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(Posted to my tumblr, but cross-posted here because it is the sort of meta discussion I’ve posted here before and also I want to have a reasonable chance of finding it again someday.)
Was Raven of This Gun For Hire a victim of rape in his reform school days?
It’s a question I’ve honestly asked myself in the course of my fic writing, because prison rape was and still is a thing, obviously, and if we’re to believe that Philip Raven the character physically resembles Alan Ladd the actor, then I have a hard time believing he wouldn’t have been the target of at least some sort of sexual harassment/assault. Ladd was, after all, boyishly handsome and famously small in stature. Most sources put his height at 5’6”, and while the film pulls off some cinematography tricks to make him appear a bit taller, the character is still by no means a large dude; I’d put Raven at 5’8”, tops. And again, if we assume the character followed the same growth trajectory as the actor, then he was probably similarly small as a boy. (And even if he wasn’t, there’s still the fact that he was only fourteen when he went in, and presumably would have been doing time with boys who were older and more physically developed. My research on early 20th century reform schools is sketchy at best, but the age of majority at the time was twenty-one, which leads me to believe he could/would have been interacting with dudes as old as twenty.)
So with all that in mind, we come back to the question at the top: Was Raven raped in reform school? The short answer is no, I don’t think he was—and this is not just wishful thinking on my part, but a genuine extrapolation of his character.
( Tl;dr: No, never raped, but probably felt up in some respect. The aggressor(s) would have gotten shanked before they could go any further. )
Was Raven of This Gun For Hire a victim of rape in his reform school days?
It’s a question I’ve honestly asked myself in the course of my fic writing, because prison rape was and still is a thing, obviously, and if we’re to believe that Philip Raven the character physically resembles Alan Ladd the actor, then I have a hard time believing he wouldn’t have been the target of at least some sort of sexual harassment/assault. Ladd was, after all, boyishly handsome and famously small in stature. Most sources put his height at 5’6”, and while the film pulls off some cinematography tricks to make him appear a bit taller, the character is still by no means a large dude; I’d put Raven at 5’8”, tops. And again, if we assume the character followed the same growth trajectory as the actor, then he was probably similarly small as a boy. (And even if he wasn’t, there’s still the fact that he was only fourteen when he went in, and presumably would have been doing time with boys who were older and more physically developed. My research on early 20th century reform schools is sketchy at best, but the age of majority at the time was twenty-one, which leads me to believe he could/would have been interacting with dudes as old as twenty.)
So with all that in mind, we come back to the question at the top: Was Raven raped in reform school? The short answer is no, I don’t think he was—and this is not just wishful thinking on my part, but a genuine extrapolation of his character.
( Tl;dr: No, never raped, but probably felt up in some respect. The aggressor(s) would have gotten shanked before they could go any further. )
