(Originally posted here)
Contents: Sexual Violence, Suicide, Ostracism
Rehtaeh Parsons in Canada and Audrie Potts
in the United States were teenage girls. Both alleged that they were
gang-raped by teenage boys while being unconscious from alcohol. Both
also seem to have been the victims of social media and real world
ostracism after the events took place. And both took their own lives,
Audrie last September and Rehtaeh this April.
In
Parsons' case the initial police investigation about the alleged
gang-rape ended in no charges though the case has now been reopened,
apparently because of new information.
The rumors are that a witness or one of the alleged rapists has come
forward because of Rehtaeh's suicide. In Potts' case the police has
made recent arrests.
That is all a very neutral summary
of the events which otherwise bring Steubenville to mind. The shared
aspects of these three cases (and many more) are a) the alleged
unconsciousness or near-unconsciousness of the girls, b) the gang aspect
of the alleged rapes, and c) the destruction of the girls' reputations
via social media and real world ostracism, including the spread of
photos about the alleged rapes or the otherwise disgusting treatment of
an alleged rape victim. At least two of the cases also suggest a fairly
lethargic involvement by the police and all three cases demonstrate
that the schools failed in their duties.
Reading about
all these cases is painful and difficult. Writing those cut-and-dry
statements is extremely insufficient. But it is a necessary prelude
for what I want to talk about: The second Act in the play titled "How
To Ruin A Young Girl's Life."
The First Act of the play is
a sexual act, or an act which some parts of the society labels as
mutually voluntary sex, even if it really is a gang-rape where one
"participant" is unconscious and has given no consent. More generally,
almost any kind of sexual behavior by the young woman or girl may suffice the get the play going.
The Second Act is what articles about these cases call bullying. But
it's something more vicious than that term can convey. It is ostracism
combined with the destruction of someone's external reputation. Mere
ostracism at least leaves the target alone. What the treatment of these
teenagers suggests is more abhorrent: The target is isolated, left
almost friendless but still continuously harassed, ridiculed, gossiped
about.
Rehteah Parsons received text messages from
strangers asking her for sex months after the alleged gang-rape. The
Steubenville rape victim was described as a whore and a slut in many
tweets I read a month after the rape, and those who described her that
way were her age and both male and female. The Facebook messages I also
scrutinized at that time described her as a slut and the boys as
innocent victims of the naturally-must-hump-a-slut instinct.
Did
the Steubenville victim not get supportive messages in the social media
then? Perhaps, but despite my attempts I couldn't unearth any. This
suggests (only suggests, as support could have been offered in personal
channels only) that the view of sexually active women as sluts and
whores is widespread among the young, that many teenagers think being
unconscious or extremely drunk is not a valid excuse for becoming the
object of sexual treatment by others and that men cannot help themselves
in sexual matters, cannot abstain from having sex with inanimate human
beings. In short, the responsibility for gate-keeping sex is clearly
seen as belonging to women.
What in olden days used to
be called victim-blaming (why did she go to that party? why did she
drink so much? how come was she dressed like that?) is not seen as
victim-blaming but as The Way Things Are. Boys are supposed to try
to get sex, at almost any cost, good girls are supposed to cross their
legs and somehow have that hold, whereas bad girls are stamped with the
slut label and are then free game forevermore.
I
was shocked to find all that so very much alive in the social media. I
naively thought that the past discussions about victim-blaming were now
knitted into the wider society. But that does not seem to be the case.
There are still good women (not for public sexual consumption) and bad
women (for public sexual consumption).
What makes all
this so horrible is that we are discussing minors in most of the
better-known cases. Children, really. Teenagers whose lives revolve
around their peer groups and for whom the sentence of that peer group
can well mean death. At the same time, those teenage boys got their
understanding of the rules of the sex game from somewhere. Who taught
them that unconscious girls can be used that way? Was it their
parents? The general culture? Pornography? I think the answer matters
tremendously.
But it's not just the boys we need to
reach. The girls with those Twitter and Facebook accounts too often
shared a similar understanding: In some odd way boys and men are
entitled to try for sex, by hook or crook, and if they succeed then the
girl or a woman is a slut or a whore but he got lucky.
We need to do something about those values, and the need is urgent.
In the final and Third Act of the play
the wider consequences of all this play out. What they are depends on
the individuals involved, on whether the woman or girl ever tells
anyone about what happened, on her mental and emotional strength, on the
severity of the hatred she must bear from her culture, on the support
she receives and on the whole larger culture. If the police is informed
about the case as an alleged rape, the values the police officers hold
enter the story, and finally the values of those who decide whether a
case can go to court or not.
At all those stages we
must be aware of those underlying values, of the submerged belief that
the destruction of some lives (such as the student athletes in the
Steubenville case) really counts for more than the destruction of other
lives (such as that of the Steubenville victim) and of the deep, deep
roots of the belief that women really are responsible for sex that
happened, except if she lost an arm or her life while fighting against
it.
The least helpful of all reactions I have read is
the recommendation that girls not be allowed to go to parties, that
alcohol should be kept away from teenagers, that parents are to blame
for not supervising their children (usually their daughters) better.
This is not because it wouldn't be good to monitor teenagers but because
all those assumptions are the same as saying that young men really all
are rapists, that nothing can be done about that except to make sure
that it's not your daughter who gets raped by them. Besides, the
advice usually boils down to limiting girls' freedoms as a solution to
something that really isn't their fault.
All that is
preposterous. It is also highly insulting to all the young men who
would never try to have sex with an unconscious woman or man, while
doing nothing to the suggestion that perhaps that IS how young men are
expected to act.
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I have written before on the derogatory terms we have for women who do not obey traditional ideas about how women should behave. It could be useful to look at the whole collection of such terms, because almost all of them have the characteristics of stating "this is a nasty person AND a woman", whereas the corresponding male terms tend to say just "this is a nasty person." There are exceptions to that rule but not many.