When teens rape, adults cry "foul!"
By Amy Dickinson
March 18, 2013
Last month I posted a Q and A from my “Ask Amy” column which I thought might be controversial. The query was from a 16-year-old girl, and her question to me was, “Was I raped?”
(For the original Q and A, please click here: )
http://www.amydickinson.com/post/44098015909/teen-girl-asks-was-i-raped
What I didn’t quite anticipate was how this question and my answer (“yes, you were raped”) would unleash a certain hateful ferocity in my readership. I also didn’t anticipate — at all — how brokenhearted I would feel, not by the reaction toward me (ten years of writing this column has made me thick skinned) but by the violence people expressed toward a girl who was raped.
Should a 16 year old girl go to the home of a 19 year old guy, tell him she doesn’t want to “go all the way” (the writer’s own delicate word choice, not mine), and expect him to respect that? That’s exactly what a typical 16-year-old with a crush on a guy would expect. And it’s what she should be able to expect.
She wanted to have a relationship with him. She stated she did NOT want to have sex with him, but then she did have sex with him. And, according to her, she did not fight him off. She did not yell (or even say…) “no.” But she did say in advance that she did not want to have sex and she never (according to her) gave any consent. And the next day she wrote to me. “Was I raped?” she asked. And I said, “Yes.”
As the torrent of hate mail poured in I was prepared for the usual assaults on my competence and character (and looks, too — because when people don’t like what you think, they enjoy telling you you’re ugly, too).
What truly broke my heart was the tone and content of the hate mail directed at the teen girl. There were so many hundreds of emails that I didn’t read them all, but after I posted the column on my Facebook page, the comments section quickly filled with so many haters blaming the victim and spewing garbage toward the teen, me and other commenters that readers begged me to remove the column and I did.
But one email stays with me. It was from someone claiming to be a grandmother who said she had shared my column with her teenage grandchildren — both boys and girls — ages 13 - sixteen.
I was curious about the reaction of these kids, so I kept reading.
And what this grandmother reported sent shivers up my spine. “She was a stupid slut who deserved to be raped,” said her 13 year old granddaughter. The grandmother showed off her grandkids’ reactions like she was proud of them, quoting each in turn — each more hateful and vile than the one before it. I won’t quote these other comments because I don’t want you, dear readers, to have them rattling around in your head the way I have.
One thing I learned from this is how tricky people think this issue of consent is. Because if you go to someone’s house, they think that means you consent to sex. If you don’t scream or fight or shout “no,” then that means you consent to sex. And if you claim you were raped — you had better have some cuts and bruises (or video) to bolster your story.
Which brings me to Steubenville, Ohio. A 16-year-old girl goes to a party, gets drunk and possibly drugged, is stripped and violated repeatedly (while unconscious) by two of her peers. (In some news accounts they were referred to as friends of hers.) Her assault is photographed by other teens and the photos and videos are widely shared. No one attempts to help her. The girl, unconscious and naked, is carried from place to place as she is violated repeatedly. She is referred to as “deader than OJ’s wife.” And kids text about it, share photos and video — and no one attempts to help her.
The victim herself was brave and savvy enough to put together a time line of what happened to her after she woke up, naked, on a basement floor, her rapists standing over her. The boys all but admitted what they had done in multiple text messages, sent to the victim and to other people. In fact, two days after the attack the victim finally texted one of her attackers, “It’s on YouTube. Stop texting me.”
And yesterday the two teen boys were convicted of rape. In court, given the opportunity to apologize to the victim and her family, one of the rapists said through his sobs that he was sorry he took photos and video of her, naked, unconscious, and with his semen on her body. He said he regretted photographing her and apologized for that. No mention of the sexual assault. The other boy sobbed, “My life is over.”
“Many of the things we learned during this trial that our children were saying and doing were profane, were ugly,” the Judge Thomas Lipps said.
Justice, I guess, prevailed in Steubenville. But what this case revealed about our culture and what my (relatively tame) Q and A revealed about our attitudes toward sexual behavior, expectations, degradation and violation is devastating. Aside from the horrific behavior of the teen rapists (and the voyeurism of so many), many ADULTS who knew about this sexual assault did nothing, covered it up, and even (in the case of the football coach, who is a mandated reporter) joked about it.
Just after the guilty verdict was announced, Ohio’s Attorney General Mike DeWine announced plans to possibly prosecute various adults who either did nothing or who actively tried to thwart an investigation. I glanced through the “comments” section of the CNN story and noticed that it was dominated by men who either felt sorry for the boys for their one and two year sentences in juvie — or who were calling DeWine the “gestapo” and screaming about their own rights (not to report a crime). And — as the comments to my own Q and A revealed, and as the icky reportage from the proud grandmother revealed — we, the adults, are the real problem.
Hey, you guys need to stop reblogging links that contain the name and/or pictures of the Steubenville rape victim, even if they contain threats. Don’t communicate with the individuals threatening her. Contact police and let them handle it. If you must, take screenshots and edit out her name but please, do not put her name out there more than it already is. She has a right to privacy and a right to feel safe. I know everyone wants to do the right thing but it has to be done in a safe way with the victim’s well-being as a priority.
Edit: And don’t put her name into any search queries because then it’ll start showing up in related searches. You may be curious about her identity but you’re not supposed to know it and you don’t have a right to know it.
“Looking back on it, here’s the awful conclusion: the social media blitz, and pictures, the video, the bragging, the guy who raised the idea of paying people to urinate on her — these were not byproducts of the exercise. Humiliating her wasn’t something that happened because they raped her. Humiliating her was the reason they raped her. That was the exercise. Humiliating her was the point of the whole thing. They didn’t get caught because there was an audience. If they wanted to rape her in secret, they could have found a bedroom and locked the door. They wanted to do it and celebrate it. They wanted to put on a show. They didn’t get caught because when they raped her there was an audience; they raped her because there was an audience. The whole thing was for the attention. They thought it was funny. Nodianos could barely contain his laughter, and his glee, and he wanted everyone who saw that video to laugh along with him, laugh at the helpless victim and how completely she had been mistreated.”
—Steubenville: Humiliation Was The Point Of The Exercise
Now think about all of this in terms of rape jokes:
In the Steubenville case, what’s most cringe-worthy is that too many kids didn’t seem to understand that rather than make jokes, they should do something to help the victim. But we can’t expect much from our kids when we adults seem pretty conflicted about what exactly constitutes rape — or what’s O.K. to joke about and what’s not. Up until January 2012, the FBI’s official definition included the word “forcible” — an effective exclusion of non-consensual sex with a person who was incapacitated or unconscious because they were drugged or intoxicated. That has changed, but the culture might take a while to catch up. And it bears reminding that the GOP vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan sponsored an anti-abortion bill allowing exemptions only in the cases of “forcible” rape, which could exclude cases in which the victim was underage or unconscious. In that context, it’s not hard to understand why one of the Steubenville witnesses Evan Westlake testified that he didn’t think what he was seeing was rape, saying: “It wasn’t violent. I didn’t know exactly what rape was. I always pictured it as forcing yourself on someone.”
And as for what’s funny, my 16-year-old daughter tells me that while her friends would never rape someone, the language used by the Steubenville kids to describe sexual assault and to degrade the victim is common online. Joking about rape, referencing sexual acts and making fun of girls perceived as “sluts” is just part of teen online culture now. The Steubenville kids captioned a picture of the passed out victim “B*tches is b*tches. F**k ‘em,” but you could find dozens of similar comments online.
If rape is too common of a punch line for this generation, we shouldn’t be shocked. After all, these kids were raised on Family Guy, a show created by Seth MacFarlane who drew ire at this year’s Oscars ceremony with his “We Saw Your Boobs” routine and a litany of other offensive jabs about women. But that’s nothing compared to the animated series’ abortion-coat-hanger jokes and the constant verbal abuse of the female characters. The series, which has become hugely popular among teen boys and young men, features more rape humor than one could tally, including one scene in which a woman is being assaulted on a beach and screams for help while another character, Aquaman, issues lame threats to the perpetrator without leaving the water. The scene ends when Aquaman gives up, saying: “Well, maybe you shouldn’t have led him on.”
“I'm pissed all I got was a hand job, though. I should have raped since everyone thinks I did.”
—a text message sent by Trent Mays, one of the two Steubenville football players accused of gang raping a sixteen-year-old girl (via CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/15/justice/ohio-steubenville-case/index.html?c=&page=1)According to Poynter's Kelly McBride, who has worked for years with survivor advocacy groups on the issue of media coverage of rape, focusing on poor handling of such cases, like CNN's coverage of the Steubenville case, can be dangerous and unproductive. Instead, she suggests putting energy towards good coverage of such stories, including these examples:
poynter.orgSo don’t sign the petition demanding CNN apologize. Instead, draw attention to the good coverage.
ESPN’s Michael Smith and Jemele Hill devoted their entire His & Hers podcast this week to the topic. Hill discussed her own childhood assault as a 12-year-old and the fact that her mother was sexually assaulted as well. They talked about the responsibility parents have to educate their sons and daughters, about the pervasiveness of male entitlement in sports cultures and how difficult it is to achieve justice. Smith explains his sympathy for the convicted boys. Hill describes how she would counsel a teen girl to protect herself in a world that won’t respect her right to say no.
The National Sexual Violence Resource Center tried to draw attention to a study suggesting that more than half of teenagers would find it tough to intervene; 40 percent said they wouldn’t know what to do.
And blogger and former Steubenville resident Alexandria Goddard describes her role in uncovering the documentation of the assault on social media.
It’s not wrong to feel sympathy for two boys crying over their ruined lives. Because of the perceived stigma, we don’t name the victim or see her image. I’m not suggesting that we change that, until victims voluntarily ask us to. But we in the media have to do more to put a face on the victims of childhood rape. We need to find ways to tell their stories, the way David Holthouse did in his moving first-person stories for Westward and This American Life.
“But we in the media have to do more to put a face on the victims of childhood rape.”
