IT was after 4am when Marie was awoken by a masked man in the bedroom of her new apartment. Bound, gagged and raped at knifepoint by a stranger who forced his way into her home, Marie was a victim of what was, in many ways, the “perfect” rape. No “blurred lines”, no “grey areas”. This was the rape, so rare yet somehow ever present, that women are taught to fear before they are even women. The malignant figure in the darkness from whom they need protection.

But Marie wasn’t the perfect victim. And protection was nowhere to be found when she went in search of it. The 18-year-old girl at the heart of Netflix’s Unbelievable, based closely on a true story which began in Washington, USA in 2009, was victimised a second time when she reported her rape shortly after her attacker left.

Her apparently calm demeanour and inconsistencies in her account of the incident were used by police as a basis for demanding that she admit to making the whole thing up.

Hoping to bring the ordeal to an end, Marie told police that she might have dreamt it, before conceding that it hadn’t really happened at all. She was charged and convicted of false reporting – an uncommonly harsh response which would ultimately cost the state $150,000 in damages when, three years later, a wider investigation revealed that Marie had been the victim of a serial rapist who had documented his assaults on camera.

The telling of Marie’s experience in Unbelievable raises important points about misconceptions around responses to trauma. Its jarring contrast with the dogged investigation of the two female detectives working across state lines to catch her attacker, before they even knew she existed, brings into sharp focus the difference between good and bad practice in dealing with reports of sexual violence.

But possibly the most striking thing about the series is that it demands an answer to the question: who gets to be considered as “believable” in the first place? Confronted with such an obviously gendered issue as sexual violence and victim-blaming or denial – which affects women across all demographic groups – it would be easy to stop there and see this as a universal story of the disbelieved woman.

But to do so would be to overlook the prejudices and power imbalances which were woven through Marie’s life and which cannot be neatly folded into a generic narrative about gender alone.

As a child, Marie had been neglected; she had been sexually and physically abused, she had spent most of her life in foster homes and, at age 18, she was living in a transitional home for young people who had been in care, while working a minimum wage job in a retail wholesaler.

These facts are not incidental to how Marie’s report of violation was treated. Marie was an unbelievable witness to her own assault precisely because she was not a person afforded the benefit of credibility or respectability.

Even her two most recent foster mothers doubted her, believing this might be the latest example of her “attention-seeking” behaviour, and they relayed this to the police. When it really counted, nobody stood in Marie’s corner and advocated for her, and, faced with the pressure of authority figures telling her what they wanted to hear, she was incapable of advocating for herself.

Marie’s story, viewed through the lens of a slow-burning, well-executed drama, feels like a painful tragedy. But tragedy is something that happens randomly, by chance. In fact, Marie was the victim of a system which routinely discounts, talks over and rewrites the experiences of the most marginalised people. The fact that the police were able, so quickly, to get her to recant on her report is a sign that she was already woefully resigned to that reality.

In the TV series, Marie (played by Kaitlyn Dever) challenges her court-appointed counsellor: “You think I’ve never seen someone like you before? I’ve been in the system since I was three. I’ve seen social workers, DCFS [Department of Children and Family Services] reps, foster care placement reps ... and they all say that they wanna help me. But I don’t need help, I just need bad things to stop happening.”

For Marie, her disastrous interaction with the police was just one more confirmation of what she had come to expect of those in authority. One more disappointment. One more bad thing that had happened to her.

Although in Scotland we operate under a significantly different criminal justice system than the one portrayed in Unbelievable, the deep-seated inequalities it demonstrates are, sadly, all-too relevant. Socioeconomic class is arguably the single most prominent factor in determining whether someone will end up on “the wrong side” of the criminal justice system, and it is certainly a factor in establishing whether a person is taken seriously during their interactions with the system. If this is true for people accused of crime, it is equally true for victims of crime.

WITH this in mind, it is essential that, in pushing for change in how complainers in sexual violence cases are treated by the justice system, we do not forget to ask deeper questions about how the system is working as a whole and who it is serving. Central to this is understanding how class, gender and experiences of trauma overlap to shape women’s experiences of criminal justice.

In Scotland, while people with experience of the care system – like Marie – make up only 0.5% of the population, statistics from the Scottish Prison Service find that they represent 33% of people in young offenders institutions and 31% of people in adult prisons.

And according to the Prison Reform Trust, as many as 70% of women in Scottish prisons have been victims of domestic abuse, while over half of women prisoners across the UK experienced emotional, physical or sexual abuse as a child.

How many of those women, like Marie, should have been offered support when, instead, they were subjected to repeated punishment by a system which had never bothered to listen?

Taking this picture into account, it seems likely, if not inevitable, that a person’s willingness to put their trust into the criminal justice system will be strongly influenced by these same inequalities in their own life experience.

In fact, there is considerable research to suggest that some women resist interventions from the state as a result of ingrained mistrust based on their own history with those institutions.

When the police called Marie to come into the station to answer more questions about her attack, she asked: “Am I in trouble?”

This was taken by the officer as further proof of her guilt. And yet is this not an entirely normal question to ask for someone who has spent their life being pushed and pulled around by almost every person and institution they’ve encountered?

When we talk about victim-blaming, about poor responses to sexual violence, about the retraumatising of victims by an often unfeeling justice system – all issues which have fortunately been pushed up the public agenda in recent years – let’s not forget that access to justice is not, and has never been, an equal opportunity endeavour.

Addressing the social, economic and systemic inequalities which collided to allow a grave injustice like the one illustrated in Unbelievable to take place will not be easy.

In fact, it may be far more difficult than creating any number of new criminal justice responses to violence or abuse. But if we are serious about protecting vulnerable women and creating a truly fair and just society, it is the only option we have.