[ad_1]
Photo: Beth Dubber / Netflix
When Marie *, an 18-year-old woman living in Lynnwood, Washington, said that a masked man had broken into his apartment in the middle of the night and had Stabbed to death, even his relatives found the story hard to believe. . Mary's behavior was surprisingly calm and calm, and small details of her story were constantly changing. "I'm a big boy Law and order fan, and I just got that really strange feeling, "says his adoptive mother, Peggy, in an article about Mary's case in Marshall Project and ProPublica, which has now been adapted to a new Netflix series. Unbelievable. "I felt like she was telling me the script of a Law and order story. "
The fact that Peggy tries to metabolize Marie's trauma through Dick Wolf's iconic criminal procedure speaks volumes. In his 20 seasons on the air, Law and Order: SVU sensitized on sexual assault long before #MeToo became a hot topic. Yet, this has also perpetuated dangerous myths. There are few more laughable sentences on television than the preliminary voice of the broadcast, which states that "in the criminal justice system, sexual offenses are considered particularly odious". Again, "in the criminal justice system, sexual offenses are rarely reported and even more rarely they are the subject of a thorough investigation" does not call quite the same thing.
Unbelievable, which airs on Netflix this Friday, is a program on sexual assault that assumes them. The show – which is directed by the showrunner Susannah Grant and is based on the history of the Marshall Project – ProPublica and a This American life episode – is the first of the #MeToo era to focus not only on the timing of the violation, but also on all the ways in which our system makes women brave enough to manifest themselves.
The show is divided into two stories. A follows Marie, played by Booksmart's Kaitlyn Dever, who lived in Lynnwood in 2008. Marie has spent her life in a foster home. Now 18, she lives in a community designed to help young adults transition to independent living. She is eager to get her driver's license and is saving Costco's salary to buy a car. But one night, a man breaks into his apartment and rapes her several times. Although the police initially believe that Mary, they quickly become skeptical, especially when her adoptive mother begins to express doubts about the credibility of her claim. During a grueling interrogation, they force her to retract her statement. Then they decided to accuse him of making a false statement of rape. She loses her job, her friends abandon her and her hopes for the future start to get lost.
The second story, which takes place in Colorado in 2011, presents a more familiar real crime trope: two crusade detectives, Karen Duvall (Merritt Wever) and Grace Rasmussen (Toni Collette), team up to investigate a series of rapes they believe are perpetrated by one offender. Duvall and Rasmussen are based on the real detectives who solved the case of Marie, Stacy Galbraith and Edna Hendershot. Unlike many of their male colleagues, these two detectives are calm, patient and compassionate towards their victims. As soon as they appear on the screen, you feel appeased to know that in their firm hands, Mary will soon get the care she deserves. Who could blame you? For years, SVU assured us that the detective work was quick and efficient and that, as a result of horrific crimes, detective Olivia Benson would rush to comfort the victims and hold criminals accountable.
"One of the most important things I've heard [from viewers] over the 20 years is
"I would like you to be the detective in charge of my case," recently told actress Mariska Hargitay. "I think our show is in many ways an ideal unit of the way we want sexual assault and domestic violence to be encountered in the world. The survivors are believed. Period. But that's what makes Unbelievable unique. You wait and wait for the detectives to become familiar with Marie's case and assemble the pieces. Yet, the two elements of the plot remain separate. Episode after episode, we switch from the investigation of Duvall and Rasmussen in 2011 to the life of Mary in 2008, where no police hero is in sight.
Unbelievable This is the first program I have seen that reflects the slowness of the system, the tedious waiting period between reporting an assault and obtaining justice – where applicable. The public tends to hear only the headlines: the crime then the sentence handed down. But victims have to live in this in-between, waiting for their lives to become a barrage of intrusive depositions and demands from the media. Their memories and credibility are dissected by well-paid professionals, while their trauma remains theirs. Whenever the series reverted to Marie's script, I became overwhelmed with anxiety when I watched the authorities make a mistake after an error. At one point, a detective from another district spoke to the Lynnwood officers about a rape that was very similar to Marie's. They stopped him, telling him that the connection did not deserve to be studied because Mary was a liar.
Paying as much attention to the minutia of Mary's life as to the detective work of Duvall and Rasmussen, Unbelievable never let the audience get comfortable. We are denied the reassuring walk to the fence that tends to accompany the crime resolution on the screen. Even when the investigation of detectives begins to advance, the series continues to tip us into limbo with Mary, which we will not believe the story for three years. We watch her linger in front of a convenience store, trying to find someone who buys her some beer; we see her failing on her driving test because she is suffering from a disabling flashback in the middle of the exam. Our time spent with Marie in 2008 only serves to reinforce the emotional issues of the plot of 2011. Unbelievable is a procedure, but does not use the procedure to increase narrative momentum. Rather, it highlights the ruthless boredom and countless false starts that accompany a good job as a detective, while exposing the flaws inherent in the system.
How did everything go wrong with Marie's case? Unbelievable expose all of this to the smallest detail. In a scene from the first episode, a detective questions Marie about what she remembers. His expression is unfriendly and factual, as if he were asking someone what they had ordered for lunch, without remembering the worst night of his life. "He has also penetrated you orally or vaginally," he says, looking bored. As Mary tries to answer her questions, we watch her through her eyes: we hear the sound of the static, we see flashbacks on her violent assault and we see moments of escape while she can be seen on a sandy beach. It is a disorienting way to illustrate the effects of PTSD and the dissociation that many victims experience.
After Marie's adoptive mother called the detectives to express her doubts about the calmness of her behavior, Marie sowed skepticism in her mind. The detective presses her in small details: was he wearing a hoodie or sweater? Did she break away before or after calling for help? She is forced to repeat her statement again and again, even if she is exhausted and is still suffering the shock of aggression. He brings her back to interrogate her again and begins to form a new story. "I'll tell you a version that goes well together," he thinks. "A young woman, who has been through a lot of bad things … feeling lonely, alone, could perhaps, at the time, imagine something without thinking, which could allow her to receive the attention she's requires." He continued to bomb her until exhausted, confused and desperate to return home, she retracts. (Although not without a fight – at one point, she suggests taking a lie detector test, and another detective threatens to jail her if she lies, and she backs off.)
"When we see Marie's experience, it's easy to understand why someone could retract even in the event that she was assaulted," said journalist Ken Armstrong, who co-wrote the original story with T. Christian Miller. "For her, it was the easiest way out of a situation that became untenable. She was facing and she just buckled under the pressure. And they gave her the opportunity to go home, if she said what they wanted her to say, that's what she did. "
As Armstrong told me, the detectives in Lynnwood used the Reid Technique, a criminal interrogation technique that was criticized for its propensity to obtain false confessions. It is unbearable to watch the detectives bluff and manipulate Mary, but that does not describe them as wicked of a note; Rather, it shows how poorly the criminal justice system is equipped to treat victims of sexual assault and how easy it is to make catastrophic mistakes without adequate training. Many police officers still have not received sufficient training on how to handle sexual assault cases, although some lawyers are trying to change that.
The case of Mary is not unique. There have been similar cases in Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and New York, where rape victims have been wrongly accused of misrepresentation. But even when the victims are believed, they face innumerable obstacles in choosing to make themselves known. According to RAINN, and according to his best estimates, less than a third of the rapes are reported to the police. Of a thousand sexual assaults, only 46 will result in arrest and fewer than five will result in incarceration. And for those whose affairs enter the criminal justice system, navigation is difficult. Rape cases are among the most difficult cases to commit because they rely heavily on the credibility of the victim's testimony. Unbelievable demonstrates the many misconceptions people have about rape victims, such as the fact that Mary's adoptive mother and police find her behavior inconsistent with the way they think a victim "should" act. (There is not only one way.) This shows the devastating effects of our national backlog of rape treatment kits; After her "confession", Marie's rape kit is never analyzed, even though we learn that the DNA evidence it contains could have helped the police to catch her attacker years earlier. And it shows how a person like Mary, who has spent all her life in the system, could easily break under police pressure. Research indicates that abusers often target victims who are least likely to report assault, such as women in low-income communities.
Unbelievable it is not just a portrait of institutional failure; it is also a portrait of institutional success. "When you see the mistakes made in Washington and everything else in Colorado, you have that cumulative power to see them side by side," says Armstrong. He suggests this to me, as much as the film ProjectorS Images of journalists filling out spreadsheets have tainted the journalistic process. The story of Duvall and Rasmussen highlights the need for police work. We are fortunate to see the hours spent watching the surveillance footage in order to pursue a single advance, as well as the countless dead ends that they are forced to conquer. As Armstrong and Miller detail in the book that they wrote about the case, Colorado's real detectives succeeded because they grouped themselves beyond jurisdictional boundaries, which detectives ( like Lynnwood's) often fail to do. They also used underutilized police resources such as: ViCap, an FBI database used to catch recidivists. On the show, Duvall and Rasmussen listen to the victims without trial and insist that their teams rush to process DNA evidence. Basically, it shows how important it is for them to believe in what they are doing and strive to do it right.
The beginning of the # MeToo movement has spilled over shocking stories of women detailing the awful things that powerful men had suffered them. But over the past two years since the beginning of Weinstein's history, we have also found how rare it is to get a conviction and how ugly the legal system can be. Unbelievable "Attacking this part of the process less sensational – not just the horror of a violent crime, but also the pain and chore that ensue – and demonstrates that listening to the women, that is to worry about their stories long after the first headlines.
* His middle name
[ad_2]
Source link