Michelle Bowdler’s book focuses on the history of sex crimes in the US and the ways they have been minimized and neglected by law enforcement and our society for decades, and why. The book also includes her own story which includes national activism work she got involved in to look at the hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits in warehouses and crime labs across the country, and a final journey decades later to understand what happened in her own unsolved case.
She Said meets Lucky in Michelle Bowdler's provocative debut, telling the story of her rape and recovery while interrogating why one of society's most serious crimes goes largely uninvestigated.
The crime of rape sizzles like a lightning strike. It pounces, flattens, destroys. A person stands whole, and in a moment of unexpected violence, that life, that body is gone.
Award-winning writer and public health executive Michelle Bowdler's memoir indicts how sexual violence has been addressed for decades in our society, asking whether rape is a crime given that it is the least reported major felony, least successfully prosecuted, and fewer than 3% of rapists ever spend a day in jail. Cases are closed before they are investigated and DNA evidence sits for years untested and disregarded.
Website Link: https://michelle-bowdler.com/
Michelle Bowdler’s book, Is Rape a Crime? was published by Flatiron Books in 2020. Michelle is a recipient of a 2017 Barbara Deming Memorial Award for non-fiction and has been a Fellow at Ragdale and MacDowell Colony. She has been published in the New York Times and in the anthologies The Anatomy of Silence (Red Press) and We Rise to Resist: Voices from a New Era in Women’s Political Action (McFarland). Her essays: Eventually You Tell Your Kids and Babelogue were both nominated for Pushcart Prizes.
Michelle has worked in the public health field for years on issues of addiction, violence prevention, sexual health, HIV education and prevention. She has been involved, as well, for over a decade working on social justice issues related to rape and crimes of violence. Currently, she has the pleasure and honor of working as Executive Director of Health & Wellness at a major university in Boston where her work involves efforts to provide excellent sexual assault prevention and treatment for students in addition to mental health and health care.
Bowdler is a graduate of Brandeis University, where she studied and fell in love with literature and writing, and of the Harvard School of Public Health, where she learned that so much of healthcare access and outcomes have a social and cultural component.
She is married to a wonderful woman and they have two awesome children.
