Rape Culture and the Media

CNN’s coverage of the Steubenville trial stirred outrage last week, focusing as it did on the guilty verdict’s effects on the rapists. Reporting from outside the courthouse, Poppy Harlow said “it was very difficult to watch” as their “promising futures...fell apart.” Needless to say, this was a rape case, not “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and the misplaced pathos was as tasteless as it was unfair, excusing two people who had total agency in their violent crime. Our sympathies are with the victim first, just as they would be with any other person targeted by a violent crime. To think otherwise discounts the horror she experienced and minimizes the savagery central to sexual assault.

It is easy to condemn Steubenville and CNN in a vacuum, and they certainly deserve to be pilloried. Yet, we must acknowledge that, far from being idiosyncratic aberrations from a culture otherwise cognizant of the plight of sexual violence, these instances betray a deeper problem in the way many in America misunderstand and misrepresent cases of sexual assault. Rape culture is a hideous, hearty weed on the lawn of American social life. Prolific, it shows up all over, not just in cable news schlock shops.

Last year, in its coverage of the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in Cleveland, Texas, The New York Times was blasted—and later apologized—for an article that discussed the adolescent’s make-up and manner of dress, quoting extensively from locals who engaged in rank victim-blaming.

Even before Harlow ran her mouth, rape culture was written all over this case. Coverage seemed to harp on the fact that when she was attacked at a party, the Steubenville teenager was heavily intoxicated, with certain onlookers even charging that she brought the crime on herself. Many in the town closed ranks around the perpetrators, obstructing prosecution until the story, scattered across social media in the form of trophy photographs and videos, hit television news and was further publicized by the hacker group Anonymous. When one of the rapists apologized to his victim after being found guilty, he did not express remorse for his behavior, only regrets that the images had been sent around online.

And after CNN’s wrongheaded coverage, the trend continued. Fox News, airing footage from the courtroom, inadvertently revealed the victim’s identity, allowing her tormentors to find her on Twitter and subject her to a barrage of hate and death threats. (This represented not only a break with human compassion, but also a departure from accepted journalistic conventions, which generally protect the names of minors who are crime victims.)

As Steubenville recedes into relative anonymity, it is important to hold onto its core lesson: Rape culture is alive and well, in towns across America and within the walls of the newsroom.