Connie displays a number of these items.
The character of Connie seems unlikely to actually exist in the first place, let alone someone people could relate such a severe experience to. She is almost comically conceded, .
She was fifteen and she had a quick nervous giggle and a habit of craning her neck to glance in mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was alright. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn't much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. "Stop gawking at yourself, who are you? You think you"re so pretty?" she would say. Connie would raise her eyebrow at these familiar complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything. (Oates 427).
Though a somewhat insulting stereotype of the adolescent, Connie serves this function perfectly. According to Dr. Melisa Holmes, the Assistant Professor in the departments of Ob-Gyn and Pediatrics at the Medical University of South Carolina, "As adolescents mature, they feel a greater need for independence and exploration, which inherently may increase their risk for experiencing forced or coerced sexual activity". (3) Connie being a girl of fifteen is experiencing these marked feelings. She is outgoing, flirtatious, and as a result she attracts Arnold Friend. The resulting situation is classified as "Acquaintance Rape" or a sexual assault by someone the victim has previously met and established some trust which commonly follows a social encounter with a stranger in a public place.
This story was accurate in more ways than the depiction of the rape as an act. The description of Arnold Friend was very similar to a serial rapist of the mid 1960's named Charles Schmid.
