Abstract

Excerpted From: Karen Yao, A Vast Crevice”: Older Asian Women's Untold Experience with Sexual Violence, 105 Boston University Law Review 1075 (April, 2025) (208 Footnotes) (Full Document)

On one October evening, a 29-year-old man entered a 77-year-old woman's room in a senior living facility--and raped her. Under the guise of being a maintenance man, he covered the door's peephole, dragged her to the bedroom, and threatened to kill her. He told her “he raped her because he had never had sex with an Asian woman” before. This targeting was rationalized as “apparently some sick fantasy that he had” rare occurrence from an anomalous actor. Such simplifications stick. A few years after this attack, a Georgia sheriff's captain justified the murders of six Asian women because a man with a “sex addiction” was “having a really bad day.”

Older women experience sexual violence. Within the population of older women, older women of color, who contend not only with the vulnerabilities that come with age but also the specific barriers that come with being non-White, experience racialized sexual violence. However, we rarely focus on or know how to make sense of sexual violence targeting older women, especially older women of color.

This lack of awareness permeates both social and academic spheres. Socially, we perceive older women through sexist and ageist lenses, such that we often forget, alienate, and disbelieve them. Academically, we put forth limited resources, funding, and desire to pursue studies that center older people, who “are not seen as sexy subjects” or “considered exciting,” exacerbating their erasure. The legal field likewise deprioritizes older women, and no legal research, thus far, has examined the unique chemistry of gender, age, and race impacting sexual violence against older women of color. This gaping hole renders many voiceless and perpetuates faulty frameworks that are ill-equipped to deal with complex realities, impacting all survivors of sexual violence. As our population trends increasingly older and more diverse, we cannot continue to ignore the voices of older women of color.

To begin illuminating older women of color and inspire further scholarship on sexual violence against older women of all races, this Note explores the experiences of older Asian women. This Note highlights older Asian women due to their perpetual erasure, the rise in hate crimes targeting older Asian people during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the sexualization that makes Asian women of all ages vulnerable. Further, this Note uses legal storytelling, and narrative more broadly, as a launching point to better understand our current realities--and envision a more expansive future.

This Note contributes to the existing literature by (1) highlighting the dearth of scholarship on sexual violence against older Asian women and (2) building on previous work to reframe sexual violence and create a new method for tracing narratives that survivors, lawyers, and extralegal advocates can use as a tool for change in the short and long term, in and out of the law.

Part I first briefly outlines this Note's emphasis on legal storytelling and the relevance of a survivor's narrative in the criminal legal system. It then provides context on narratives of older women and Asian women to situate the conversation on older Asian women. Part II explores how current narrative frameworks fall short and the resulting harm older Asian women suffer. Part III offers three proposals: (A) a reframing of sexual violence to encapsulate structures leading to an act, the act, and the consequences flowing from the act; (B) a new method for tracing the sexualization Asian women experience throughout their lives (“Narrative Tracing”); and (C) three recommendations for future directions alongside counterarguments. Last, this Note concludes with reanimated conviction about its proposals and the urgency of these issues.

[. . .]

Sexual violence toward older women of color is violence. Erasure is violence as well. This Note highlights the largely ignored reality of sexual violence against older women, older women of color, and specifically older Asian women. Current frameworks, with their many pitfalls, actively harm most people, including older Asian women. Through building on scholars' prior work, this Note proposes a reframing of sexual violence. It also shares a new methodological approach to illuminate a more complete understanding of survivors' experiences, expand legal narratives for survivors in the current moment, and encourage long-term legal change. These proposals offer insight into how interdisciplinary collaborators and those with lived experience can work toward greater relief and protection for survivors from varied backgrounds.

While focusing on stories may not at first glance seem like an inherently legal approach, “[l]egal storytelling is an engine built to hurl rocks over walls of social complacency that obscure the view out from the citadel.” After all, “the real task is not one of law or of gentle nudges but of changing the culture.” This Note ends with the ultimate call to take this Note as it is--a small stone in a vast crevice center the voices of older women of color, and to affirm the deep and transformative power of stories. They wield the power to save lives.

J.D. Candidate, Boston University School of Law, 2025.