Another day, another horrific story about male violence against women and another article in the mainstream press humanising the perpetrators and diminishing the victims.
Language matters, the subtleties of words tell a story even when the tone appears to be impassive. News reports do this all the time, sensationalist headlines over what looks like straight news reporting until you scratch the objective surface and reveal the twisted rationales underneath.
The Sydney Morning Herald’s article today about the four men and one 17 year old boy charged with multiple offences over gang-rape of an unconscious teenage. The evidence presented to the court alleged that they filmed themselves raping her, laughed while they did it and egged each other on.
The article starts with this headline:
Really? His father is defending him? That’s the point of this story?
The opening lines of the article:
A week ago Tristan Carlyle-Watson fronted his father and revealed he was likely to be charged following the gang-rape of a teenage girl.
“He was worried when he told me, of course he was,” his father, James, told Fairfax Media on Thursday.
So before you read anything else about the gang-rape of a teenage girl, already you’ve been told the most important thing you need to know is that his father feels bad and one of the men allegedly involved in the attack is “worried”.
Three lines later:
Police allege a number of men in the room on the night of May 22 took turns in having sex with the teenage girl, who lost consciousness.
No one has “sex” with a girl who has lost consciousness. It’s not sex if she’s unconscious, it’s rape.
I understand the need to use the word “alleged”. Until the case has been heard in court and a conviction handed down he’s not a rapist, he’s an alleged rapist; it’s not a rape, it’s an alleged rape. If they are convicted only then, for the purposes of a media article, does it becomes a rape and they become rapists.
However, also included in the article was this sentence:
Mr Carlyle-Watson was allegedly one of up to eight men inside a room at a house party in Sydney’s west in May when a teenage girl was pack-raped and filmed.
And again, that headline:
There’s clearly no problem calling it rape, so why is a journalist describing it as men “having sex” with an unconscious girl?
Why is a journalist talking to and writing about the father of the accused rapist? Why is an editor publishing that story under that headline?
If I could bring myself to imagine my son being charged with such a crime, or myself talking to the media about it the day after hearing such news, I can’t imagine any circumstances under which I would be able to make any kind of sense or be able to give any real informed consent to barely articulated confusion and horror becoming a headline in a national news article.
After some fairly gut-wrenching details of the rape, the father’s story continues:
His father first heard of his son’s arrest after one of his friends called him on Wednesday.
He said his son, who hasn’t been charged with sexually assaulting the girl, wasn’t involved in the actual act.
“My son doesn’t want to do that,” he said.
“He has girlfriends all over the place. The way he gets on with girls … why would he want to go waste his time and do that?”
He said his son and some of the others charged over the assault were friends who had grown up together.
Some of the men are married and another is engaged, it is understood.
He’s not a professional in this area, or a public figure, he’s the father of one of the alleged perpetrators. What possible value is there in reporting his reaction to this crime? Everything in those quotes that equates sex with rape and assumes that nice ordinary men couldn’t ever commit rape are coming from a clearly shocked and distressed father, there is no public benefit is served by reporting them.
There is however, significant danger in it.
Victims of crime don’t disappear into an impenetrable bubble after their attackers have been charged. They still have computers, phones, tablets, newspapers and they still live in a community of people who have all those things. Nor do they just forget about the crime committed against them. Victims of crime, trying to make sense of what happened to them, will often scour the media for reports about their attack, as will the people who love them and are traumatised by their trauma. It’s almost certain that someone who knows that girl read this article, there’s a good chance that she did.
In the wider view, given the number of women we know have been sexually assaulted and that the only thing about that number we know for sure is that it’s underreported, it is certain that many other people who’ve read that article have suffered some form of sexual violence.
There is a wide spectrum of sexual violence and an equally wide variation in the responses people have to such violence, but one thing seems to be a constant across all ages, genders, cultures and eras: shame. It is an almost universal response to sexual attacks and it is why reporting like this is so dangerous. When the victims are erased from the story, it can feel to them like a confirmation of their shame.
The alleged perpetrators have families, they’re “worried”, they can “get girls”, they have friends, wives and fiancés. They are humanised and real. The victim is nowhere in this story, she has been implicitly dehumanised by comparison.
The effects of such reporting are insidious, intangible and scarring. The girl at the centre of this story is a real person, she also has family, friends, feelings, a life, a story to tell. She is not the invisible background to the story of the men who perpetrated violence against her.
This is not about inciting another wild bout of outage against a single journalist, because it’s not a single journalist and it’s not a single publication. It’s about a pervasive endless parade of reporting male violence against women that subtly implies women aren’t real and men aren’t accountable.
The victims of violence are real, their suffering is very real and so are the choices violent men make. These are the assumptions that need to underpin every report of violence, when that is not the case the media needs to be told that in failing to do so they’re perpetuating the effects of violence not just reporting it.