Published in 2020
304 pages
Michelle Bowdler is a debut author with her first book, Is Rape a Crime?. This question was asked by a survivor following an event where they had been gathered to advise law enforcement on how they would explain to their communities that they were now going through massive numbers of untested rape kits — some decades old — and were finding DNA matches to crimes that were ignored at the time they occurred. The devastation of the neglect and the sheer number of uninvestigated cases was staggering. This deeply researched memoir calls into question the ways sex crimes have been addressed over decades and is a rallying cry for urgent change.
Michelle is a recipient of a 2017 Barbara Deming Memorial Award and has been a Fellow at Ragdale and MacDowell. Michelle’s writing has been published in the New York Times and her essays “Eventually You Tell Your Kids” and “Babelogue” were nominated for Pushcart Prizes.
Bowdler is a graduate of Brandeis University, where she studied and fell in love with literature and writing, and of the Harvard School of Public Health, where she learned that so much of healthcare access and outcomes have a social and cultural component.
She is married to a wonderful woman and they have two awesome children.
What is this book about?
She Said meets Lucky in Michelle Bowdler’s provocative debut, telling the story of her rape and recovery while interrogating why one of society’s most serious crimes goes largely uninvestigated.
The crime of rape sizzles like a lightning strike. It pounces, flattens, destroys. A person stands whole, and in a moment of unexpected violence, that life, that body is gone.
Award-winning writer and public health executive Michelle Bowdler’s memoir indicts how sexual violence has been addressed for decades in our society, asking whether rape is a crime given that it is the least reported major felony, least successfully prosecuted, and fewer than 3% of reported rapes result in conviction. Cases are closed before they are investigated and DNA evidence sits for years untested and disregarded
Rape in this country is not treated as a crime of brutal violence but as a parlor game of he said / she said. It might be laughable if it didn’t work so much of the time.
Given all this, it seems fair to ask whether rape is actually a crime.
In 1984, the Boston Sexual Assault Unit was formed as a result of a series of break-ins and rapes that terrorized the city, of which Michelle’s own horrific rape was the last. Twenty years later, after a career of working with victims like herself, Michelle decides to find out what happened to her case and why she never heard from the police again after one brief interview.
Is Rape a Crime? is an expert blend of memoir and cultural investigation, and Michelle’s story is a rallying cry to reclaim our power and right our world.
