Anna Bninski ‘23
Executive Editor
Content warning: discussion of sexual assault
“The details of whatever happened were gone from her mind, but present all over her body.” The opening scene of Julia Dahl’s novel The Missing Hours doesn’t pull any punches, depicting a college freshman as she wakes up and faces the aftermath of a sexual assault. The novel, and its genesis in Dahl’s past as a crime reporter, provided the topic for a Zoom discussion between Dahl and Professor Danielle Citron, titled “Intimate Privacy Violations and the Law.” Sponsored by the LawTech Center; Law, Innovation, Security, & Technology (LIST); and the Virginia Journal of Law & Technology, the discussion focused particularly on the aftermath of a sexual assault and how, as Dahl put it, “there’s not really any good choices when this happens to you.”
I logged onto this Zoom with a certain disadvantage: I hadn’t yet read The Missing Hours. Although the UVA Library System is very, very good, it takes a few days to turn around a book request, and I failed to plan sufficiently far in advance. But the discussion only confirmed that I would be reading this novel as soon as possible—and once I did get my hands on the book, I finished it within 24 hours. It’s both quite dark and hard to put down.
Ms. Dahl began her career as a journalist, with a focus on sex crimes against women; she described a piece that she wrote years ago for Seventeen magazine, detailing the experience of a young woman who suffered sexual abuse by a relative. The young woman’s family didn’t believe her; neither did law enforcement. As Dahl covered similar crime stories, the pain—and seeming inevitability—of being disbelieved kept appearing. So did the inefficacy of turning to law enforcement in the wake of sexual assault; while working for a nonprofit that focused on criminal justice news, Dahl wrote a major piece on rape kits “languishing, going bad in freezers across America.” Some may yield a conviction decades after the assault, but most do not.
In the wake of the infamous 2012 Steubenville High School case, which introduced much of America to the upsetting fact that perpetrators of sexual assault could document that assault, and distribute that documentation with seeming impunity,[1] Dahl could not stop thinking about the experience of the victim and her family. Since the assault took place in a fairly small community, Dahl imagined how every time you meet someone, “you would have no idea if they’d seen these pictures of you, in that traumatic, humiliating moment…I couldn’t get that out of my head.”
During her time writing about this kind of crime, Dahl reached out to Professor Citron,[2] trying to get a handle on why, in cases where intimate photos or videos were shared without the subject’s consent, law enforcement claimed there was nothing they could do. The conclusion: “The law had not caught up to what the crimes were.” While that has changed to some degree—Professor Citron mentioned New York’s 2019 criminalization of revenge porn—neither law enforcement nor lawyers come out of The Missing Hours looking great.[3] Professor Citron noted that Dahl’s work serves as education on the failures of the legal system and can spur change. “But it’s bleak!” she exclaimed. “Did you think about having the police maybe help a little?”
Claudia, the protagonist of The Missing Hours, discovers that the perpetrators documented their assault on her. Characters variously attempt to contain, weaponize, and repurpose the video. Partially due to a prior less-than-flattering appearance on a reality TV show and partially because of society’s generally terrible treatment of sexual assault victims, Claudia knows that her obvious incapacitation during the assault won’t save her from being painted as a party girl who invited the violation, rather than as the victim of a crime. Ultimately, she turns to extra-legal means to exact a measure of revenge. Dahl explained that while she does not endorse her character’s decisions, and doesn’t think they’ll make her happy, the system she’s facing does not allow her any good choices.
Dahl expressed hope that someday we’ll reach a change in the legal system, where the default is for police and prosecutors to believe victims—and for prosecutors, when deciding whether to bring a case, to expect the same of the jury.
During the Q&A portion of the event, Professor Cathy Hwang noted that Claudia was a semi-public figure, and that the novel could encourage people to feel comfortable asserting boundaries in the parts of their life that are documented and disseminated. Dahl added that privacy is not an all-or-nothing proposition: “Just because you’re an influencer, a movie star, a public person, doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to have privacy.”[4]
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amb6ag@virginia.edu
[1] After public outcry two juveniles were eventually convicted of rape; multiple adults were indicted for behavior that included obstructing justice, tampering with evidence, and making false statements.
[2] Ms. Dahl and Professor Citron are clearly huge fans of each other, which gave the conversation a really good dynamic despite its difficult subject matter.
[3] It’s probably good for law students to periodically read books where at least one villain is a lawyer, to keep things in perspective.
[4] For those interested: Throughout the discussion, Dahl recommended further reading, including Know My Name by Chanel Miller, Is Rape a Crime? by Michelle Bowdler, and The Damage by Caitlin Wahrer.