RAPE CULTURE AND MEDIA NARRATIVES

Makna Sinatria
Introduction
Patriarchal society and rape culture is pretty much inseparable. Before
feminism in the 19th century, people (mostly white men who held the higher
position in the society) still held the old concept of gender inequality and
gender roles; they did not respect the marginalized groups such as women
and other racial groups. Men, in general, considered women as property, a
trophy needed to be won over. Sadly, over the years, even after the
emergence of feminismwhen people trying to promote rights equality in all
groups (including marginalized race groups, not only women) the concept
persists; women are still objectified.
The term of rape culture was first coined in 1970s by the feminists of
the United States. Emillie Buchwald (1994) in her book Transforming a Rape
Culture (cited in www.wavaw.ca) defined rape culture as:
a complex set of beliefs that encourage male sexual aggression
and supports violence against women. It is a society where
violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent. In a rape
culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that
ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A
rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against
women as the norm In a rape culture both men and women
assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, inevitable
However much of what we accept as inevitable is in fact the
expression of values and attitudes that can change.
As cited by Kacmarek and Geffre (2013) in Rape Culture is: Know it when You
See It in Huffington Post, Lynn M. Phillips stated that rape culture is:
a culture in which dominant cultural ideologies, media images,
social practices, and societal institutions support and condone

sexual abuse by normalizing, trivializing and eroticizing male

violence against women and blaming victims for their own abuse.
Simply speaking, rape culture is the condition where the society normalizes
sexualized violence, as defined by BuzzFeedNews, rape culture is a culture
in which sexual violence is considered the normin which people arent
taught not to rape, but are taught not to be raped.
As

explained

in

website

Force:

Upsetting

(http://upsettingrapeculture.com/rapeculture.html)

the

Rape

Culture

rape culture includes

jokes, TV, music advertising, legal jargon, laws, words and imagery, that
make violence against women and sexual coercion seem so normal that
people believe that rape is inevitable. We are so accustomed to rape culture
that we are not aware of this and put to believe that this is just the way
things are. Often times, rape culture is situations in which sexual assault,
rape, and general violence are ignored, trivialized, normalized, or made into
jokes (www.everydayfeminism.com)
In this paper, I would like to focus on how media talk about the issue of
rape and how they narrate both the victims and the perpetrators and the
action of rape itself. The data includes media narratives on rape cases found
in online media, not only in news portal but also articles/posts/images that
indirectly supported rape culture.
Discussion
As explained, rape culture persists and it is a root cause of violence
and devastating form of violence in its own right (Prochuk, 2013). Prochuk
(2013) wrote on the survey conducted by Dr. Margo Maine (2000), 30% of
American college men stated that they would commit rape if they could get
away with it. In the same survey, more than 83% college men agreed that
some women look like they are asking to be raped. This showed how the
society normalized sexual violence as mens basic instinct, and everything
will come back to womens fault for the violence afflicted them. A survey (as
cited in sbs.com.au) conducted in Australia showed that men and women
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alike believe that the victim has a part of the blame because of some
reasons such as intoxication (being drunk), sex drive, or anger for violence
(Carisbrooke, 2014).
Rape culture tells women to cover their body parts, to wear proper
clothing, to not be seducing and attractive towards men, to be always
cautious, that they are vulnerable, giving women tips and tricks on how not
to be raped. The myth of rape prevention actually is the part of rape culture,
by giving limitation to women of what to wear, when to go out, and so on, its
like emphasizing that the responsibility of rape (or being raped) always lays
on the hands of women, that it is always womens fault for being raped, that
they are the main reason for rape to happen. None of the rape prevention
place responsibility on the perpetrators, that they are responsible and have
the choice of not raping. The problem is, no matter what they wear, women
are always prone to rape, because men are not told how not to rape. There is
no big article in magazines saying how not to rape. Indirectly, our culture
blames women for existing, for being a woman. Not fair? For women, yes. For
men, a reason for them to rape. Just because.
Statistically speaking, 1 out of 5 women and 1 out of 71 men reported
of being raped (ww.everydayfeminism.com). Looking at the statistic above, it
is obvious that women are more of the easy target for men (or women, as
there are some cases on this) to rape. Rape culture normalizes rape as
something common and unchangeable in our culture. Some of rape cases
are not disclosed to the public; only a small percent of rape cases ever
prosecuted and even less number of perpetrators are convicted for rape.
Taken from the qualitative findings of the United Nations (Fulu, Warner,
Miedema, Jewkes, Roselli, and Lang, 2013), sexual violence, especially rape,
remains the most under-reported violent crime. The number of reported rape
case stays on less than 30% of the countries in the world. In Indonesia, the
number was 19.5% of rape towards female and 7% of gang rape.
Many factors cause this. First, people still think that rape is personal
and private problem, that it does not need legal law to solve these problems.
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Rape cases are more to be judged by moral law rather than legal law. Even
though legal law against rape is already established, victims are often
reluctant and discouraged of reporting this. Most of the time, the main
reasons are shame, victim blaming, fear of being labeled as slut, rape
jokes, and the ongoing stigma in the society enveloping rape victims. The
stigma inured people of putting the blame on the victims instead of the
perpetrators, making such comments as shes wearing a short skirt, shes
a flirt, girls should not walk around at night, she wears such a revealing
clothes, shes asking for it, and so on. In Western countries, most of the
rape victims are being blamed because they are drunk or passed out and
taken advantage of by the guys, as a survey conducted by dailymail.co.uk on
women, a third of Britons believe a woman who acts flirtatiously is partially
or completely to blame for being raped more than a quarter also believed a
woman is at least partly responsible for being raped if she wears sexy or
revealing clothing, or is drunk.
Lets return in the media narrative context. Even though media has
shifted to a better one after freedom of speech was issued in many
countries, unexpectedly this does not affect how media narrated sexual
violence cases and its victims. It is commonly known that media could never
be objective; most of them are biased, opinionated, with certain political
interest, supporting certain groups, and so on. Even though it was not found
in all media, biased and victim blaming characteristics can be mostly found
in online media. People often crack jokes on it, using euphemisms to describe
rape in order to make it sound better, and making unnecessary supporting
remark on the perpetrators (e.g., describing him somehow as the victim of
accidental actions). Media narrative influences how people think of a certain
matter (in this case, rape) and somehow, by blaming the victim and
sometimes making rape jokes supporting on the normalizing rape as a
common thing that could happen to women (and men) who are asking for
it.

In this modern area, people could easily access and post anything
online, whether it is image or video or article, and our young generations are
prone to this exposure of rape culture. The most common form of how the
society normalizes sexual violence can be seen through social media (e.g.,
instagram, reddit, twitter, facebook, etc.) where people freely can upload
anything. This what-so-called freedom made some people post improper
video or image of them raping or sexually assaulting girl(s) in their personal
account, receiving many comments from their followers and friends. The
comments showed varied responses; this, however, triggered slut-shaming. I
doubt those girls who were in the picture or video gave their consent for
their assaulter to put the post online. They were called slut for their assault
and in the end became in no position of reporting the assault because of the
shame they have to bear. The reality is that most rapes are never reported
at all, due in part to the mistreatment victims receive from police and from
their communities (Reisenwitz, 2014).
As the development of technologies, teens nowadays got more access
to almost everything through the internet where victim-blaming and slutshaming mostly happen. Teenagers would be the most prone to these, either
as victims or the ones who post sexually explicit content in their social
media. Without considering of the consequences and driven by the influence
they got from their peers, posting inappropriate materials just to be cool,
they could hurt others due to their slut-shaming action. As cited by AbadSantos a teen counselor stated that, teens can say whatever they want on a
typed screen and then push send without having to think and feel about
the ramifications and see the feelings, the results of what that can do to a
peer. Sexual cyberbullying, as a teen movie Easy A featuring Emma Stone
easily described it, it is that easy for people to believe in a story spread
through the interneteven based on false accusation and rumorand gave
bad label to people (men and women alike).
Many cases on online slut-shaming did not end well, most of the time
the shame felt by the victim lead them to suicide attempt even death. The
5

Steubenville High School Rape most probably was the most concrete
example of this. A high school girl was raped at the party, and the action was
documented in photographs and videos, and those were shared among
friends and uploaded and went viral in the internet. The responses, even
though some expressed their sympathy, many of them treated this as a joke.
Being viral in Twitter with hashtag #Steubenville and on Facebook and other
social media, certain people blamed the victim for being a slut or calling her
a whore and that she asked for it; as I quote one of the twitter post I
honestly feel sorry for the boys in that Steubenville trial. That whore was
asking for it. And to make it worse, they made jokes out of the very-seriousbut-taken-for-granted rape cases.
Regarding the issue of biased media and victim-blaming, Roxane Gay
(2011) wrote an inspiring article concerning a news article released by The
New York Times in reporting a gang rape case of 11-year-old girl in Texas 1.
She wrote that the article, written by James McKinley Jr. and was published in
2011, was heavily victim-blaming piece. This could be clearly seen through a
sentence he chose to put and was published, if the allegations are proven,
how could their young men have been drawn into such an act? This
sentence alone as if suggesting that an 11-year-old girl could draw these
young menfew with criminal recordsto have sex with her and give them
consent to videotape the whole incident. Furthermore, as he quoted one
resident he interviewed who said these boys have to live with this the rest
of their lives. He chose to ignore the 11-year-old victims ruined life and
focused more on how the incidentin which the suspects brought upon
themselvesruined their futures and lives.
Victim-blaming does happen in our societywith or without us realizing
it. An interview with one of the town residents stated that she dressed older
than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in
her 20s. As the article went on, it actually showed how our community saw
1 Read more Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town on
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/us/09assault.html?_r=1
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rape victims. Responding on the victim-blaming article, Jamelle Bouie, a

blogger on The American Prospect put it as, its the extent to which it
reveals the ubiquity and casual acceptance of victim-blaming. Often times,
we put the blame upon the victim by pointing at her clothes, her actions,
what she said, and so on rather than focusing on the choice the perpetrators
have over his action of rape. Such as discussions of rape that focus on
women dressing appropriately rather than on the perpetrators choice to
commit rape, explained one of founders in Ending Victimization and Blame
website (http://everydayvictimblaming.com/). The samples of rape culture in
our community, especially in media, could go on.
As we all know, most media tend to use euphemism in describing the
action of sexual assaulteither in terms of violence or harassment.
Euphemism is used to refer to the literary practice of using a comparatively
milder or less abrasive form of negative description instead of its original,
unsympathetic

form

(http://literary-devices.com/content/euphemism).

Euphemism functions as the substitution for the unpleasant and severe

words into the gentler ones to mask the harshness.
However, the use of euphemism in describing sexual assaultin this
case, rapecould be catastrophic. Brownmiller (1975) in her book stated
that rape is a crime of not lust, but of violence and power. By replacing the
word rape with less abusive word such as have sex with, inappropriate
behavior, unpleasant, forced himself on her, sexual bullying, sex
without consent, non-consensual sex, and so on could undermine and
diminish the real meaning of rape itself. The way we currently represent
rape, in books, in newspapers, on television, on the silver screen, often
allows us to ignore the material realities of rape, the impact of rape, the
meaning of rape (Gay, 2011). Chemaly brilliantly explained the situation in
an article she wrote; Why Rape Euphemisms and Myths are Dangerous
(2014):
Bishop Desmond Tutu, Jacob Lief, and Sohaila Abdulali explained,
Rape is utterly commonplace in all our cultures. It is part of the
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fabric of everyday life, yet we all act as if its something shocking

and extraordinary whenever it hits the headlines. We remain
silent, and so we condone it. And when we arent silent, we use
euphemisms, which are worse than silence, because they
trivialize and mythologize it.
This act would and could give okay sign and push the perpetrators in a more
comfortable position for the action they did and minimizing the impact they
inflict upon the victims.
In her article When You Call a Rape Anything but Rape, You are just
Making Excuses for Rapists, Jessica Valenti stated that the debates on how
people describe rape is still ongoing, whether it is an act of penetrating or
it only stretched to the act of groping or touching without penetrating.
why saying rape sometimes and for some people feels like a
step too far is that were simply more willing to believe
perpetrators than victims. If that is to change, we need to call
rape what it is, and not water it down with descriptors or replace
it with inaccurate terms that make sexual violence and the
people who perpetrate it seem more palatable (Valenti, 2014).
As the article title suggested, by making excuses for rapists, we actually
allow, normalize, and trivialize rape to happen in our community.
Conclusion
The strong link between patriarchal culture and rape culture persists as
long as the stigma and the ongoing victim-blaming persist in the society.
Rape culture enables and encourages sexual assault or any abuse of power
over the counterparts. Rape culture normalizes and trivializes these actions,
treating it as the inevitable in the community. Without us realizing it, rape
culture widely spreads in our community in many forms; images, jokes, TV
shows, advertisements, and so on.
This paper focuses on three main forms of rape culture in media
narratives: slut-shaming, victim-blaming, and euphemism use. Commonly
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found in the modern era of media narratives such as social media or online
news portals, slut-shaming recently is popular among internet users. Not
necessarily found in rape cases, people tend to label women experiencing
sexual assault and the action was documented without their consent and
went viral through internet. At most cases, this happens in high school or
universities where sexual assault sometimes went unchallenged due to
school policy. Instead of expressing sympathy for the victim or asking the
post to be taken down, most internet users would tend to make jokes, label
them as sluts/whores, degrading them, and blaming them as the attractor of
sexual assault.
This leads to another form of rape culture; victim-blaming. The level of
norms and moral values in our community sometimes blame the victim as
the one whos asking for it, by wearing such revealing and provocative
clothes, by walking unaccompanied in the street at night, by luring the
perpetrator to rape them, and so on. More than often, media narratives
implicitly suggested that the women or the victims were the ones at fault for
being in the wrong place, in a wrong time. The ongoing stigma of victimblaming was the main reason for low percentage of reported rape cases,
because rape is still considered as taboo and an embarrassment for the
victims due to peoples judgment of the things she should have or should not
have done.
How media cover rape cases highly affect and reflect the society as a
whole. Following the basic idea that the word rape itself is taboo and harsh,
media tend to use euphemism to make it less harsh and acceptable for the
society. Instead of rape, the terms sexual assault, force penetration, or nonconsensual sex are used in media narratives, even in the court. However,
they also forget that it is important for people to understand that rape is
harsh, that it also serves as the real action that the use of term sexual
assault could not replace and could not accurately describe the whole
horrendous action. The use of euphemism to replace the word rape in

media narratives could undermine and diminish the real meaning of rape
itself, because rape is rape and it is not just an assault.
Across the world, media tended to have the same characteristics on
how they narrated the news subject and the side they took upon. Further
studied regarding the media narratives in Indonesia should be conducted in
order to know how the media narrated rape cases, whether they took stand
on the victim or do victim-blaming themselves.
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