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ABSTRACT
This study addresses the need for more research on news media representations of sexual assault within Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It focuses on the discursive links between victim-blaming in mainstream news coverage, on the one hand, and a neoliberal ideology that backgrounds structural issues while implicitly emphasizing an ethic of ‘personal responsibility’ for risk-management, on the other. The existing research in feminist media studies points to the way that media misrepresent gendered crime by individualizing cases and focusing on victim behaviour rather than connecting sexual assault to systemic social issues based on power imbalance. Using coverage of the highly publicized 2013 Steubenville, Ohio rape as a case study, this article builds on existing research by performing a systematized, grammar-based analysis of transitivity and agency in news reports and demonstrating their often subtle connection with neoliberal notions of victimization and risk that align with the interests of perpetrators, especially when they are privileged social actors (in the Steubenville case and many other recent cases in the U.S., revenue-securing male athletes) while placing the onus on victims, whose agency is used to imply blame.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Lisa A. Barca is a Lecturer in the Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University. Her research and teaching encompass rhetoric, critical media studies, and the intersections of feminist theory and animal ethics. She earned her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago in 2012. Barrett, The Honors College, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA. Email: [email protected].
Notes
1 In addition to the many U.S. cases in the news at the time, the rape and murder of medical student Jyoti Singh Pandey was coming to light simultaneously with the publication of the 16 December 2012 New York Times article on Steubenville. Mardorossian (Citation2014) has remarked on ‘the contrast between the treatment of gang rapes in the United States and in India, where gang rapes have also been occurring with alarming regularity over the last few years’ (pp. 9–10), adding: ‘In strong contrast to India’s response to gang rape as an expression of culture, the United States has been increasingly focusing on rape as an issue of criminal deviance, as an exceptional occurrence rather than as a pattern of violence.’ (p. 11). It would be informative to apply CDA to news media representations of rape cases involving cultural others as opposed to North Americans in the U.S. news.
2 Although outside the parameters of this study, a well-known and controversial TV news broadcast suggests the inter-media pervasiveness of these patterns. On 17 March 2013, CNN reporter Poppy Harlow lamented post-verdict that ‘two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believe their life fell apart,’ with anchor Candy Crowley concurring and legal contributor Paul Callan describing ‘a courtroom drenched in [the convicts’] tears and tragedy’ (CNN grieves that guilty verdict ruined ‘promising’ lives of Steubenville rapists, Citation2013).
3 While an examination of the arguments regarding the structural roots of rape are outside the scope of this paper due to the large volume of scholarship on the topic and the diverse positions offered therein, a few remarks representative of substantial consensus among feminists are warranted. According to Kaufman (Citation2007): ‘The act of violence is many things at once. At the same instant it is the individual man acting out relations of sexual power; it is the violence of a society – a hierarchical, authoritarian, sexist, class-divided, militarist, racist, impersonal, crazy society – being focused through an individual man onto an individual woman. In the psyche of the individual man it might be his denial of social powerlessness through an act of aggression. In total, these acts of violence are like a ritualized acting out of our social relations of power’ (p. 33). Kaufman (Citation2007) also cites the rigid gender socialization characteristic of modern industrial societies, which involves ‘the splitting of human desire and human being into mutually exclusive spheres of activity and passivity,’ so that ‘the internalization of the norms of masculinity require the surplus repression of passive aims,’ which can result in the ‘development of a “surplus aggressive” character type’ (p. 41). This can be accentuated in ‘straight male clubs,’ such as sports teams, fraternities, gangs, etc., which, ‘as many feminists have pointed out … are a subculture of male privilege’ (p. 46). Schur (Citation2007) has focused on U.S. rape culture in particular, noting: ‘Coercive sexuality is a predictable corollary of American outlooks on sex. In particular, sexist attitudes and habits … and the commercializing instinct encouraged under modern capitalism combine to … push us in the direction of sexual indifference and insensibility’ (p. 89). In sum, there are ‘four general factors that may contribute to the prevalence of sexual coercion: depersonalization, leading to sexual indifference; the persisting devaluation (and sexualization) of women; pervasive socioeconomic inequality; and culturally induced habituation to force and violence,’ including pornographic depictions of rape (Schur, Citation2007, p. 95). Certainly most if not all of these structural factors could be relevant to understanding the Steubenville case, given the hyper-masculine football culture in which the perpetrators were ensconced; the aggression that can be foundational to that culture both on and off the field; the violence-inflected, social comradery expressed by the perpetrators the social-media and video content recovered by police; the socio-economic inequality prevalent in a U.S. state such as Ohio, with pervasive economic depression in the rust-belt area that includes Steubenville; and the quasi-pornographic language and staging of the acts of violence by the perpetrators in their recorded materials on the night of the crime, especially the extremely depersonalized and objectifying ways in which they referenced the victim. For more on structural roots of gender violence, see the excellent variety of articles in O’Toole, Schiffman, and Edwards (Citation2007).