Acquaintance Rape in Young Adult Fiction
Overview
Novels for children and young adults have always reflected cultural trends. They shape young people’s focus and expose them to explanations about the world. The power and promise of this literature lie in its ability to both instruct and delight its audience by teaching them histories (and herstories), enabling them to hear voices too often silenced, entertaining them, and helping them to find their way to understanding even the most complex situations. Acquaintance rape is one of those situations.
More than half of all sexual assaults are committed by an acquaintance; as a culture, we have come to understand that the face of the rapist is most often a face we know, a friend, a schoolmate, a date (Research and Statistics Division, Department of Justice). Sexual assault is also a gendered crime: women are victimized more often than men. Unfortunately, adolescents (15-24 years old) have the highest rates of sexual assault. As a crime that profoundly impacts adolescents, it is unsurprising that more than one hundred young adult novels about acquaintance rape have been published in the past decade.
Objectives
The objectives for this project are to answer two questions:
- How, and to what end, do young adult rape novels represent the survivor’s shame and other psychological reactions to sexual assault?
- How, and to what end, do young adult rape novels characterize, and in some cases focalize, young men who rape?
Book Database
One early outcome of this research is the reading of 100+ young adult rape novels. To share these titles with the public, we have created a book database that provides a basic synopsis and key themes about each novel. The database can be searched by title, author, and keyword. We hope others who are interested in accessing young adult rape novels will find this database to be a useful tool in selecting books for their own interests, or specific teaching and research goals.
Acknowledgements
Roxanne wants to thank the research assistants and interns who have contributed to this project; this website and the scholarship has been enriched and expanded by their commitment and talent:
Team Lead: Kelly Keus
Research Assistants: Emmarie Brown, Mia Arciniegas, Alynne Sinnema
Mitacs Interns: Jasmine Trang, Lakshmi Priya,Verónica Mondragón Paredes, Yixi Wan, Mariana Rodriguez Castañeda, Weilan Shu
Funding
Thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for funding this research.
Works Cited
Research and Statistics Division, Department of Justice. “Just Facts: Sexual Assault.” Government of Canada, https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/jr/jf-pf/2019/apr01.html. Accessed 28 July 2021.