Jon Krakauer: “It’s easier to pretend it doesn’t really exist.”

You’re addressing a national problem — our inability to address widespread sexual assault via our current justice system — by focusing on one American city. What led you to choose Missoula, Montana, for this book?

In 2012 I began tracking approximately thirty sexual assault cases in different parts of the country as I tried to decide whether to write a book about acquaintance rape. One of the cases was in Missoula, and when I saw that a sentencing hearing for this case had been scheduled for October 2012, I decided to attend, although the hearing ended up being postponed until January 2013. When I finally went, and observed a young woman named Allison Huguet testify against her assailant, I was so inspired by her courage that I decided to ask her if I could write a book about her case, and she agreed. Later, as I learned of other cases in Missoula that suggested the city had a systemic problem with the way it handled sexual assaults, I expanded the book to include these cases, too.

You write, citing a study that analyzed and debunked notions of the prevalence of false accusations of rape that “When an individual is raped in this country, more than 90 percent of the time the rapist gets away with the crime.” Most readers would, I think, be shocked by that figure; why are we so tuned out to the scale of the problem?

I’m not entirely sure why so many Americans are in such denial. Having said that, I must confess that until a few years ago, when I was alerted to the problem upon learning that a young woman I know had been raped by a man she trusted (a man whom I also trusted), I, too, was ignorant about the scale of the problem. Perhaps it’s because acknowledging how big the problem is, and how much harm it causes, it so disturbing. It’s easier to pretend it doesn’t really exist — that it’s simply a hysterical overreaction to a relative handful of women who have made false accusations.

You movingly connect the PTSD suffered by rape victims to that which characterizes the post-combat experience of many veterans of service in Iraq and Afghanistan. How well do we understand the effects of trauma on the psyche, and should we be rethinking how our justice system works in light of what we now know?

Most of us have a very poor understanding of the profound impact that being raped can have on those who have been traumatized. The science is very clear that sexual assault is often such a horrifying experience that it changes the fundamental chemistry of the brain, causing victims to act in ways that can seem baffling. For example, most rape victims don’t resist, even when the assailant doesn’t have a weapon. Many victims irrationally blame themselves for being assaulted. One of the victims in my book actually drove her assailant home after he raped her. Needless to say, such behavior can make it hard for prosecutors to convince juries that the sex wasn’t consensual. To win convictions in rape cases, prosecutors need advanced training that allows them to grasp the scientific basis for the counter-intuitive behavior exhibited by many victims, in order to make sense of such behavior to juries.

You’ve dealt with both terrible crime, personal tragedy, and individual heroism in your previous books. This seems to be a departure in that you are explicitly addressing an ongoing and widespread social problem. What do you hope we learn from Missoula?  Is there a particular set of changes you want to see happen?

Mostly I hope people come to understand that relatively few women lie about being sexually assaulted — the most reliable peer-reviewed studies show that only 2 percent to 10 percent of men charged with rape are falsely accused. To be labeled a rapist carries an indelible stigma, and to wrongly accuse even a single man can cause irreparable harm. But it can be just as harmful to let men who are guilty of rape escape accountability, because doing so sends a false message that the women they have raped are liars unjustly stigmatizing their victims, compounding the trauma of being sexually assaulted. It’s easy to forget that the injury done to a rape survivor who is disbelieved can be even more devastating than the injury done to an innocent man who is unjustly accused of rape. And without question, the former happens much more frequently than the latter.