Reading the Language of Rape Culture

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The State of Things | Frank Stasio

Reading the Language of Rape Culture
Wednesday, April 06 2011

Most cases of rape and sexual assault never make the news. But in recent weeks, horrific stories about victims of sexual violence have created national headlines. Some language used in the reporting of these cases and public reactions to them has caused controversy. How we articulate ideas about rape sheds light on American perceptions of violence, gender and race. Host Frank Stasio discusses the language and the law surrounding rape with a panel of guests including documentary filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons; Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African-American Studies at Duke University; Melissa Harris-Perry, associate professor of politics and African-American Studies at Princeton University; and Mary R. Block, associate professor of history at Valdosta State University.

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William Jelani Cobb: " Cleveland, Texas and Gender Jim Crow"

from The Nation

Cleveland, Texas and Gender Jim Crow
by William Jelani Cobb | March 29, 2011

In the three weeks since the New York Times [1] broke the story [1] of a child’s rape there, the events in Cleveland, Texas, have morphed into a category five media storm. The Times piece, which echoed and amplified currents of victim-blaming in the town, generated a tide of criticism. Yet beneath the outrage was a parable of modern media. Aside from the familiar and incendiary themes it contained, the Times article seemed an object lesson in what happens when cash-strapped newspapers parachute a reporter into a complex situation hoping for coverage on the cheap. In-depth coverage requires resources and the time to do the deliberate, painstaking gathering of facts that were in short supply in James McKinley’s article. “The New York Times,” as one friend put it, “can no longer afford nuance.”

Add to that equation the fact that Twitter-orchestrated protests, web petitions and Facebook posts pushed the Times to apologize (or at least come close to it), and our understanding of the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl becomes yet another front in the battles between old and new media. Even the way the assault became public knowledge—digital images traded around on cellphones—seems to be part of the narrative of modern technology and information.

Yet for all this modernity, the most troubling aspect of the ongoing fallout from Cleveland is the way it resurrects themes of race, sexual violence and provincialism long interred in American history. Some weeks ago I taught students in my civil rights history class about the plague of lynching, which claimed the lives of more than 3,000 African-Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beyond the horror of the organized murder of black citizens, students were most troubled by the recreational nature of it all: the images of smiling white citizens, fathers and sons, upstanding Christians gathered in fellowship around the smoldering ruin of a black body—all preserved on postcards.

If you asked any of these people in the abstract if it is right to hang a person, set him on fire and then riddle the body with bullets, they would likely have called those actions illegal and sinful. But there is an asterisk: unless that person was black; unless he had demanded his wages, or been to slow to vacate a sidewalk when a white person walked by, or been “unpopular” (these are all actual reasons cited for lynching). These are actions of people who have been given a moral escape clause, an asterisk in which upstanding Christians can sate the demonic appetites of their collective id. Thus an act of abomination becomes a moment worthy of commemorating with a photograph.

I thought about that discussion of lynching again as news spread that the alleged perpetrators were so utterly secure in the righteousness of their act that some of them snapped pictures or recorded footage on their cellphones. We have, in 2011, reached a point when the public display of charred human remains is no longer acceptable. But the response of some of the citizens of Cleveland, Texas, to this horrific assault has brought us face to face with a kind of gender Jim Crow. Here the asterisk is not failure to conform to racial etiquette but the lax adherence to an equally stringent gender code, one where “innocent” is a relative concept and rape, like lynching, can be elevated nearly to the level of civic responsibility.

Read the Full Essay @ The Nation

The New York Times and the Language of Rape

The New York Times and the Language of Rape
by Mark Anthony Neal

The story of an 11-year-old girl, who was purportedly raped by nearly two dozen men and boys is beyond heartbreaking. As the father of two girls and the friend and “brother” of far too many rape survivors, I can’t even begin to imagine the trauma that the girl and her family are experiencing. But the New York Times’ coverage of case directs another round of violence at the girl, embracing a narrative of the story that places the onus on the very victim of the rape.

18 men and boys have been officially charged in the rape the 11-year-old girl in an abandoned trailer home. The police investigation of the case was aided by the fact that some of the accused boys and men took pictures and videotaped the attack on the girl with their cell phones.

The case seems clear cut; there is no legal context in which an 11-year-old child can have consensual sex. If any of those boys or men penetrated the girl with their penises, a gang rape occurred. Yet New York Times reporter James C. McKinley, Jr. , who is the Houston bureau chief for the newspaper, chose to present a narrative that consistently suggested some culpability by the girl in the attacks on her.

McKinley’s mistake was to invest in community narratives, largely constructed around protecting the reputation of the town, Cleveland, TX and the images of the accused boys and men—virtually all African-American. How else can you explain why early in the article McKinley paraphrases town residents who wonder “how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?” as if the victim was some kind of professional sex worker.

Throughout, McKinley quotes residents lamenting how the charges will affect the future prospects of the suspects and devotes an entire paragraph to a resident who questions where the girl’s parents were. In other portions of the article McKinley gives voice—credence really—to residents who claimed that the girl “dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s” and that “she would hang out with teenage boys at a playground” as if either point is justification for rape. That McKinley, the New York Times and those town residents that were quoted should know better, seems beyond the point.

I suspect that McKinley was trying to be racially sensitive to the African-American community in Cleveland, Texas particularly given historical narratives that depict Black men as habitual rapists—the Scottsboro Boys immediately come to mind. But in his haste to be politically correct, the integrity of the 11-year-old girl was sacrificed. In the hierarchies of race and ethnicity that this nation continues to reproduce, an 11-year-old Hispanic girl was deemed expendable, as is often the case with young Black girls in such cases.

The politics of race and ethnicity will likely obscure the real issue at hand in the New York Times' coverage of the case: we continue to live in a nation that encourages rape, even sanctions it—what some rightly call a rape culture—because we are fundamentally unwilling to invoke the language that correctly captures the brutality of such acts. A rape is a rape—not an act of sexual violence, not a forced sex act, not a misunderstanding. If our major corporate media outlets are unwilling to call rape by its name, than how can we expect our children to know what rape is?

On the way home this evening, I had a difficult conversation with my 12-year-old daughter about this case, and like so many of these conversations, much of it centered on the responsibility she will have to take to protect herself in a rape culture. Sadly, I suspect that if she has children of her own, the conversation will not have changed much.