When Elizabeth Flock was 20, she took a trip to Rome with friends, and the group signed up for a guided tour. At night, they traipsed from one bar to the next with their male guide before heading to the Trevi Fountain, where they tossed pennies over their shoulders into the water, a local ritual ensuring their return to the city someday. That is Flock’s last memory of the evening. She woke in a dimly lit room to find herself being raped by the tour guide. She froze. “I let it happen,” she writes.
Flock, now a journalist, did not report the rape to the police because she “did not think they would help me.” If she’d had a knife or a gun within her reach that night, would she have used it? she wonders. And what would have happened if she had? Would she have been arrested and jailed? Years later, she doggedly searched for the guide and discovered that he lived in the same city she did, where he owned a furniture shop. She fantasized about burning the shop down but ended up sending him a message on Facebook instead, asking if he remembered what he had done to her and how many other women he had hurt. She never got a reply.
She began a new search, this time for women who did what she could not bring herself to do: fight back. “The Furies” of Flock’s title are three women who “took matters into their own hands,” defending themselves “in places where institutions failed to protect them.”
In Alabama, she meets Brittany Smith, who shot and killed the man who raped her. In Tirwa, a town in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, she finds Angoori Dahariya, a Dalit who, after being evicted from her home by an upper-caste landlord, formed a cane-wielding gang of women to deal with abusive and unscrupulous men. And in the Afrin district of northern Syria, she encounters Cicek Mustafa Zibo, who joined an all-female militia to protect the newly autonomous Kurdish-majority region of Rojava from ISIS militants. In intimate character studies of her three subjects, Flock seeks to answer a question she had asked herself: Does fighting back lead to change? Her book is no rose-tinted call to arms. These women’s stories don’t lend themselves to easy morals. Smith was raped and beaten by an acquaintance who detained her in her home until she shot him with her brother’s gun. She was charged with murder, and planned to invoke a “stand your ground” defense — a statute that permits the use of lethal force against deadly threats. Her request to use the defense was denied by a judge. Although a medical examiner listed 33 injuries to Smith’s body, including bite marks, when a police investigator was asked on the stand about the severity of her injuries, he said, “Honestly, I mean, I would have thought there would be more.” An activist tells Flock that in Smith’s Alabama county rape is epidemic, and in “The Furies” the incidents pile up, one outdoing the next in brutality. Smith’s rapist’s ex-wife says the man once tied her to a chair and threatened to drown her, while another woman recounts that her ex-husband “stomped” on her head until she fainted. The county sheriff shrugs off such accounts. “People get high, they get stupid,” he tells Flock.
Flock helped produce a 2022 documentary on Smith’s case, recounting incidents. The violence in her book is committed by women who are in many ways perfectly ordinary, and though we may not agree that the sum of their actions “added up to something worthy setting events into motion that very well may change the world after them,” Flock has done a service by portraying her subjects’ human complexity.