The Perplexing Twist in Jen Percy’s Girls Play Dead

While interviewing sexual assault survivors for her study Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation, Jen Percy began by asking: What did you do immediately after your rape? One woman Percy spoke to prepared chicken soup for her assailant; another “had a bath and watched television with [her] family”; still others comforted or cuddled their violators, fell asleep in the beds where the rapes took place, or pretended, for the sake of their rapists, that the rapists themselves were the proper victims of these events.