Erin Wunker Reviews Robyn Doolittle's Had It Coming: What’s Fair in the Age of #MeToo?

Robyn Doolittle. Had it Coming. Allen Lane. $25.00, 272 pp., ISBN: 9780735236592

Robyn Doolittle’s Unfounded series, which ran in the Globe and Mail in 2017, demonstrated that one in five sexual assault cases in Canada is closed by the police and categorized as “unfounded.” This staggering set of facts represented more than eighteen months of Doolittle’s research in which she requested freedom-of-information requests to collect statistics on crime from “873 police jurisdictions across the country.” What she found was this: across Canada law enforcement officers were dismissing sexual assault claims not because there were no leads, but because they were deemed “unfounded.” “The term means they think the incident didn’t happen,” writes Doolittle. Her goal, to attempt to “quantify rape culture” with data, was met. “Now,” she writes, “I had to figure out why the dismissal rate was so high.” This question marks the starting point for her new book, Had It Coming: What’s Fair in the Age of #MeToo? 

Doolittle opens with a personal memory that situates the reader in the writer’s own process of recognizing the pervasiveness of rape culture in shaping how people relate to one another. “Kobe Bryant and Me” opens with Doolittle recalling 2003. That year, NBA star Kobe Bryant was accused of raping a 19-year-old hotel worker in Eagle, Colorado. The allegations, Doolittle recalls, made headline news, and those headlines were damning. The seriousness of the allegations against Bryant were minimized through consistent deferral to sports metaphors that underscored his skill. Meanwhile, the young woman’s confidential details were repeatedly released by court staff by accident, her previous sexual history was investigated as evidence of her morality, and ultimately, she decided to discontinue court proceedings.

Doolittle recalls her own reactions to the case in 2003: “The girl had gone to a hotel room with an NBA basketball player at night. What did she think would happen?” In foregrounding her own reaction, and returning to it more than fifteen years later, Doolittle observes: “This, all of it, is what rape culture looks like: my baseless suspicion, the sympathetic press coverage, the slut-shaming, the cavalier attitude of the court staff towards a sexual assault complainant, the fact that Bryant’s career carried on without consequence.” In demonstrating the perniciousness of rape culture through her own set of reactions, Doolittle establishes the tone of the book as well as the thesis: We live in rape culture. Now, after the watershed of #MeToo, where do we go and how might we get there? 

Had It Coming is both thorough and ambitious, which is both an enviable quality and an admirable feat given the sticky complexities under study. Doolittle moves with fluency and authority between close-reading cultural rupture events such as the CBC’s firing of Jian Ghomeshi and other flashpoints (think here of Harvey Weinstein and Aziz Ansari), and introducing scientific research into how trauma affects a person’s ability to recall details, or act in a way that feels reasonable to someone not experiencing trauma. There are no easy answers here, but there are data-driven results that suggest possible ways forward. In each case study she offers, Doolittle presents the evidence, lays out public opinions that do not act in concert with one another, and ultimately leaves the responsibility of assessment with the reader. There are ways to break the systems and cultures that allow rape culture to thrive, Doolittle demonstrates. But it will take work. Are we, the readers, prepared to demand that work, as well as put it in ourselves? 

In bringing together both her journalistic training and her personal voice, Doolittle has written an important and difficult book. While she resists step-by-step suggestions, in Had It Coming Doolittle leads the reader through some of the most complex issues that have become more visible since the #MeToo movement. This is a book of serious significance, both for understanding how rape culture has flourished systemically as well as affectively, and for thinking through how to change the cultural script.

Erin Wunker is the author of Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life. She lives in K’jipuktuk/Halifax.