ABSTRACT
Media representation of crime influences popular understandings of the ‘reality’ of criminal behaviour. In the context of sex crimes, and rape in particular, there is an additional dimension; namely, that newspaper reportage can significantly influence public attitudes regarding gender stereotypes and rape myths. The terminology and language used in reports of rape and other sexual offences has the potential to exert both direct and subliminal impacts upon its readership. More worryingly, recent findings of a study commissioned by the Lilith Project in 2008, which analysed rape articles from the national tabloid and quality press as well as the BBC website for the year 2006, identified that current media constructions of rape, perpetrators and victims do not accurately reflect published research and crime statistics. This indicates that there are images and attitudes that exist in both the public mind and in the law that underlie the authoritative or established position of the incidence of rape and which are out of step with the realities and actualities of the crime. This miasma undermines official communications and information about rape which in turns impacts negatively upon reporting and conviction rates. The contemporary stereotypical media construction ‘depicts rape as an outdoor
crime at the hands of a monstrous or bestial, deviant stranger, who may be “foreign”, and uses extreme violence to overpower a victim’.1 To be acknowledged as a ‘proper victim’ it is the complainant who must be ‘proven innocent’ by the press who will test her conformity with gendered expectations relating to conduct, resistance and emotional trauma. Such outdated stereotypifications have more in common with ingrained nineteenth-century expectations of feminine behaviour embedded in legal and media representations of rape (as typified in an episode of the recent BBC television series Garrow’s Law inspired by the life of late-eighteenthcentury defence barrister William Garrow) than the experience of rape in modern times. Yet, despite considerable pressure and criticism, the modern criminaljustice system still seems to have an inherent difficulty in expunging such mythology from its operation, something not made any easier by the external influences of the press. While the twentieth-century development of the scientific
study of victimology was a breakthrough in acknowledging the experience of victimisation and victimhood, rape victims still tend to be judged, by the media in particular, according to far more rigid stereotypes.2 The relationship between rape victim and offender differs from other crimes, not only because of its intimately personal and sexual nature but also because the dynamics of private power play and control make for a very different type of victim. Surprisingly, it is not just the tabloid press that is responsible for misleading
the public in relation to stereotyping and blame-assignment. In July 2009, the Telegraph was forced to issue an apology as a result of ‘an editing error’, after deliberately misrepresenting academic research released in a British Psychological Society press release under the headline ‘Scientists Say Women Who Drink Alcohol, Wear Short Skirts and Are More Outgoing Are More Likely to Be Raped’.3 The reportage completely undermined the results of the study which concluded the opposite: that ‘men who engage in highly diverse sexual activities are more likely than their counterparts to coerce a woman into sexual acts against her will’.4 If the results of an objective inquiry can be so readily misrepresented and manipulated by even the broadsheet press then it is no wonder that rape myths endure in the popular consciousness. Public recognition of such deceptive stereotypifications and acceptance of the ‘real
rape’ myth (that stranger rape is more deviant and prevalent than intimate rape), allow us to ‘distance’ ourselves from the fearful actuality: that in fact we are more at risk from partners and acquaintances.5 As Greer asserts, press representations of gender norms falsely reassure us that ‘ordinary’ people do not commit sex offences; we therefore need only fear the unrealistic stereotype of the ‘predatory stranger’.6 Contemporary media coverage in the English press, particularly concerning those found to have abused their position of trust, has effectively destroyed such fragile, albeit illusory, security. Public fears now emanate as much from the threat of female perpetrators such as teachers and nursery nurses entrusted with the care of children (notably the Vanessa George case), as from the male stranger waiting at the school gates.7
