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
Hi there, and thanks for the link. If you have a look at the MSNBC story again, you’ll see that the girl wasn’t 14, but 9. NINE.
Ugh. “Fixed”, if you can call it that.
Good post, Erik. This kind of looseness of language is a very scary thing, and not only in a discussion about sexual assault. It’s all over the place in other important discussions too (like calling genocide “ethnic cleansing”). Orwell wrote a great article about this.
Hi Erik, great post. Let me point out what I think is wrong with a sentence like ‘the woman was raped.’ This isn’t a contradiction of what you’ve said, but an application of some useful concepts to better define what’s wrong about it. So if you’ll countenance some linguistics babble, here goes:
In the active voice, the grammatical subject (i.e., the noun phrase before the verb) corresponds to the ‘active’ participant in the action described. In the case of the verb ‘to rape,’ this would be the rapist. The object (i.e., the noun after the verb) corresponds to the ‘passive’ participant, in our case, the woman who was raped:
(1) The man raped the woman.
In the passive voice, on the other hand, the ‘passive’ participant in the action described is promoted to subject position. The ‘active’ participant can appear after the verb with the preposition ‘by,’ as in (2a), or can be omitted as in (2b).
(2) a. The woman was raped by the man.
b. The woman was raped.
The passive voice is the one we were all told not to use by high school grammar teachers, and its purging from the English language has become something of a cause for pop linguists far and wide. Rebutting the often-ridiculous claims made about the active voice’s supposed “muscularity” (and a host of other weird, gendered descriptions) has in turn become a cause of real linguists. If the pernicious feature of ‘The woman was raped’ is really the fact that it is in the passive voice, I’d expect there to be a noticeable difference (with respect to fairness of representation) between (1) and both sentences of (2), with no real difference between (2a) and (2b).
You see, I feel like the truly outrageous thing about a sentence like ‘The woman was raped’ is the absence of the agent male, the rapist.
If that’s the case, (2b) should seem worse than (2a). And so it is, to me anyway.
Friends don’t let friends hate on the passive voice for no good reason. Hate on (2b) for its omission, and implicit exculpation, of the rapist.