By Nadine Moedt (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: March 20, 2013
The Steubenville rapists have been found guilty; Trent Mays and Ma’Lik Richmond have been sentenced to a maximum of four years in a juvenile facility. Elsewhere in North America, a twisted culture absolves these types of crimes with a scary ease. Is this a result of a male-dominated and sports-obsessed culture, as Jezebel’s Doug Barry suggests, wherein “athleticism is confused for heroism,” or is it something that runs deeper?
There are numerous articles blaming the actions of these two young men on the veneration of athletes; anti-sexism activism Jackson Katz says in the NY Daily News that he “believes the Steubenville football players had been conditioned to dehumanize women.” The athletes, he continued, “were never encouraged to see the victim as someone who might be humiliated or traumatized by their actions.” They instead viewed their peer as “one of the rewards that comes from being a football star.”
When considering the reaction of mainstream media to this story, the sympathy directed to the perpetrators may be a reult of this athelete veneration. Articles reporting the court proceedings are accompanied by sympathetic images of the rapists, crying pitifully, or have their despairing and apologetic statements highlighted. Commenters have fallen into the victim-blaming trap candidly.
CNN’s correspondent Poppy Harlow responds with incredible insensitivity to the victim:
“It was incredibly emotional – incredibly difficult even for an outsider like me to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watch as they believed their life fall apart.”
She later insinuates that “alcohol” is to blame for the boys’ actions. Nowhere to be seen is her sympathy for the helpless girl who was violated repeatedly and humiliated over a period of six hours.
Good Morning America’s coverage was decidedly sympathetic towards the boys, with an emphasis on the “demise” of the rapists’ dreams of playing football.
One of the coaches of the boy’s football team is a bit more aggressive in his victim-blaming.
“The rape was just an excuse, I think… What else are you going to tell your parents when you come home drunk like that and after a night like that?” said Hubbard. “She had to make up something. Now people are trying to blow up our football program because of it.”
Yet this crime was not committed simply because these boys are football players and therefort felt entitled to do as they please, as many people are suggesting. Sympathy for the rapists may be a result of a sports-obsessed culture, but the actual rape? This is a result of a rape culture, one that excuses the perpetrators through victim blaming and slut shaming. The rapists could have been utterly unathletic and the story would have been the same; the victim would be forced to defend herself in her community and prove that she is not a “slut,” she would be threatened on social media sites and humiliated before her peers by those in positions of power.
The question here should not be about why the mainstream media sympathizes with these boys—whose football careers have been “cruelly” cut short—and have been placed on a grotesque, sports-infatuated pedestal. In the end, this has nothing to do with football. The question should simply be why these boys were raised in a culture that taught them that it is okay to rape one of their classmates.
