Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash
What does it mean for a character to have a sense of place? The places we live become a part of us, shaping where we go to sleep, work, eat, meet friends, or see family. “Setting as character” is a concept used to describe stories with a setting so present it becomes something like a member of the cast itself. But even a less present setting is entwined with the building up of human characters—the creation of the person the reader meets on the page.
If a character’s sense of place includes their history with different parts of their setting and how they orient themselves within it, then that orientation (not that kind of orientation) is as much a part of their characterization as anything else. Just like real people, every character in a setting will have their own mental heat map of where different kinds of violence are more likely to occur.
Some characters’ sense of where danger is will be more accurate than others’. In real life, statistics have shown time and again that most people are at far and away more risk of sexual violence from acquaintances than strangers. (These statistics get quoted around as though they include everyone, but anyone living in captivity or for that matter working as a waitress will be exposed to regular harassment from people who don’t fit the categories of acquaintance rape or an unexpected attack by a stranger.)
Some fictional characters will understand all of this more than others—but knowing less isn’t automatically a mark of naivete, nor limited to characters with unfounded fears about violent strangers. Lack of knowledge about the world is only lack of knowledge about the world, and if you’ve ever spent time developing a cast of characters to inhabit a world you know well that any trait can have multiple explanations.
Some characters will think about sexual violence very little. For other characters, the management of risk will be a major part of their lives. Thinking about how a character would picture risk—the risk of sexual violence and other forms of violence—and how that risk grows and diminishes in different parts of the setting can be a test of depth of characterization. For the more intuitive writer, are you at the point of being able to take on the perspective of the character and know how they’d figure it? For a more mechanical writer, have you developed the character’s inner workings enough to be able to wind them up and know how they’d interact with the setting this way?
There are as many ways of writing sexual violence as there are books in the world. A scene that includes sexual violence might be anything—a sensual scene in a dark romance novel, a scene that reflects the real-world horror of sexual violence with a devastating portrayal, a scene where sexual violence is not the worst thing happening to the character, a scene that is off-screen and only referenced, a scene where the primary emotion upon experiencing sexual violence is relief because a character has protected another character from experiencing it, a scene where the devastation of sexual violence is ambiguous in the moment and comes into its horror as the character lives forward into their future. How do we portray sexual violence “well?” There are few rules for portraying sexual violence “well” that could hold up under all of these use cases.
One angle of approach is to start by creating a loose delineation between portrayals in the realm of realism and portrayals more in the zone of Old Skool Romance “She said she didn’t want it but really her nether regions did:” those scenes that exist to give the real-life reader an “out” for sexual fantasy, yet also (especially in the real life heyday of Old Skool Romance) can never be entirely separated from the reality that some people who perpetuate rape culture really do think like that. Outside of the latter zone, most writers working today (at least those not in the misogynist shithead taxa) want to handle the topic of sexual violence in a way that doesn’t hand-wave the devastation of real-life sexual violence. I think the biggest way to avoid being unserious and degrading, including in stories that use more ambiguous or sensual portrayals but are attempting realism rather than a book-length “break” for the reader, is to ensure that, throughout everything happening in the characters’ perspectives or third-person narration, the underlying narrative holds the weight of what sexual violence is and allows that weight to distort the underlying fabric of the work rather than unconsciously subjectifying the distortion.
How can we avoid subjectifying the distortion that sexual violence causes in the metaphorical “gravitational field” of the events of the story? Part of allowing sexual violence to have weight in the underlying mesh of the work is understanding how risk and counter-risk play a role in how characters orient themselves in space.
A character might enter a situation where they know violence is possible because avoiding the situation would result in a different danger. This was something I was thinking about when I wrote the protagonist in my first novel entering a dangerous situation because she knows she would face consequences for trying to avoid walking into it. It’s important to me to give characters the dignity, the frankly bare minimum dignity, of acknowledging that “risky” decisions—the kind of decisions that people in real life seize on for victim-blaming—are often decisions that are made by weighing competing risks.
Even in times and places where some amount of sexual violence is inevitable, individual characters might dread some situations more than others, which will inform their sense of their surroundings. Of course, as a late-breaking edit to this post because I don’t want to ignore the victim-blaming forest for the trees, it cannot be stressed enough that sexual violence is the choice of the perpetrator and not the result of a character “failing” to “avoid” sexual violence, regardless of how much a character’s life involves managing and weighing known risks.
A character might take on a greater risk of sexual violence to avoid a counter-risk, but they might also take on other, “more dangerous” risks to manage a known risk of sexual violence. As more people in spec fic communities push back against the conceptualization of sexual violence as a violence that is wounding in a way no other violence is wounding and has no overlap with other forms of violence, I also want to push back against the overextension of that pushback. Sexual violence has been devastating throughout human history, and to most people—victims, bystanders, and perpetrators—sexual violence is a form of violence with distinct social and spiritual consequences. If we want to push back against the idea that a character is irrational for taking a risk that could lead to sexual violence, then it must be equally rational for a character to accept large risks to try to decrease the risk of sexual violence against themself or a loved one.
This web of risk and the easing of risk of sexual violence and other types of hardship is an inescapable part of how any character will experience the setting they live in. If we want to write against sexual violence as a form of violence all other violence exists in reference to and also against the failure to take sexual violence seriously, seeing all forms of violence as different weights within the same mesh helps reinforce the dignity of characters living their lives within those fields of gravity.
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