Chapter 65
(Cottle's POV)

If the stakes weren't so damned high this whole conversation would be laughable. I mean, this is supposed to be a battlestar --the last battlestar, to be precise-- we are at war and yet I am debating the extent of a young woman's psychological scars and how she understands the concept of 'love' with both the Admiral and the CAG. Granted, Starbuck is not any young woman. She is the closest thing Bill has to a daughter, as for his son... well, let's just say that Apollo may be his father's son but I don't think he sees Starbuck as a sister and I certainly wouldn't describe his concerns as brotherly. That is part of what makes this whole thing so tricky. Unfortunately, even though I am trying my best here, this is not my specialty... in fact there are no specialists left and that is precisely the problem. Most of our knowledge went up in smoke with our worlds so, gods help us all, I am going to have to do.

"'Love is unlikely to be one of them'?" repeats Apollo, not that I was expecting him to let this go.

"Yes."

"What the frak do you mean by that?"

"I mean that in her mind rape is the norm but Leoben failed to recognize that. Think about it, she was ten years old."

"So?" he growls.

"So there's no before and after in her case," I explain before going on. "It is not the same as with an adult woman who has a frame of reference that enables her to recognize rape as an aberration to begin with, to say nothing of the fact that Jonas was a part of her life for almost two years so we are most definitely not dealing with an isolated incident here. That also explains why she doesn't have a clear concept of consent and that in turn explains why she doesn't see what the men that came after Jonas did to her as rape. Simply put, she does not have the basic tools to recognize it as such. Now, when it comes to Leoben, that works both for her and against her."

"How come?"

"Well, you have to keep in mind that this is at best a very general theory because even though we have a vague idea of what Leoben did to her, we don't have much in terms of details. Anyway, the way I see it, it works for her because chances are that even when she wasn't actively fighting Leoben, her responses were probably still atypical enough to keep him slightly off balance. You can think of it as an equation with a variable that hasn't been properly calculated. That may be analogous to what Leoben encountered and the result was that his actions were probably not resulting in the reactions he was expecting to see. Now, I don't think it was anything glaring enough to get him to change his approach but it was probably enough to lessen the effectiveness of his strategy. That is the good news. The bad news is that it works against her because, seeing how her definition of consent is badly skewed to begin with, she can't recognize coercion as rape. Add to that the fact that while she was growing up she was almost certainly bombarded with messages that equate sex with love and the end result can simply be described as a tangled mess, one that is going to be all but impossible to untangle. She didn't fight Leoben and in her mind that means it wasn't rape and that is a problem, one that is further complicated by the fact that she doesn't have a clue of where the line between rape, sex and love is supposed to be."

"But you just said that for her sex has nothing to do with love."

"It doesn't, at least not as we understand that word, but that doesn't mean she is aware of that fact," I point out.

"How can she not be aware of something like that?"

"I already told you: because she has no frame of reference, that is the key. It may be true that in her experience sex has nothing to do with love but that doesn't mean she hasn't been told countless times that both things are supposed to go together so she may not even be aware that something is missing from her experience in the first place."

"That's crazy!" he exclaims.

"Not really. It may sound crazy to you but from her perspective it all adds up because she doesn't have anything to compare it with, that is precisely the problem," I explain before going on. "Our experiences shape our expectations and our definition of what is and is not 'normal'... and the bottom line is that in her case those experiences have led to a highly abnormal --but working-- definition of 'normal'."

"But she does have a frame of reference," insists Apollo. "She is married, she was engaged, she..."

"Yes, she is married, she was engaged and that means that she does have something to compare what happened with Leoben with, and that may even have played a role in her reactions on New Caprica, but that still doesn't mean she understands what a 'loving relationship' is supposed to be or how it works nor does it mean that she has what most people would consider a normal frame of reference," I interrupt him, though I know I am going to have to be careful here because neither Adama is likely to take kindly to some of the details of what I have to say. "Think of what we learned here today. She was physically abused by her mother and sexually abused by her mother's boyfriends. That is where she is coming from. Granted, she has a husband now and she had a fiancˇ before that but going by what I know of Sam --and by your brother's age at the time of his death-- I don't think either one of them knew what they were up against. Chances are that they both assumed she understood what 'love' meant, just like you are doing now. Unfortunately it is an easy mistake to make, not to mention a recipe for disaster. Hell, even if on a rational level she is aware of the fact that her own experiences have been different, that still doesn't mean she is in a position to understand what those differences entail. In fact I am fairly certain that being suddenly confronted with what most of us understand by 'love', especially in a sexual context, would be enough to send that girl screaming into the night."