Trust (2010) Anonymous 40058
I just watched this movie. It's about a 14 year old girl named Annie who meets a man online who poses as a teenager (Charlie). They meet IRL and he is actually middle aged. She goes along with him anyway and goes back to a motel room with him. He rapes her.
Her friend saw her with the man and Annie admits to having sex with him. Her friend reports what happened to the school.
The rest of the movie is about the fallout. Annie is at first in denial it was rape (even though in the scene she is telling him to wait and stop), saying she loves him. She resents her friend and family for making a big deal out of it and driving Charlie away. After learning he has multiple victims as young as 12, she realizes she was raped. She is bullied at school and attempts suicide.
During the film her father also becomes obsessed with revenge, and beats up a man who he think looks like Charlie. He does other stuff like pose as a teen girl in chat rooms and search the sex offender registry.
This movie has its flaws, the way the investigators behave is often unbelievable (having Annie continue to chat with Charlie to try and bait him so they can trace him, showing her photos of other victims, etc).
I bring this movie up because most of it is about the fall out of what happens after the rape. The investigation itself and the shame that comes from her parents knowing, her school knowing, etc. is significant and traumatic. Almost more traumatic than the rape itself it seems. What would happen if she remained in denial, potentially until she was much older and could realize what really happened to her?
This isn't me making a case to not investigate rapes, I don't think that is the way at all. But the forced therapization and her family harping on her reminding her of the shame every day seems to make things 10x worse.
Then we have the father. The father is consumed by his desire for revenge. He has dreams about beating the man and killing him, poses as a little girl in chat rooms to catch pedos, searches the sex offender registry and reads through his daughters explicit chats with the groomer. In olden society the father would have just killed the sick fuck that touched his daughter and had his catharsis. In modern society, it must be emasculating to have to wait for the investigation and justice system to work. And after all that, is it really as satisfying to see him go to jail after countless hours, sleepless nights, and resources poured into a trial, when Daddy could have just blown his head smoove off and saved everyone some grief? I don't have the answer either, but it makes me ponder whether things are really better this way.
Anonymous 40059
>The father is consumed by his desire for revenge.
Hopefully not to the point where he unintentionally neglects his daughter. There are real cases where people care more about punishing the perpetrator than they do truly supporting the victim, not simply because they're careless but because they're sure revenge or unaccompanied hatred will fix things. Obsession with a solution can sometimes neglect what the main sufferer really needs to feel better during the aftermath. As you brought up with the
>forced therapization and her family harping on her reminding her of the shame every day
thing. It's the situation where people imagine they're doing right by getting themselves involved in certain ways, but really it's amounting to a new kind of stress that intensifies the damage of the initial event. It's so sad and I hate that rape forces really torturous positions and consequences. Wanting revenge, but needing some balance to heal. Not wanting to cope with the assault poorly, but being forced to by certain physical and mental circumstances. Systems wanting to respond but being incapable of handling it properly despite at least wanting to. Coping mechanisms twisting up the emotions and stories of those who experienced rape, making them feel guilty for how they handled things or how they were related to their abuser.
A thing that comes to mind is Maya Angelou's case, where she stopped talking for five years because she thought speaking up about her rape had made her responsible for her rapist's death (he was killed when he got out of jail.) It was a great outcome that he's now dead (good riddance no matter what), yet the point that got to me was the victim herself felt really horrible despite the result being understandable and deserved. The reaction was so important to how she coped. It opened a new wound, arguably causing the main blow to not be treated as best as it could've.
Though obviously the answer isn't to imagine girls and women are better off staying silent, only allowing themselves to let out the truth quietly. The culling of rapists is naturally a positive.
It's just plainly detestable that society cannot handle it in the best way (but how can it be?), which was probably shown in the film judging by what you shared about the school and her family's reactions being traumatic.
>revenge
A lot of people post inflammatory statements about wanting to kill rapists (please do, chop chop), but won't do the work to handle victims properly. They think they're helping but they really aren't. I get it though, which is the worst part. I understand her father wanting to kill the one that did this to his daughter. There's nothing else to do with that level of anger really, other than imagine completely erasing the cause. Jail isn't enough
