Victim-blaming. No-one does it better than a court reporter, it seems.
In this case we’re talking about allegations involving a group of eighteen men and teenage boys raping an eleven year old girl in Texas. The New York Times article, which is being thoroughly picked apart here by Mother Jones seems slanted towards concern for the welfare of the boys involved and what this whole matter might be doing to the reputation of the town. (Hint: not great for your reputation, but not because we think your town is full of slutty eleven year olds!) There are also nice little examples of victim-blaming (the eleven year old was a trashy dresser, apparently, which explains everything) in the piece, and even a bit of good old-fashioned mother-blaming (though not aimed at the mothers of the perpetrators but rather at the mother of the eleven year old victim).
This is the point at which, as the writer’s editor, I would send him an email. “Dear James,” it would say. “Thanks for getting this in! I have some concerns that we’ve only got quotes from people who are worried about the suspects (‘The arrests have left many wondering who will be taken into custody next’) and think the girl was asking for it, especially since, even if she actually begged for it, the fact that she is 11 makes the incident stupendously reprehensible (not to mention still illegal). We don’t want anyone wrongly thinking you are being lazy or thoughtless or misogynist! Please advise if literally no other kinds of quotes are available because every single person who lives in Cleveland, Texas, is a monster.”
The way media reporting of rape occurs has been a particularly persistent case of the misogyny that is rape culture, and Hoyden About Town dedicates an entire category to examples where ‘sex’ is used instead of ‘rape’ to describe the crime in media reports. Some of the examples are quite extraordinary.
Update: The Public Editor of The New York Times has written this follow-up to their piece. Not quite an apology, not even quite an admission of wrong-doing in their writing, but significant none the less.
I tried to form the words to form a coherent argument… but really there aren’t any words except. ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!
Thanks for the link to the MJ piece — I’ve been following this, but hadn’t come across that one. It does a particularly good job of showing how the reporter’s own phrasing is the problem, not just the choice of quotations from the people in Cleveland, TX.
i’m glad there was no comments section in the NY times article, what a horrorshow that would be
Based on the description given of the Public Editor (“His opinions and conclusions are his own”), I don’t think he’s in a position to apologize on behalf of the paper, which is working on its own follow-up story. I will be very interested to see how they handle the story in a second go.
Also, the comments on the Public Editor’s piece are open. Many of the comments are quite critical of him for saying that the problem of the original story is that it “lacked balance”; e.g.: “You say that the initial story lacked ‘a critical balancing element’ as if suggesting that both points of view, blaming the victim and scorning the perpetrators for their inexcusable crimes, are equally valid.” Also, from another comment: “I have never read a story about any other kind of crime — murder, larceny — where so much attention was paid to the feelings of the criminals and the supposed ‘asking-for-it’ behavior of the victim, and so little attention paid to the damage they had wrought. When a gang runs into a convenience store and shoots up the place, we don’t see stories about how badly those poor robbers are going to feel now, or about how the store was really asking for it, what with being open all night and dealing primarily in cash.”
[…] the hurricane itself as our bungled response in its wake.) Whereas human malice at its worst and indifference to the suffering of an 11-year-old girl are beyond my comprehension. (In case you are confused, […]
[…] victim-blaming which appears to be unavoidable even where the victim is eleven years old – You’re never too young or too overpowered to be the slutty trouble-maker. Fuck Politeness points out that, as usual, public sympathy is focusing on the welfare of the 18(!) […]
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