Raped in the U.S.A.

What the Cleveland, Texas Case Teaches Us About Rape Culture in America

I can’t stop reading the coverage of the new gang rape case, even though it makes me sick to my stomach to keep on reading. It’s not just the crime that makes me feel physically ill when I think about it. It’s the coverage of the crime by nearly every major media outlet, from The New York Times to the Houston Chronicle to NBC.

In the past week, these news sources have perpetuated the myth that women, and yes, even 11-year-old girls, who are raped bring that crime upon themselves. It’s a theory that’s so widespread, some even call it a culture.

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Here are the details of the case: An 11-year-old schoolgirl was allegedly gang raped by a group of as many as 18 boys and men in an abandoned trailer in a small, East Texas town. Footage of the rape, taken on a cell phone video camera, was spread around town after the attack. In late November, an elementary school student showed a teacher some of the video footage. The teacher alerted the police, who began an investigation.

The New York Times identifies the rape of the young girl an event that has ravaged a community, but at no point mentions the physical or psychological impact the crime might have upon the child who was actually raped. Instead, the concern of the article focuses on the damaging effects of the crime on the lives of the perpetrators: It’s just destroyed our community,” one town resident states. “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.” Nevermind that the real question of a rape is not how the young men will be able to live normally after the crime, but rather how the victim will be able to survive, despite the physical and psychological trauma that she has and will continue to endure for the rest of her life. 

In what constitues a FOX-worthy example of editorializing “the news,” the journalist in question, James McKinley, chooses quotations only from those residents of the town who saw the victim as responsible for her own rape. The piece therefore emerges as an appallingly biased depiction of a rape that an 11-year-old girl brought upon herself. McKinely takes pains to explain the way in which the 11-year-old victim “dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s” and “would hang out with teenage boys,” as if clothing, makeup, and befriending teenagers were acts that might lead those teenagers to commit rape. Furthermore, McKinley’s article describes the men, (some of whom were as old as 27,) as having been “drawn into” the crime, rather than having “committed it.” In this textbook example of the use of the passive voice to transfer agency from subject to object, the sentence shifts the blame from the perpetrator of the crime to the victim. McKinley’s reportage goes as far as to blame the mother of the victim for not keeping her daughter out of trouble—as if it were a mother’s responsibility to prevent all possible criminal activity singlehandedly, after doing the dishes and before bed. Nowhere in the article does McKinley consider the perspective of the other side—the necessary perspective here, the logical one, the one that might, for example lead to the question: “Where were the parents of the young men who committed this rape? Why didn’t they teach their children to respect women?”

The art of a fine news article is the art of telling an unbiased story. McKinley’s piece is anything but an unbiased tale, and yet, many readers will consume it as such, without questioning it. It should be placed in a locked cabinet, right alongside the the intrusive psychological probes of the Houston Chronicle, which analyzed the victim’s Facebook profile for evidence that she was the paradoxical quintessential rape victim: vulnerable and yet seductive, nervous and weak, but still a tramp. The Houston coverage describes the victim as a troublemaker whose “vulnerability pokes through the tough veneer,” who made “flamboyant statements about drinking, smoking, and sex,” while she “let people take advantage” and “walk all over her.” Yet the most disturbingly misguided statement regarding the rape took place during a recent NBC newscast, when a defense attorney for the case claimed that the child had been a “willing participant” in the series of rapes. Way to go with that legal knowledge, dude: You don’t have to be a lawyer to know that an 11-year-old cannot legally consent to sex. 

If the idea of victim blaming still appears a little too abstract, then consider the details of a similar gang rape that occurred in Canada this past September: A 16-year-old girl was drugged and gang raped, and the photos from the attack went viral on Facebook. According to an article posted on Jezebel, Facebook comments included statements like these: ‘“Straight up WHORE,” “a complete slut,” and “Cmon whose not down for a gangbang.” In video footage, guests at the party who witnessed the rape blamed the victim for getting “messed up” and stated that the whole thing was “over-exaggerated.” A young man named Martin Duckhorn complained that the victim was “more embarrassed about it and so she’s trying to make it sound like she’s a victim of something, rather than to say that she did something and that she knows it was incredibly idiotic.”

The idea of finding out about your own rape via Facebook is one we’ll have to get used to; this is probably not the first case in which this social media has distributed images of rape to the eager eyes of a general audience, and it won’t be the last case either. In the age of Facebook and cell phone video cameras, the voyeurs who posted these photos to Facebook and blamed the victim in their comments, and the pedophiles who spread the video footage of an 11-year-old girl’s attack must be understood as perpetrators in the culture of rape. To watch and to do nothing about it, to look and to laugh at it, and to write and to blame the victim, they are all rape at the level of discourse, at the level of culture. 

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Rape culture is everywhere we look, and everywhere we do not look. It is everywhere we choose to avert our eyes, and everywhere we fail to turn the lens of the camera back upon ourselves, upon our own beliefs and implicit prejudices.

Rape culture is in the hand of the television viewer, who clicks the remote back to the Superbowl, even after hearing that the football player he’s rooting for has been accused of sexual assault. Rape culture is in the cheer that is heard world wide as that football player scores a field goal.

Rape culture is in the eyes of the teenage girls who ostracize another one of them for dressing sexy and sleeping around. Rape culture is in the shouts of “slut” and “whore” that follow the girl around school, and finally, in the fear that brings her to kill herself.

Rape culture is in the smile of millions of Americans who tuned in, last week, to the deranged antics of Charlie Sheen, who caused his twitter followers to rise to over a million and break a Guinness Book World Record, who quoted him and heralded him as a new, American folk hero, a despite the fact that he’s a known repeat perpetrator of violence against women.

Rape culture is in the pens of the liberal editorialists who defended Julian Assange against charges of rape by releasing the names of his accusers, by reconfiguring the language of the accusations so as to render them meaningless. It is in the comment thread of every internet site where readers claimed, “A good man like that who is intelligent and left wing could never be a rapist.”

Rape culture is in the catcalls that women hear when we walk down the street, wherever we go, and no matter what we’re wearing. It’s in the way we’re afraid to walk home at night alone, because we know that someone might be waiting, and in the way we are encouraged all our lives to be passive, not to fight back, not to learn to assert or defend ourselves, when in fact, fighting back is the skill that will save us.

Rape culture is in the minds of Republican House Representatives who are waging a new war against women’s bodies and lives. It’s in the mind of the Representative who suggested re-defining rape to signify only “forcible rape,” thereby eliminating all those “messy cases” where the victim is unconscious, drugged, mentally handicapped, or underage. Rape culture is in the minds of those Representatives who voted to de-find Planned Parenthood, which provides much needed sexual health services, including abortions, to low-income women across America. Rape culture is in the mind of anyone who would deny a rape victim an abortion, and it is in the mind of the legislator who would render it legal to kill an abortion provider.

Rape culture is in the assumptions of every reader who, upon hearing of the brutal sexual assault of CBS reporter Lara Logan in Egypt, responded by thinking, “She’s a beautiful woman covering a political rebellion. What did she expect was going to happen?” Rape culture is in the assumptions of every bigot who commented that sexual assaults by gangs of men happen only in the Middle East, disavowing the fact that sexual assault is widespread in America as well.

Rape culture is in the opinions of every reader who, after hearing the story of what happened to Logan, decided it’s too dangerous to send female reporters to report in war zones. Rape culture is the culture that takes women journalists out of war zones so that they cannot find and tell the stories of other women’s rapes. Rape culture is any culture that refuses to recognize that rape is still used all over the world as a tool of warfare, and that, in war zones, the story of rape is not commonly written down unless a female journalist is there, a fellow woman to whom a female survivor might more easily entrust her story.  

Rape culture is in the way we now tell jokes about rape without wondering why we do it. It’s in the way we laugh at those jokes rather than challenge the person who is telling them, or turn off the television, or click away from the Internet browser.

Rape culture is in my hometown, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, an idyllic suburban enclave of middle and upper middle class families where the high school football team gang raped a mentally handicapped girl one day after school. Rape culture is in the way the adults of the town subsequently worked to cover up the rape, to transfer the blame to the victim, and to transfer blame away from the good old boys.

Rape culture is in the way we are not educated as to the meaning of consent, so that the few conversations I’ve had with female friends about involuntary sexual activity always end in confusion: Why did this happen and why wasn’t I prepared? Why didn’t I know it would be like this—hazy and in the dark at some party, and with someone I knew, and why didn’t I realize that this was happening to me? If I’d known what to expect, I would have yelled “No!” when I was really thinking it.

Rape culture is in the failure of schools and communities and families to provide adequate sexual education and in the abstinence only education that convinces us sex is not in fact about consent, but rather about secrecy and shame. Rape culture is in the way we still conceive of sex as a commodity-based transaction. Rape culture is in the way we are still taught that men control the terms of the transaction. Rape culture is in the boring porn videos that situate women as passive recipients of male desire. Rape culture is in the way we still refuse to believe that sex means mutual fulfillment and is a voluntary act for both parties involved.

Rape culture is in the way we still can’t seem to believe that rape could possibly happen in LBTQ relationships, because if we were to take the hetero, gender-based model away, then that would mean that sex is an act based only on a principle of consent. Rape culture is the way we are still, radically afraid of the idea of consent—in all its messiness, in all its peculiar individuality, in all of the weakness it might expose in ourselves, and in all the potential for equality that it bestows upon us.  

Rape culture is in fear, fear of female sexuality and the female body. It is in our suspicion of the victim every time she comes forward to state her cases. It is in our guilt and shame about ourselves, just as it is in that nagging feeling of which we are all guilty: “What was she wearing? Was she drunk? Why did she go home with him?”

And rape culture, ultimately, is rooted in hate, hatred of women who use their bodies for their own fulfillment and pleasure. It’s rooted in our society’s veil of misogyny, and in our denial that this hatred still exists, and continues to exist—in implicit prejudices, in snap judgments, in psychological processes we are only beginning to understand.

Rape culture will not go away on its own. It’s up to us to change it. Those who wield the power to influence others’ minds—journalists, reporters, bloggers, and public figures—should prioritize sensitivity to victims and survivors over fueling popular demand for myths about rape. But it’s not just up to reporters, or to people with a byline to speak out about rape culture. It’s up to all of us. That’s called personal integrity. We all have that—all of us.  

Even an 11-year-old rape victim has it, although The New York Times has silenced her voice.