“What about Justice?”: Persisting Girls in Young Adult Rape Fiction

Abstract

Three recent Young Adult novels feature girls who persist in seeking justice and insist their rapists be punished. Each protagonist epitomizes persistence, continuing obstinately in a course of action despite extreme difficulty. Their methods, however, vary from perjury to planting illegal drugs to murder. In Kiersi Burkhart’s Honor Code, Sam, a near victim of her boarding school’s most popular boy, appropriates the story of a girl he raped. In her singleminded quest to see him successfully prosecuted, Sam both silences Gracie and negatively affects her healing. In Nina Foxx’s And You’d Better Not Tell, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, a rapist’s young victims, Rumer and Ranisha, frame him with the same illegal drug he used to assault them. Their route to justice, however, ensures he won’t victimize other girls. In Hannah Capin’s Foul Is Fair, Jade is gang raped at a party and, with the assistance of her friends, crafts Macbeth-inspired methods to avenge herself with the murders of the perpetrators and their accomplices. A substantial proportion of the large catalog of recently published YA novels about acquaintance rape follows standard “rape scripts.” These books sometimes reify rape culture even as they condemn it. In line with current statistics, their victims are reluctant to report the crime and their perpetrators are rarely punished by the law or their educational institutions held accountable. Unlike the victims in most of these texts, the survivors in Honor Code, And You’d Better Not Tell, and Foul Is Fair actually succeed in punishing the rapists. This article works to understand justice brought about through deception and subterfuge by persisting girls. I consider these quests to punish a rapist by any means possible as challenges to commonly held rape myths and as fictional means to subvert or resist rape culture. In “The Subject and Power,” Michel Foucault focuses on sites of resistance as the way to bring to light power relations, their positions, their points of application, and the methods used. He begins with “immediate struggles,” such as opposition to the power of men over women, in which “people criticize instances of power which are the