The verdict is in. Two young boys, among a group of football players of Steubenville Ohio, were found delinquent (the juvenile equivalent) of guilty in the case of sexually assaulting a 16 year old girl and one boy was found guilty of distributing nude photographs of a minor.
For more information on the tragic case of the Steubenville gang rape, you can read the full timeline at the Daily Kos.
The case was remarkable for the incredibly publicity generated both by the male perpetrators and the media both before, during, and after the case. Unlike other “acquaintance rape” trials, the evidence (provided by the defense itself through social media) was clear and unambiguous that rape had occurred.
It also mirrored the recent gang rape of a woman on a bus several months ago that spawned nationwide protests. The case in Steubenville was particularly noteworthy because of the age of everyone involved. Though, like many cases, it involved athletes, alcohol, and victim blaming.
Now the deconstruction of the tragedy has begun in earnest in a 24 hour news cycle desperate for lurid details.
On on hand, we celebrate any successful prosecution of perpetrators of rape. According to the Department of Justice, the decision to prosecute was roughly 50% of cases brought to police. On the other hand, the Rape Abuse & Incest National Network reports that only 5% of rapists will ever be convicted of their crimes.
But rape culture isn’t just a matter of statistics. In the literature, it is defined as “ a complex of beliefs that encourage sexual aggression and supports violence, a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent, and a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism and presents it as the norm”. Society reflects these beliefs in the portrayal of sex, sexual relationships, power, and normality in every day words, action, and images.
You can find more articles about rape culture, challenging rape culture, and the affects of rape culture here, here, here, here, and here among many places.
Rape culture is especially prevalent in how the media talks about rape and rape enforcement. Jackson Katz does a particularly good job highlighting how men are decoupled from gender violence perpetration through simple grammatical syntax.
In particular, pay attention how the statement “John beats Mary” becomes “Mary is a battered woman.”
We see the degenderization of violence in the coverage of school shooting. BOYS don’t shoot up schools, STUDENTS shoot up schools. We also see it in the coverage of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill rape case and federal lawsuit.
But what does all of this have to do with Steubenville media coverage? Stuebenville exemplifies how pervasive rape culture is in our society still.
First, we normalize the behavior of the perpetrators and identify the victim as abnormal. Second, we justify even the most egregiousness behavior as relatively normal for our community. Third, if we can’t degender the perpetrator, we change the focus of agency to the victim. This is known as victim blaming.
CNN may have made the worst of the leaps into rape culture. Candy Crowley lamented the “lasting impact” on the lives of the boys who raped a “nearly unconscious” young woman. Further, their bottom screen texts routinely established the young boys as “football stars” versus the young girl as the “drunken girl” or “drunken victim.”
In these statement we see CNN attempt to gender and normalize the male perpetrators while degendering or abnormalizing the female victim.
However, CNN isn’t the only news organization that gets in on the controversy. ABC stressed how “this was every parent’s worse nightmare and a cautionary tale for teenagers living in today’s world.” (emphasis added). NBC did a character piece on the male perpetrators as “promising football stars.” It was the Associated Press who focused on the level of intoxication while Yahoo News highlighted the emotional trauma for the town of Steubenville Ohio. You can find these examples and more from Think Progress.
Just recently, Fox News (among others) released the name of the female victim survivor in direct violation of state statutes that protect victim survivors who are minors.
The one element that ties these narratives together is in fact what is missing from the narrative – a focus on the female victim of sexual assault. This is a component of rape culture – a systemic set of blinders to the impact of rape on the individual and the fact that women are statistically far more likely to be raped by a man that they know. Though anyone of any gender can attack anybody else.
In fact, this blind spot is highlighted best by The Onion, who ran a parody news video about a young male basketball player “overcoming rape” after a “drunken mistake” his freshmen year.
It is time we stopped normalizing rape. We need a culture change to a firm stance for “affirmative consent” and we need to start teaching it to both boys and girls EARLY. No one has a right to your own body except for you.
As Dr. Harry Brode argues in his lecture “Asking For It: The Ethics and Erotics of Affirmative Consent” if you get into a car accident, telling the cops that you were drunk as well does NOT help your case.
Further, we need to reject efforts to blame victims for what they were doing or what they were wearing. In this particular case, the defense tried to argue that “she could have said no if she wasn’t interested in sex”. What they did not say was whether she had said yes to sex. In fact, there is strong evidence that not only was the girl too drunk to give consent, but that she was nearly comatose.
Moreover, why does it matter if she was drunk? We need to move towards a society that sees sex as something that is not an entitlement but a mutually respectful activity.
As a side note, I think such a culture change could and would lead to better, healthier sexual relationships, but that is neither here nor there.
The fundamental basis of affirmative consent is that sex is principally up to the person being asked if they want to have sex or not.
A Department of Justice report indicates that 73% of victims know their attackers. Most rapists are men, though not all men are rapists. There is no magical bodily function that rejects rape sperm in the female body, rape-rape is not “fundamentally different” from acquaintance rape, and rape is not sanctioned by god.
It is time we start teaching boys not to rape, rather than teaching everyone else how NOT to be raped.
If Steubenville has taught us anything, it is that we continue to discount the dangers and impact of acquaintance rape. As a society, we still see how pervasive unhealthy sexual relationships are and are unable to seperate our own anxieties about sex to hold a critical frame to male perpetrators without seemingly attacking all men. We also desperately need to do more work to talk with children about healthy relationships and affirmative consent to promote safe and respectful communities.
If we take nothing from the Steubenville case, we accept that rape culture is an acceptable state of mind.
Do you agree with the idea alcohol negates your ability to give consent to your body? If not , then join the conversation and speak out against sexual assault and speak for affirmative consent.
