Although this article is nearly a year old, the content reminded me that during the trial of the man who raped Jessica, we were all advised "don't say rape" during our testimonies. The defense, however, used the word often and with impunity.
Until we better educate society... until we remove the element of shame associated with rape... until we treat rape as a crime no different from any other crime (violent/devastating/life changing)... until we stop making excuses for criminals... we will never reduce the incidence of assault.
Confusing Sex and Rape
Published:
November 19, 2011 – The New York Times
AS the Jerry Sandusky case at Penn
State University shows, reporting on allegations of sex crimes poses a
challenge not only to get the story right but to deliver it in language that
puts the facts in the proper light.
Some readers, responding to The New
York Times’s first reports on the case, strongly objected to wording in the
articles that, in their view, either underplayed the details or wrongly applied
the language of consensual sex to the narrative.
The objections focused on the most
severe of the accusations against Mr. Sandusky, a former Penn State assistant
coach. According to the grand jury report, he subjected a boy estimated to be
10 years old to “anal intercourse” in locker room showers at the university in
2002.
Jennifer Crichton, a reader from
Manhattan, said The Times’ initial article on Nov. 5 missed the mark when it
described the testimony of a Penn State graduate assistant about the incident.
As The Times put it, he told the grand jury that he saw Mr. Sandusky “sexually
assaulting a boy in the shower.”
“Why is this described as ‘sexual
assault’ and not as ‘rape’ ”? Ms. Crichton wrote.
“My question for The Times,” wrote
Frederick Lazare of Houston, “is why did it not immediately tell its readers
that the student assistant saw Jerry Sandusky raping a child. That was in the
grand jury report.”
Lilith Fowler, a reader from
Milwaukee, objected to a Nov. 9 Times account in which the graduate assistant
was said to have testified to the grand jury that “he saw Mr. Sandusky having
anal sex with the boy.”
“The boy, age 10 or 11, has no
ability to consent,” Ms. Fowler wrote, “so this is not anal sex, it is a rape,
and The Times should call it that.”
Patricia Raube of Binghamton, N.Y.,
elaborated on the same point about the same passage: “An adult can rape a
child. An adult can molest a child. An adult cannot ‘have sex’ — a phrase
connoting consent — with a child.” In her view, the language soft-pedals the
“enormity of the abuse perpetrated.”
It should be noted that four days
into The Times’ news coverage, the newspaper introduced the term “rape” into
some of its descriptions of the 2002 incident. Joe Sexton, the sports editor,
told me the paper had “no reluctance to use ‘rape’ ” and was not trying
“to somehow shy away from the graphic nature of the allegations.” He said the
charges included a variety of acts, so the paper had used “sexual assault” to
cover the range. Further, he said, the paper’s reporting on Penn State
officials’ accounts of their actions required careful wording, as none of them
besides the graduate assistant had acknowledged that rape was involved.
It is common for newspapers to use terms
like “sexual assault” and “sexual abuse” and “have sex” when reporting on sex
crimes. Perhaps, though, it’s time that The Times and other news organizations
take another look at the language they use. Victims’ advocates echo what the
readers told me in their e-mails: language in news media reports — and, for
that matter, in the court system itself — consistently underplays the brutality
of sex crimes and misapplies terms that imply consent.
“We constantly talk about victims
having sex with their perpetrator,” said Claudia J. Bayliff, project attorney
for the National Judicial Education Program and a longtime advocate for victims
of sex crimes. “We talk about children performing oral sex on their
perpetrator, which suggests a consensual act and a volitional act. We use
‘fondled,’ ‘had sex with,’ ‘performed oral sex on’ — all those kinds of terms.”
Wendy Murphy, an adjunct professor
at the New England School of Law, runs a program there whose mission is to
persuade court systems to use language that strips out vagueness and the
implication of consent. She told me she has worked with journalists and finds
they are largely untrained on the subject.
Newspapers, she said, shy away from
publishing the explicit details that really tell the story. “People are eating
their cornflakes,” she said. “They don’t want to read ‘the penis was forced
into the child’s mouth.’ ”
But, she added, “my argument back is
always, come on, if there is one thing newspapers have always said it is: ‘We
are sorry to offend but we are going to tell the truth. We are not going to
soft-pedal it for you.’ ”
This is not an easy fix, and the
Sandusky case illustrates why. It is complex, with 40 charges involved, and the
details of the allegations are extremely unsavory. How can a reporter characterize
the facts accurately and without compounding the victimization?
Marci Hamilton, a professor at the
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University and an advocate for
victims of clergy sex crimes, suggested that news organizations should be both
general and specific. “I don’t think the terms ‘sexually abuse’ or
‘molestation’ are inappropriate,” she said.
“The problem is when they are the
only terms used. In this case, you have eight victims with stories told about
them. Each is quite different. A journalist who doesn’t make it clear the
spectrum of inappropriate behavior is letting us down.”
Using a broad term like “sexually
assault” or “sexually abuse” is reasonable, in other words, but only if the
specifics are not spared. In my view, and that of several victims’ advocates I
spoke with, the term “rape” is appropriate in describing the most severe
allegations in the Sandusky case. But there is a problem there, as well.
“Rape” is a word in flux. The Times
stylebook says to use it to mean “forced intercourse, or intercourse with a
child below the age of consent.” In many cases, though, the justice system
doesn’t use the word. In the Sandusky case, the charges do not include the word
“rape” because he was charged under the statute covering “Involuntary Deviate
Sexual Intercourse.”
Ms. Murphy, of the New England
School of Law, said that in surveying the 50 states, she found “something like
40 different terms to describe the act of rape of a child.”
So murky has the definition of rape
become that the Police Executive Research Forum, a police think tank for big
cities, recently convened police chiefs to discuss redefining the term for the
F.B.I.’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. The upshot is a recommendation that
the F.B.I. rape statistics, previously limited to forcible vaginal penetration
by males, cover any penetration that is genital, oral or anal, regardless of
whether the victims and the offenders are male or female.
This broadened definition provides
clarity. When the facts warrant it, journalists should be as specific as
possible, they should avoid using the language of consensual sex and, when
appropriate, they should call a rape a rape.
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