By Beth Connors-Manke
Last week, I was scanning the New York Times online, looking for information on Libya, when I came across this headline: “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town” (March 9). The teaser read: “Eighteen young men and teenage boys have been charged with participating in the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl, which was recorded on telephones.”
The at-home, right-here violence immediately pulled my attention away from Qaddafi.
I could tell you more of the story, repeat the details as they were described in the New York Times — details which were mostly about the setting (Cleveland, Texas, in a working class neighborhood called “The Quarters” by an interviewee, on Travis Street, in a house and then in an abandoned trailer).
Or, I could tell you about who seems to be getting blamed for the violence (the girl and her mother). One neighbor is quoted as saying, “Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking? How can you have an 11-year-old child missing down in the Quarters?” The Times summarized other neighbors’ comments, pointing out that “she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground.”
Or, I could tell you about how the story has been framed by The New York Times, the Houston Chronicle, and the critical response.
Let’s start there.
The Criticism
A day after the Times article ran, Ms. Magazine online, which dubs its work “fearless feminist reporting,” had this to say about Times writer James C. McKinley, Jr.’s story:
“I’m dismayed (but neither shocked nor surprised) that people have these kinds of thoughts about a young girl who was raped. Scrutinizing clothing and behavior is standard practice for rape victims—yes, even sometimes when those victims are 11 years old, as this child was. But I am downright angry that the Houston bureau chief of The New York Times, whose byline is on this piece: James C. McKinley, Jr., graduate of Cornell University and former editor of New Letters, thought that this information was relevant to print in a national news article.”
Ms. Magazine writer Andrea Grimes continued:
“Printing victim blaming speculation about how slutty some people perceived an 11-year-old child dressing doesn’t give readers information they need. It doesn’t paint a picture that helps them understand the situation. It perpetuates rape culture and gives those who want one (and those people are many, as evidenced in said article) an excuse to dismiss the behavior of 18 men who have been suspected of, and I’ll say it again, gang-raping an 11-year-old girl.”
On this second point, I respectfully disagree with Grimes. Printing victim-blaming speculation gives readers exactly the information they need. In this case, it is the news story.
Who’s at Fault
Let me explain why a gang rape story could pull me from what is, unarguably, one of the most important news stories right now (Libya): news stories on rape remind me that women are habitually targeted for interpersonal violence that seeks to deny their human dignity. News stories on rape remind me that it could next be me, my sister, my niece, the boy up the street, a man living on the streets, or one of my college students.
So, an article reporting that adults could actually say publicly, to reporters no less, that the blame for gang rape lies with an 11-year-old girl tells me that it’s the community’s fault the girl was gang raped. In other words, it’s whole communities that put us at risk, make us vulnerable to sexual violence.
Readers learn from the Times article that this town allows the sexualizing of young girls and abides, if not encourages, sexual violence by men. Doesn’t this help us understand the situation better? Especially when a woman who knows some of the defendants says, “It’s just destroyed our community. These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”
And when a spokeswoman for the Cleveland Independent School District, Stacey Gatlin, is quoted as saying, almost absurdly, “I really wish that this could end in a better light.”
Critics are right to note that the Times article is skewed. But, it’s off-center in a way that the online, off-the-cuff criticisms (the Ms. Magazine article isn’t the only criticism leveled at the news coverage of the crime) haven’t noted, at least not yet.
What’s Missing from the Story
The strange framing of the story has to do with the setting and the social circumstances. The story is most detailed when it talks about the scene of the rape:
“The abandoned trailer where the assault took place is full of trash and has a blue tarp hanging from the front. Inside there is a filthy sofa, a disconnected stove in the middle of the living room, a broken stereo and some forlorn Christmas decorations. A copy of the search warrant was on a counter in the kitchen next to some abandoned family pictures.”
And it is at its most oblique when discussing the social aspects of the town. Travis Street is in a “working class neighborhood,” but the article ignores the racial history potentially implied by the colloquial name for the area: “The Quarters.”
The Times article seems uninterested, perhaps studiously uninterested, in the fact that the men charged are all black and the young girl Hispanic (according to the Houston Chronicle). And the race issue, of course, complicates everyone’s take on the matter.
When Rape is News
After the story broke, The Houston Chronicle ran an article about pre-existing political tensions boiling over in the town, tensions over recall elections of black city council members and responding accusations of racism. It seems that those racialized political tensions are shaping the town’s response to the rape. The Chronicle has reported that white men with shaved heads are driving around yelling murderous threats; a black community activist has suggested some of the arrests are racially motivated.
The nature of news stories about rape is that they tend to focus only on the victim and the perpetrator(s), and often in abstract ways. Information on the victim tends to be limited to gender and age; details hint at the violation but never fully describe it; the perpetrator’s biography is fit into a sketchy and stereotypical outline. (The general exception to this is rule seems be a perpetrator who is an athlete; then, feature stories delve headlong into the issue, hoping to exonerate the athlete.) The standard news story frames the violence as an act isolated to the predator and the prey.
That’s the thing, though: rape isn’t an isolated act. As Grimes points out in her critique of the Times article, we live in a rape culture.
Assessing the situation, the Times article believes the central question of town residents to be: “how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?” This question, of course, implies the young men’s passivity in the situation, as if some force directed them 1) to assault the girl in two different locations and 2) to video the gang rape and then circulate that video. The question, phrased this way, is revolting.
But, if we consider that this question is coming from the mothers, grandmothers, sisters, fathers, uncles, friends, cousins of these young men, the question makes more sense. There’s grief there, and with that grief, another question: how have we created this?
The real news story is about the community. And, the news story will continue to be about the community, as it decides whether it will shift blame for the rape from collective community guilt to stock narratives about race. The individual stories of the girl, who’s been whisked off for protection, and each young man will probably remain their own long-enduring, heavy burdens.
If Cleveland, Texas is collectively responsible for this gang rape, then the Lexington community is to be blamed for the sexual violence that happens in our city. We’re all responsible for protecting others from rape and sexual assault, and we’re accountable for keeping ourselves and others from perpetrating sexual violence. Let’s not let anyone in our community be “drawn into such an act.”
TAKE BACK THE NIGHT
On Wednesday, March 30, 2011 Lexington will join the national movement of Take Back the Night with a march and rally downtown. Thirty-three years ago, women started to stand up and speak out against sexual violence under the banner of Take Back the Night. During those years, Take Back the Night became known internationally as a visible way for men and women to take a stand against sexual violence as well as domestic violence in their community.
If you would like to participate, meet at one of the MARCH WITH ME launch sites at 7:00 PM. Current sights include the Patterson Office Tower plaza at the University of Kentucky, the parking lot of 3rd Street Stuff on Limestone, and Triangle Park. The marches will lead everyone to Courthouse Plaza in downtown Lexington where the rally will be from 7:30-8:30 PM. Area colleges, high schools, and community members are invited to participate in this powerful mission to illuminate the darkness surrounding victims of violence and speak up for healing, change, and the right for everyone to live free of violence and fear. The rally will include special speakers, musical guests, a candlelight vigil, community resource tables, and more.
For more information, please contact the Violence Intervention and Prevention (VIP) Center at 257-3189 or on Facebook.
Danny
I don’t see Beth asking us to take responsibility for a long history of human atrocities; I think she’s asking us to take action–to first recognize that history, and then to act on that knowledge.
Beth C.M.
Richard:
You make a good point about ideological shibboleths. I think we’re moving along different trajectories on the other points, but that’s ok with me.
Take care.
Richard
Beth: I appreciate your experiential knowledge of, and work with, victims of sexual violence. My position is that ideological shibboleths only cause division and become repressive in their turn. The concept “culture of rape” is a simplistic approach to the male problem of “access to women” and its various solutions. You ask that I take responsibility for a human nature that is a history of atrocities? You ask too much.
Beth Connors-Manke
p.s. The “Take Back the Night” march information is also above, at the end of my article.
Beth Connors-Manke
Richard:
Thanks for reading NoC and taking the time to respond to my article.
While I’d need clarification to understand better some of your points, I will say that I do believe that we live in a rape culture. (As does Grimes, who says not that there “may be” a rape culture–as you write in your response–but that there is a rape culture perpetuated by the Time’s reporting). This belief does not come to me theoretically, which it seems to me that your response assumes. It comes from my personal experience listening to the many, many rape and sexual assault stories from friends and my students. It comes from work in a domestic violence shelter. It comes from watching network TV, which nightly airs shows about murder whose victims are often women. It comes from knowledge of human trafficking, which targets women and often for sexualized purposes. It comes to me from knowledge of the brutal murder and violation of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
In my opinion, Americans don’t understand class well, and consequently, I find academic, abstracted class analyses unpersuasive. It would help if I understood better your argument about class, so if you’d be willing to clarify that part of your response, I’d be happy to consider it more.
Rape, though, isn’t confined to any particular class, race, culture, nationality, economic system, or even gender. It has long been used as a strategy in war; it is used to establish hierarchies of power in prison and in our communities; it is used to create in-group cohesion, as is sometimes the case in fraternity gang rapes, and may have been the case in Texas.
I agree with you that our culture is many things, and one of it’s facets is a tradition of sexual violence. The goal of my article was to prod all of us to consider ourselves responsible for the violence around us and, therefore, able to take action against it. In our print version, my article was accompanied by an announcement for the annual “Take Back the Night” rally in Lexington on Wednesday, March 30. If you live in Lexington, I hope you’ll come. Information can be found at http://www.uky.edu/StudentAffairs/VIPCenter/.
Richard
Saying “we live in a culture of rape” is not the same as _ Ms.’s_ Grimes’ distinction that there may be a “rape culture and… those who want one.” The former is a repulsive indictment of all American citizens that comes from Feminist discourse (GWS 101): it is not helpful. The later quotation addresses the social intersections of class, race and gender and is (perhaps unintentionally) also a critique of alternative power structure, e.g. Anarchists) and social norms of sexual expression.
An individual’s behavior alters in groups, (deindividuation) neighborhoods, communities, and ultimately in the foundations of Euro-American capitalism. Within the U.S., eleven year old children are more than likely already directed into career paths and those that fail to demonstrate bourgeois values may act out rebellion (see _Women Without Class). Without considering economic justice there can be no Justice: that is beyond a community’s means.
This social ill of rape appears implicit in the inequities and will not go away: remember Jody Foster in _The Accused; Herbert Selby’s _Last Exist to Brooklyn_?
But please! stop telling me that MY culture, one that could produce such texts and art as listed herein, those that address humankind’s best hopes is necessarily criminial.