When court convened at ten o’clock, Counselor Davic addressed this question to the defense expert witness, Dr. Leslie Clemens.
“In your monograph, Doctor, which appeared last February in the Psychiatric Review, you used the terms ‘victim-signal’ and ‘victim-language.’ You also stated that in assault and rape cases, some victims are, in fact, crying out not for help but for abuse and humiliation. Would you explain these concepts more fully to the court, Dr. Clemens?”
“I’ll try. Studies of sexual pathology contain case histories characterized by these so-called victim-signals. In my article I was referring to body language and facial expressions, combined with certain clothing and terrain by which women advertise their availability as willing partners in unconventional erotic activities.”
To the intent jury and spectators, Dr. Leslie Clemens was drawing — under Davic’s questioning — a portrait of a specific class of female with whom the plaintiff, Shana Selby, might logically be identified.
“At first glance,” the doctor continued, “the signals may seem artless or even unconscious, but the literature of abnormal sexual tendencies, not to mention plain commonsense, tell us these advertisements, these sexual alerts are more often than not deliberately and cleverly planned.”
Dr. Clemens adjusted his cuffs and shifted his position on the witness stand to more effectively keep in view the jurors. “I have examined Miss Selby on three separate occasions. Each interview lasted an hour or more. I’d like to state that my judgments fall only within the parameters of probability, but my conclusions are supported by numerous accounts of sexual dysfunction that I am familiar with as a physician and which, in certain instances, I myself have authored...”
Tall and slender with short brown hair, graying in patches above rather knobby ears, Dr. Clemens, except for a head somewhat larger below those ears than above — cheekbones and jaw more prominent than temples and forehead — was handsome, with pleasant, if somewhat formal manners.
He went on to explain that the death of Shana’s mother, coinciding with Shana’s own onset of adolescence, and burgeoning womanhood, had surely been a traumatizing blow to the young girl... A causal relationship was very common in such situations. When a mother’s death occurred at the time of a daughter’s passage into sexual maturity, that new sense of life that otherwise might be so welcome became a guilty burden. A kind of rebuke to the dead mother, causing and reinforcing feelings of responsibility for her death. Such daughters tended to feel they had stolen this precious gift, the power to conceive and nurture life, from the departed mother. Now Shana Selby had experienced her first menstrual period just one month after her mother’s death. Studies of sexual disorders ranged extensively over this specific subject — the theft-association between the approach of menses and the death of a maternal parent. In such situations it would be unlikely that a daughter could enter into sexual relationships in a normal manner, since a pleasurable experience might be an unbearably guilty reminder, to her, of what she had presumably stolen... Such bruised psyches tended to take refuge from their sexual desires — which they often found punitively keen and insatiable — by retreating into emotional connections with idealized, unavailable figures — or into other fantasy worlds where their sexual drives might be internalized. But at other times such damaged young females might deliberately place themselves in jeopardy situations and send out victim-signals to alert males to their presence, availability, thereby provoking attention, aggression, and even sexual attacks. This way they could at once satisfy and be punished for their sexual drives, which at the onset of menses would be straining powerfully. They might well encourage a chance male to molest them, to abuse and assault them, even to commit rape on them but — crucial to their simultaneous need for a virginal self-image — they would insist that they had been forced into those acts against their wills.
At this point Davic asked Clemens to be more specific about the victim-signals.
The vocabulary of this system of communications, Dr. Clemens said, was clear and extensive, although it couldn’t always be interpreted accurately, especially by understandably protective relatives and parents.
The doctor commenced to tick them off on his fingers... jeans, tight, constricting jeans were obvious. Belts made of leather and ropes and chains were another, pulled painfully tight across creased and sucked-in stomachs. Wedged soles that made running (flight) impossible, foot gear with thongs and straps binding ankles and calves in painful cincture, all were potential “advisers” to the stalking male, signaled a willingness to participate in a kind of bondage. Any female who permitted herself to be tied up and gagged — no easy matter without at least a certain unconscious cooperation or submission from the so-called victim — was very possibly signaling her readiness to accept not only sadistic sex but other humiliating punishment that her, in effect, invited guest might want to inflict...
Under Davic’s prompting, Dr. Clemens gave as further examples women who exercised “in brief attire” in front of undraped windows, used washing machines in basement laundry rooms or public laundromats late at night because they had supposedly forgotten or postponed that chore during the day, loitered in poorly lit stacks in public libraries, allowed their cars to run out of gas on deserted highways or turnpikes, or hitchhiked along such highways... or rode a bicycle at dusk on lonely country roads, even short distances from their homes...
A pause as Davic looked at Shana, and then at the jury.
These were not accidents, Dr. Clemens said... no, they were contrived situations in which the elements of seduction were gathered together with premeditation — subconscious or not — in a place favorable to sexual combustion, just as if paper and dry twigs and kindling had been piled high and splashed with flammable liquids, needing only the single chance spark to set them off...
At that point Counselor Davic thanked his witness and announced to the bench that he had no further questions. With a pleasant smile he addressed Dorcas Brett with an old-fashioned legal phrase, “The People may inquire if they so wish.” Then he sat down at the defense table.
Brett’s face was white with anger. She stood up and said, “The People certainly intend to inquire, Mr. Davic. We will examine the expert witness and his novel speculations. We—”
Judge Flood interrupted with a glance at the wall clock. “If it’s agreeable, Miss Brett, and to you, Mr. Davic, I think tempers might cool over a recess for lunch.”
Victoria Kim was a striking Eurasian in her early thirties, Selby judged, with a narrow, elegant face and graceful hands. Her clothing and eyes heightened her exotic appearance; a slim pink cashmere suit, heavy coral bracelets. Her eyes were dramatically emphasized with blue eyeliner and a velvet sheen of mascara on her thick lashes.
They met in a suite with a view of the river and its sculling boathouses. A suede coat and pieces of matching luggage were in the adjoining bedroom. After they introduced themselves, Miss Kim lifted a receiver and dialed room service. “Would you like coffee and sandwiches, Mr. Selby, or something to drink and a decent lunch?”
“Just the coffee, thanks,” Selby said. He hadn’t been eating regularly, and while he was hungry he couldn’t rid himself of a vague suspicion that he might be accepting hospitality in the camp of the enemy. There had been so many evasions and lies to this point that he accepted a sense of paranoia as his only practical defense against them. If you didn’t suspect that the pulling guards had homicidal designs on you there would be no need for face guards and helmets.