That rape cases are hard to prosecute is no shocker, but the claim that crime writers are partly to blame shocked me. According to the Staunch prize for books with no violence against women, writers who include sexual violence and rape in their books are contributing to a wider culture in which jurors are “reluctant to convict ‘ordinary’ men” because “they don’t fit the idea of a rapist they’ve internalised through the stories and images they’ve received through popular culture”. In great thriller tradition, the call is coming from inside the house.
As someone who analyses culture for a living and often finds it wanting, I’m in the unaccustomed position of noting that what we’re talking about is, after all, only fiction – where the bad guys, more often than not, meet a satisfactory justice that reality often fails to provide.
My rapist was an ordinary man. I write that sentence not knowing if I mean the fictional Paul Beresford, a fin de siècle rake who assaults my heroine Sarah Gilchrist less than a year before her first adventure The Wages of Sin opens, or the man who raped me. In both cases, it happened after a party. In both cases, victim and perpetrator shared a circle of friends who would have seen it as her word against his, who had seen them laughing and joking together earlier in the night. They saw them leave the room (Sarah) or the party (me) with the man who, in both cases, later decided he wasn’t interested in what the woman wanted, or didn’t, after all.
Sarah isn’t some flimsy author stand-in – she’s a medical student in 1890s Edinburgh and I’m a millennial writer who doesn’t know where the spleen is – but there are similarities. Sarah’s backstory is what it is because, when I sat down to write The Wages of Sin, I couldn’t write about the experience of being a student at Edinburgh in any century without writing about rape. The two were inextricably linked. It’s a depressing origin story, yes – but then so is Batman’s, and I don’t see prizes set up to reward books with no orphans in them.
I doubt I’m the only crime writer who is also a rape victim, and I’m certainly not the only reader whose experiences occasionally overlap with her taste in literature. Women, in particular, consume crime fiction, especially violent crime fiction, at a rate that might seem concerning to some. But when books contain violence, they do just that: contain it, our real-world fears caught safely within fictional parentheses.
This is not to say that authors writing about rape can indulge in whatever graphic, schlocky entertainment they wish. In my books, the assault happens offstage but we get glimpses of it, in flashbacks, exposition and small details; in my latest, The Unquiet Heart, the press of a bookcase against Sarah’s back when her love interest consensually kisses her triggers a fight-or-flight response. I have no interest in writing a rape scene. But the aftermath of rape – the emotional fallout, the PTSD – that’s where conflict, representation, whatever shred of catharsis I gain can be found.
I can’t write about a world without rape because I don’t live in one. I won’t sanitise my writing in service of some fictional, feminist utopia. And while I indulge in fictional universes that let me escape, write the world the way I wish it was, my work lies in marrying my imagination with the ugly truth, challenging myself to explore the friction in the places where they collide. I wanted to write someone whose story didn’t end with rape, or even begin with it – but included it as just another bump in the road that has to be dealt with, worked through and lived with.
I was raped in the same place as Sarah in my books; around the corner from Edinburgh’s old medical school. Perhaps this is my way of reclaiming the city I love, by rewriting my past into an imagined and far bloodier history. When I walk nearby, all I see is Sarah’s Edinburgh, not mine. I could have set it somewhere else and avoided the memories – but I’ll be damned if I’m letting one man who felt he was entitled to my body deprive me of a bloody good novel setting, or an ugly culture that refuses to believe women deprive me of telling a story that needs to be told.
• The Unquiet Heart by Kaite Welsh is published by Tinder Press; she will be appearing at the Edinburgh international book festival in August.
