"There is an element of anger among women who've been raped. There's certainly a major element of humiliation. But it really does seem like a medical condition of shock and horror"
About this Quote
Kristof reaches for the language of triage: not politics, not morality, but diagnosis. By calling survivors responses a "medical condition", he’s trying to shove the reader out of armchair judgment and into an emergency-room mindset. Shock and horror aren’t attitudes you debate; they’re injuries you treat. The phrasing is an ethical gambit, designed to short-circuit the lazy cultural impulse to interrogate a woman’s behavior, credibility, or composure after rape.
The subtext is doing two things at once. First, it acknowledges emotions that are culturally legible and, to some audiences, more "acceptable": anger, humiliation. Then it pivots to something that can’t be so easily policed: a destabilizing physiological aftermath that overwhelms personality and choice. That move implicitly rebukes the courtroom and media habit of reading trauma through performance cues (Did she cry? Did she fight? Did she report immediately?). If trauma is a condition, then "inconsistent" behavior stops being evidence of deceit and starts being a symptom.
The risk, of course, is that medicalizing can flatten. Rape is not an act of weather; it’s violence committed by someone, often enabled by institutions. Emphasizing shock can invite a sort of antiseptic pity that blurs culpability and structural context. Still, as a piece of rhetorical strategy from a journalist steeped in human rights storytelling, it’s calibrated to pull mainstream readers toward compassion and policy urgency by reframing rape’s aftermath as injury, not character.
The subtext is doing two things at once. First, it acknowledges emotions that are culturally legible and, to some audiences, more "acceptable": anger, humiliation. Then it pivots to something that can’t be so easily policed: a destabilizing physiological aftermath that overwhelms personality and choice. That move implicitly rebukes the courtroom and media habit of reading trauma through performance cues (Did she cry? Did she fight? Did she report immediately?). If trauma is a condition, then "inconsistent" behavior stops being evidence of deceit and starts being a symptom.
The risk, of course, is that medicalizing can flatten. Rape is not an act of weather; it’s violence committed by someone, often enabled by institutions. Emphasizing shock can invite a sort of antiseptic pity that blurs culpability and structural context. Still, as a piece of rhetorical strategy from a journalist steeped in human rights storytelling, it’s calibrated to pull mainstream readers toward compassion and policy urgency by reframing rape’s aftermath as injury, not character.
Quote Details
| Topic | Anger |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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