Boys will be boys. When Layla Cameron titled her March 25 blog post, she wasn’t referencing a flippant cliché. She was commentating on the less-than-tactful media coverage of the Steubenville, Ohio, rape case.
Cameron studied media and gender studies at Carleton University and then started work for Media Action and its Represent project. The Represent project offers a forum to challenge damaging media representations of women.
The Steubenville case concerns the night of Aug. 11, 2012 when two high school football players sexually violated an incapacitated female peer, and documented their acts through social media. Ma’lik Richmon and Trent Mays, both 16 years old at the time, have been convicted in juvenile court for the rape of a minor.
The international community watched as the case came to a close, and with it media sympathy for the convicted rapists.
CNN called the boys “promising students” and NBC news lamented on their “promising football careers.”
The ABC program 20/20 began an online piece by writing the case was “every parent’s nightmare.”
The tragedy, based on the media coverage, was not that two boys had committed a crime, but at their age they would enter the criminal justice system. Not only do these commentaries victimize the convicted, they perpetuate rape culture.
Rape culture means we live in a society where rape and sexual assault are normalized through cultural patterns, a lack of education about consent and a court system that blames victims by prioritizing rapists’ stories.
Cameron says a way media perpetuates rape culture is by giving irrelevant details when commenting on sexual assault cases.
“Don’t talk about what girls were wearing, don’t talk about how much they’ve had to drink, don’t talk about anything that makes it seem like they asked for it,” adds Cameron.“No one asks to be violated.”
Unfortunately, the Steubenville case isn’t the lone incident of media coverage gone wrong.
It occurs often enough to spur the creation of groups such as Take Back The News, founded in 2001. The aim of the group is to confront the misrepresentation and underrepresentation of sexual assault in mainstream media by “improving both the quantity and quality of media coverage of sexual assault.”
The organization provided outlets for rape survivors to publish their stories in their own words before it disbanded in 2009. But the issues the group tackled did not disappear. Groups such as Media Action in Canada have taken a stand against inaccurate media depictions of sexual assault.
But media still provide inaccurate coverage. As an industry with overwhelming reach and influence, the effects can be daunting.
Overall, the rate of sexual assaults being reported to the police declined in 2011, down three per cent from the previous year, according to a report by Statistics Canada.
Aggravated sexual assault, which police categorize as the most severe, saw a decline of 23 per cent.
But this doesn’t reflect a society that is increasing in safety or decreasing in the occurrence of sexual assaults. Statistics Canada noted the number of sexual assaults reported by police is an undercount.
“There are many reasons that victims gave for not reporting sexual assaults to police including the belief that the incident wasn’t enough,” the report says. Meaning, the assault wasn’t at a level of violence for the victim to feel justified in reporting it.
With media coverage lamenting a girl’s drunken state as the catalyst for sexual assault, thereby ruining the lives of teen football stars, these downward trends aren’t surprising.
Those who report to the police face the possibility of being publicly chastised by bad media coverage at a later date.
Sarah McCue, a member and support worker for the Coalition for a Carleton Sexual Assault Centre says rape culture is something people face daily, partially through recycled media stories.
“The media representations of sexual assault cases are not the only driving force for rape culture,” she says. “But it definitely doesn’t need any helping hands.”
So how does it stop? It’s critical to provide solutions, or the cycle never ends, but it’s also important to examine media coverage, Cameron says.
But she never received any formal training in covering sexual assault because it isn’t something that people like to talk about.Talking about sexual assault, though, is crucial.
Cases such as the one in Steubenville cannot incite rage among media consumers only to fade into the background until the next high profile sexual assault.
Maybe it's the lack of training that is responsible for this imbalanced media coverage of sexual assault, but it needs to end. McCue says the media, at the very least should treat sexual assault as any other crime in which the victim is not blamed or questioned.
But that’s a low bar to set. There needs to be dialogue about sexual assault outside of media because changing the way they cover sexual assault isn’t the only requirement to ending rape culture.