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THE STORY OF JANE DOE: A BOOK ABOUT RAPE Jane Doe Toronto: Random House of Canada Limited, 2004
REVIEWED BY MARION M. LYNN
In the heat of the summer of 1986, a friend was raped, in her own bed on the third floor of her house, by a serial rapist who had been stalking her Toronto neighbourhood looking for an easy access through a screen door or open window. The police knew what he was doing and were tracking his path. They asked her if she had been sleeping in the nude or wearing a provocative negligee. A woman at the hospital rape crisis centre introduced herself as an expert on rape. When my distraught friend asked this expert about her rape, she retorted that she had never been raped, but was a professional expert on rape through her studies of rape and by helping rape victims.
In the fall of 1986 I was taking a course on violence against women. Lori Haskell, one of the instructors, brought a woman into the class to speak to us about rape. This woman had also been raped in the summer of 1986, by a different serial rapist, stalking a different Toronto neighbourhood. He entered apartments on third and fourth floors through locked balcony doors. She did not speak about studies of rape or her work with rape victims, but from her own recent experience. She was to become an expert on rape. She was the woman now known as Jane Doe. This book is her story.
It is also much more than her story. It is the story of the intersection of the personal and the political, of the act of rape at the particular, institutional, social and political levels. The book presents a unique...