time I did end up going to the police, it must have been almost ten months after the incident. And it was horrible, absolutely horrible. The person I spoke to when I told him what happened, he just said, he just looked at me. Goes, "Well, what do you expect? What do you think was going to happen to you? You're going to be drinking alcohol and be carrying on?" And my child was there with me. She's an adult, she's twenty-five, but I just cried and I ran out of the police station. That was it. And I was like, "I'm never going to do that ever again." And I just chose not to continue on with moving forward with it because it was just too much.
Jane Aster Roe: Since it seems like so many people within the system and surrounding it are so attached to these narratives around victimhood, I started to wonder about how cases that got close to hitting the metrics would be treated. Would those victims get better receptions within the system?
I'll remind you that I had an officer tell me point blank that I was a perfect kind of victim, and I got a not guilty verdict. Of course, I was only ticking off some of the boxes. Maybe important ones, sure, but not all of them.
Lem, whose name we've changed, told me about their assault and I realized that they did tick off all the boxes.
Lem is a white, tiny, femme-presenting woman who was approached by a stranger, followed from a bar while walking home on a busy street, and then was subsequently assaulted.
Even when you hit every metric of being a perfect victim, there will always be something else to find, something to pick at, in order to discredit you.
Even though they hit every metric on Christie's list, Lem still had an adverse experience, because Lem was someone who was easy to write off in other ways.
Lem has lived in and out of psychiatric hospitals and struggled with bipolar and other mental illnesses for most of their adult life. They've had several prior hostile interactions with the police before, in mental health contexts. They're also autistic, and the way they communicate sometimes doesn't match up with how police want to be communicated with.
Lem: I felt like I was knocking on a dead door. Whenever I would call the office, like the detective's direct line, another officer would tell me, "He's on holiday right now," or "He's gonna come back at this date, and he'll be in the office at this time." And so I would call at that date and at that time, and there would be nothing. Same thing with meetings. If I'd call, I'd be told, "He's in a meeting that's gonna end in two hours or so." And then I would call again, and then, "Well, he left, he went home."
And so I had called, another officer had picked up the phone, I explained my situation, and then at one point, she cut me off and said, "Okay, this isn't supposed to be for a venting session."
Jane Aster Roe: Lem took matters into their own hands.
Lem: That's when I kind of did my own field work. I went back to where the assault, or most of the assault, took place. Took pictures. I saw there was a sign that said CCTV, and I saw that there was a camera. And so I also called the number that was on the sign, and that was to a general security line, and they told me that footage gets erased after about a month, so there was still some time, but not a lot of time, to see if there was any footage captured.
And I went back to one restaurant, and I spoke to the waiter, and he said that they would be able to trace card transactions if a card had been used and that the police hadn't come yet, but he gave me their information so that I could give it to the police.
So I had all of this information, all of these pictures, along with the recording of the assault. And so after doing all of that, I decided to make a Google Drive, because the detective who was initially working on my case, he said something about setting up a portal where I could upload all these documents, which never happened. So I created my own drive and shared that with the detective.
Jane Aster Roe: Lem also ticks off another box here that we haven't addressed yet. There was so much evidence in their case. By having a recording of the event, Lem eliminated all ambiguity that an assault had occurred. But after giving the evidence to the police, this was the response.
Lem: So then I would call the detective to get some updates, and every time he kept saying that he needed to wait until he got results back from the Centre for Forensic Sciences, like the DNA results from the rape kit, and that things would move forward from there.
Jane Aster Roe: After a couple months, the detective in charge of their case stopped responding to them at all. Lem was extremely concerned.
Lem: Part of the urgency for me to get this case solved was because I knew that there was this violent assailant who was out in the public, and I was extremely concerned that he would hurt someone else.
Since the assault, I had to have eyelid surgery. I had a rib fracture that took a long time to heal and will still act up. And so I thought, this guy is out there living his life, and my life feels pretty ruined. And I'm in and out of the psychiatric hospital, and especially when I'm in the hospital, you can't leave. So it just felt, it felt ironic that I was the one who was in a place behind locked doors.
Eventually things started to feel like a dead end. Nothing was progressing. And I would call, I have a call log and just dozens of calls to the detective's office, and I was never able to get through to the actual detective. It would always be someone else.
The most helpful person was an officer who was working at the main line. And so I explained my situation, that I wasn't able to get through to this detective, and she said that she would not only get in touch with him, but she would also see if she could give me any updates. And she was actually the one who told me that the DNA results had come back months ago, and that there was DNA that was found, so I should have been contacted to get an update.
Jane Aster Roe: Lem went and did investigation work that absolutely wasn't their job to do, and then they essentially turned themselves into a squeaky wheel, something that made more and more noise until it was easier to just grease the wheel rather than ignore it. And let's be clear, I am absolutely not saying that you as a victim should go back and find your own evidence for the police. What I am saying is that in Lem's case, the fact that they did that and made so much noise seems to be the reason it was able to be solved.
Lem's assailant was eventually caught. But this happened after a friend of theirs called in a favour with another friend, who contacted the chief of police.
That's not at all realistic for every survivor.
The perfect victim, and the perfect villain for that matter, is a trap. We have to stop looking for it. We have to stop reaching to fictional stories to tell us what to expect in the real world.
A lawyer we interviewed named Amanda Carrasco said this:
Amanda Carrasco: It's easier when it's black or white, when it's good or it's bad, but the reality is our whole world is gray. Like it really is, it's so not clear cut. There's so many factors that come into play, and it's why people that are selling pat answers or simple solutions are kind of selling snake oil, because life is complicated. Our situations, our experiences, are complicated. There's a lot of nuances, there's a lot of context. And when we try to just take this simplistic approach to things, we fail because people are not boxes. And that's what I see with our system. We're trying to put people into boxes, but that's not us. That's not reality. We're people.
Jane Aster Roe: You've been listening to The Defendants, an Aster Roe Production. It's executive produced by me, Jane Aster Roe, Rachel Arundel and Katie Jensen. Our story producer is Jessica Strachan. Editing and sound design by the incomparable Isis Madrid and Katie Jensen. Our research producer is Charlotte Gregg, our fact checker is Rachel Bromberg and our mental health consultant is Michelle Crossman. Lindsey Keene is our outreach coordinator. Dawson Fleming is our production assistant. The voice actors featured in today's episode were Dawson Fleming and Lindsey Keene. Special thanks to Annette Studios and Vanessa Zoltan. We explored a lot of information in this episode. All our sources are in the show notes. It's also there that you can find resources and organizations that offer support. Thank you for listening.