This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Exeter chapter.
Joanna Freeman investigates this week’s biggest news story and gives us her opinion on the Steubenville Rape Case.
On Sunday the 17th of March in a case which has become infamous, the Steubenville rapists were finally found guilty. If you’ve been too busy with deadlines to keep up with the news, the case concerns a young girl who came forward in Steubenville, Ohio, and reported that she had been raped during a party held by fellow high school students. Ma’lik Richmond and Trent Mays were seen in video and photographic evidence driving the girl from party to party whilst assaulting her and livetweeting the attack. A picture was found which showed the two boys holding the unconscious girl by her hands and feet, and they joke about how she ‘looks dead’ in videos that were shared online in the wake of the attack.
Furthermore, other girls have turned on the victim via social networking sites, with a 15 and 16 year old being charged for menacing and aggravated menacing after threatening bodily harm and murder online. This reaction is shocking, but there is some small comfort in the quick response of the law – showing that this is not an appropriate way to behave, no matter how old you are.
While the boys were undeniably guilty, the football-obsessed town of Steubenville and the media saw fit to defend their high school’s most popular athletes, choosing instead to blame the victim. The event has been compared by Laurie Penny to the Abu Ghraib incident – where photos emerged of smiling American soldiers standing around the bodies of prisoners of war. The gleeful and arrogant publicising of their crime makes it all the more disgusting – the fact that these boys saw no repercussions to their actions and went so far as to boast about what they were doing.
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Despite the issues and furore which have surrounded this case from the beginning, the current drama concerns the media’s response to the story. Some of you may have seen the requests going around Facebook asking people to sign a petition forcing CNN to apologise for their reporting of the case, but why?
The media as a whole has dealt with this story terribly. In practically every newspaper you read you will find photos of the sobbing boys, described as “football stars”, in which the reporter laments the destruction of their lives. They are filled with quotes from the boys, such as Ma’lik Richmond’s “I had no intention to do anything like that,” he said. “And I’m sorry to put you guys through this“, as if his apology and his tears can change what they did.
The real question here is why such sympathy is being shown for rapists, but none for the victim. This young girl who had the courage to testify in court has to turn on her television every day and read in newspapers that it was partly her fault for being drunk and that she has ruined their “bright futures”. This sympathy and lax attitude towards such a crime gives off entirely the wrong message: that this was not ‘real’ rape, but simply “boys will be boys” and the result of some harmless fun being taken too far.
In CNN’s first report on the sentencing, Candy Crowley says “a 16-year-old now just sobbing in court, regardless of what big football players they are, still sound like 16 year olds. The other one, 17.” Only much later in the report do they even mention the actual victim in the story.
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Equally as disgusting as CNN’s response was that of a large percentage of the public. People took to Twitter, tweeting things such as “
maybe if you don’t want to get raped, don’t get blackout drunk. Just a thought #Steubenville” and “
Steubenville: Guilty. I feel bad for the two young guys, Mays and Richmond, they did what most people in their situation would have done”. A complete log of such tweets is kept on
www.publicshaming.tumblr.com/tagged/steubenville.
As university students, I am sure most of us can agree that we’ve been drunk and vulnerable before, and here are hundreds of people saying that in such a situation, we would have deserved being taken advantage of if we are unable to consent. Young men and women alike should practice safe drinking, but if things do get out of hand, they shouldn’t have to worry about being sexually abused.
An unsourced post on social media site Tumblr sums up this rape culture with an interesting analogy: “Imagine you have a Rolex watch. Nice fancy Rolex, you bought it because you like the way it looks and you wanted to treat yourself. And then you get beaten and mugged and your Rolex is stolen. So you go to the police. Only, instead of investigating the crime, the police want to know why you were wearing a Rolex instead of a regular watch. Have you ever given a Rolex to anyone else? Is it possible you wanted to be mugged? Why didn’t you wear long sleeves to cover up the Rolex if you didn’t want to be mugged?”
While the fact that her attackers were actually sentenced should be positive, it is likely that they will only serve a year in prison. The presiding judge, Thomas Lipps, made it clear that they could have been tried in adult court, which would have resulted in many more years in prison. But the fact is that they weren’t – they were allowed to get away with an extremely short sentence considering the crime they committed, simply due to being 16 and 17: undeniably old enough to know better. Richmond’s lawyer is even appealing against the verdict, saying that his client should not have to be on the sex offenders register as he is only 16 and therefore “does not have a fully developed brain”. Whilst I understand that a lawyer’s job is to defend their client in any way possible, regardless of their own beliefs; the idea that a 16 year old is unable to make decisions or know right from wrong is ridiculous. At 16 you can get married, have a full-time job and have consensual sex, but apparently you are still not expected to know that rape is wrong.
This whole saga is just another wake-up call: rape culture is becoming a bigger problem than ever and something must be done about it.
Photo Sources: reuters.com, twitter.com, tumblr.com
