There are many passages in Jon Krakauer's Missoula that, even nearly a year after reading it, I can't shake. [Heads up for trauma survivors: Some of those graphic passages are included below.] One of them comes two pages into the sixth chapter.

Krakauer is telling the story of a University of Montana senior named Kerry Barrett, who had gone out to a bar with friends one September night in 2011. She met a "tall, athletic student named Zeke Adams," Krakauer writes, using a pseudonym for the man. They spent the evening talking. Eventually, Barrett went home with Adams, but "before I even went in the door," she recounted to Krakauer, "I told him, 'I'm not sleeping with you.'" They fooled around. He got aggressive. She told him "no" and started to leave. And then:

Adams urged her not to go, because it was 3:00 in the morning. As Barrett remembered it, he said, "You're wasted. Stay over and I'll drive you home in the morning. You know I'm a nice guy and nothing is going to happen."

"I actually wasn't that drunk—not nearly as wasted as he was," Barrett said, "but before you learn the realities of sexual assault, you're taught that it's dangerous to walk alone at night, because strangers are out to get you. The safer option seemed to be to stay at his place. So that's what I did."

Barrett says she fell asleep and later woke up to Adams trying to rape her.

The heightened attention on campus rape in recent years (Missoula included) has exposed many serious flaws in the way campuses and police departments handle sexual assault. It has also made more a lot more people aware of one key fact: Most rapes are committed by someone the victim knows.

This fact was not so commonplace when I was a freshman sitting through orientation programming at the University of Montana in 2008—the same type of programming Barrett likely sat through. I remember being told about the brightly lit emergency phones installed around the University of Montana campus, useful in case a stranger followed or attacked me on the Oval (the campus's central open space). I do not remember being told about the risks of date rape or the importance of consent or where to find help if someone I went home with told me he was a "nice guy" and then tried to rape me in my sleep. The message from the school: I should be afraid of strangers, not men like "Zeke Adams."

This misleading type of messaging is surely not unique to the University of Montana (and would be irrelevant if men would just stop sexually assaulting other people). But it is one of the many ways colleges have failed young women. In recent years, the University of Montana has added various new trainings and resources the school claims will better educate students about the realities of sexual assault on campus. While there is still significant work to be done, those changes are because of the bravery of survivors at schools like Montana and the tenacity of reporters like Krakauer.

After her alleged assault, Barrett encountered a police department that seemed more sympathetic to her alleged rapist than to her. She told Krakauer that the first officer who interviewed her asked if she had a boyfriend because "sometimes girls cheat on their boyfriends, and regret it, and then claim they were raped." When Adams came in to give his recorded statement, the detective assigned to the case, Jamie Merifield, began by telling him, "I think this is just a big misunderstanding," Krakauer reports.

Merifield said, "We have a lot of cases where girls come in and report stuff they are not sure about, and then it becomes rape. And it's not fair. It's not fair to you. ... You guys both went into this together. ... She came home willingly with you. The fact that she changed her mind and went home on her own, ... that's not your fault.

"But I have to interview you," Merifield explained a moment later, apologetically. "I have to talk to her because she came in and reported it. If I had just flushed the case, she's going to say the police don't do anything. ... That's not the message we want to send to people: 'Well, we're only going to half-ass your case because we don't really believe this happened."

The case is infuriating, as are all the others Krakauer documents in the book. The wave of sexual assaults at the University of Montana—combined with a local culture that fetishizes football players, including those accused of rape—made Missoula a revealing and stomach-turning case study. (Krakauer is still fighting for the release of documents associated with a case in the book.)

Tonight at 7:30, Krakauer will be at Town Hall in conversation with KUOW's Ross Reynolds. (It's unclear why Town Hall and KUOW couldn't manage find a woman for this event, but, yes, it will be two men discussing campus sexual assault.) The two will discuss "stigmatism, victimization, and PTSD faced by survivors—and how [Krakauer's] 'inexcusable' ignorance on the issue led him to research this epidemic." Tickets are $5.