So, I've been visualizing this for a while, from different angles, different perspectives, but hell, I can't draw from any personal experience and have never seen it portrayed in any media (believe it or not), so I'm not sure how to make it "real". In a movie I'd imagine a lot of cut scenes, odd angles, dark and shadowy. But obviously I need to create it. In my "camera-eye" perspective, there's a lot of violence and swearing, but the feeling and empathy is so much more than that. I want the reader to feel the scene, not react to the language in the writing (does that make sense?).

I'm thinking about writing it from the woman's perspective, but then it obscures the heroines dispatch of the rapist. Which on the one hand makes the scene possibly more real, and heightens the mystery of the heroines, but on the other doesn't advance understanding of them as much as I think I want it to. Never mind trying to understand and convey such a perspective.

So I'm back to thrid person, and struggling with making the reader feel the scene. The empathy is important, because it's the young woman's terror and dispair that ultimately "solve" the situation.

The reason for this is so that the reader can decide how to feel about the experience.

Too many writers try to provide an analog to the violins in the sound track that tell a movie viewer how to feel about what's happening on the screen.

Readers are intelligent enough to want to decide for themselves how to feel about what is happening in a scene. If the author tells them they should feel thus and so, and they don't, the whole things falls flat.

If you show the rape from the point of view of any of the characters, stick very strictly to the things that character actually notices.

For example, if you use the victim's point of view, is she likely to take note of how she feels? She might notice that her heart sounds really loud in her ears--be careful about cliches with this, by the way--but not while she's struggling with her attacker. She would only notice such noise when she is trying to hide from him. During a struggle, she is only going to notice her injuries if they keep her from fighting back--her arm is broken, or whatever. I hope that all makes sense.

If you don't get into the head of one of the characters (and use "camera eye" instead), just "show" as clearly as you can, what the reader would see if it were filmed.

And let the reader supply the violins.

I have read a few novels that included rape scenes. Some of them were poorly written. In the well written ones, the element that affected me the most, and still sticks with me long afterwards, was not depicted during the rape scene at all. It was the way the victim was changed by the event.

The writer allowed me to get to know the woman before the rape, forced me to live through the rape (various perspectives), then let me get to know a completely different victim after the rape. The original woman never returned, even after the rapist was executed. As a reader I kept hoping for the original woman to come back, but I knew it was not possible. The rape scene had been too traumatic.