Monthly Archive for May, 2007

WARNING: This post is about sexual assault.

Hoyden About Town is one of my favorite feminist blogs because TigTog and Lauredhel really get into the nuts and bolts of how sexist oppression works, how it spreads, and how we can fight it. Two recent posts are absolutely essential reading. They point out two frighteningly insidious ways careless language can contribute to a culture of rape tolerance.

Two weeks ago, Lauredhel pointed out that when we say things like “a woman was raped” instead of “a man raped a woman”, we change the event from something perpetrated by a man into something supervised by a woman. This totally changes how people reason about what happened. A UCLA study found that when they left attackers out of such sentences, readers “attributed less blame to the perpetrator – and less harm to the victim.”

And we wonder why women blame themselves when a man assaults them? We wonder why sentences like “she shouldn’t have gone home with him” come out of peoples’ mouths?

Today, another eye opening post links to an article on MSNBC describing a man who raped a 9 year old girl twice a week for two years. Not once in the article does the author ever describe it as rape. The language is practically permissive, referring to the events in question as “hav[ing] sex,” “sexual relations,” and “what he did.” To say that they had sex implies that she gave consent. A 9 year old girl is incapable of giving meaningful consent to a 26 year old man.

This is empowering knowledge–knowledge we can all use to change our culture. We can monitor those around us for this kind of irresponsible langage, and we can respond. We can email bloggers to tell them to clean up their language, we can write letters to editors demanding more journalistic responsibility, and we can stand up in conversation and say “you mean he raped her.”

This is the kind of knowledge we, as activists, need to spread far and wide. This knowledge is power.

Here’s the letter I wrote to The Carolina Channel, the station that wrote the article in question:

I find it appalling that the story “Man Pleads Guilty To Impregnating 10-Year-Old” fails to describe as rape what is clearly rape. The article dances around the subject using terminology like “have sex” and “sexual relations” and “what he did”. Not once does the article acknowledge that a 26 year old man raped a 9 year old girl.

This may seem like a silly squabble about words, but the language you’ve chosen obfuscates the true nature of the crime. By referring to his actions as “sex” rather than “rape” you quietly suggest that she gave consent, when at 9 she was legally incapable of any such thing.

Using more precise language is the absolute least we can do to change our culture, a culture which is far too tolerant of violence against women.

Erik Pukinskis
San Diego, CA