Sexual violence is something that a lot of people don’t like discussing. It’s not a pleasant topic, so it’s not going to make it into a lot of dinner party conversations. What’s also true, though, is that the way the media reports it seems to matter.
Not long ago, Matthew Baum, a Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government researcher, culled newspaper and data set information to figure out whether there were societal attitudes that normalized sexual violence. That was important, he felt, because if media reporting normalized sexual violence through the language reporters and outlets used, that did the survivors a disservice.
Baum concluded, through his study, that where “there is more rape culture in the press, there is more rape.” Let’s break down what that means.
Sexual Assault and How Reporters Talk About It
Some states have harsh penalties for those who commit sexually violent acts, while others are more lenient. In some states, you’ll find sentencing ranges that are harsher than 2nd-degree murder for violent sexual assaults.
Harsh penalties might deter these crimes to some degree, but where does media reporting fit it? The reason Baum began his study was that he felt that some of the sexual assault or rape stories that the media covered were apologist on the perpetrator’s part.
The reporters used language, Baum contended, that made it sound as though the perp had a promising future, and now their life was going to fall apart because of this one minor indiscretion.
What Else Did Baum’s Study Reveal?
When Baum concluded in his study that when “there is more rape culture in the press, there is more rape,” he did not mean that media sexual assault coverage caused more sexual assaults. What he meant is that what reporters say reflects that region’s norms.
Baum felt there was evidence that when reporters used apologist language when talking about sexual assault perpetrators, that could lead to both more rapes and also influence how the criminal justice system handled those events during investigations.
This matters because many people have worried in the past that when the media uses apologist language for sexual assailants and condemning language for victims, that can lead to fewer individuals coming forward and reporting what happened to them.
What Language is Harmful?
If a reporter went on TV and spoke about a sexual assault, Baum felt it was harmful if they used language talking about or indicating that there had been a prior sexual relationship between the victim and the perp. This often happened, though, since so-called “acquaintance rapes” are much more common than stranger rapes.
He also worried that some reporters would go out of their way to describe what the victim was wearing when someone attacked them, or they would find a way to not-so-subtly talk about the victim’s sexual history or proclivities.
Of course, none of this should have had any bearing on how the police prosecuted the case, but Baum felt that there was a relationship between those two things. Whenever the media engaged in victim-blaming or shaming, it made it less likely for victims to come forward and also normalized the perps getting lighter sentences or getting off entirely.
The Data Backing Up These Assertions
Baum and his partners, when they completed this study, made a point of studying sexual assault newspaper coverage between 2000 and 2013. They also used FBI Uniform Crime Reports having to do with both rapes and arrests.
What they found is that if there was more “rape culture,” as they referred to it, meaning the toxic language that forgave the perpetrator and condemned the survivor, there were more rapes in that geographic region. For instance, they found a correlation between the two events in parts of Iowa, California, Minnesota, and North Carolina.
Baum feels that newsrooms can learn from this study. Apparently, how the media reports sexual assaults matters.
Where they normalize victim-blaming and perpetrator forgiveness, these assaults can proliferate. If the media is more careful in its collective language choices, more sexual assault survivors might be willing to come forward, and the police can hit those responsible with harsher penalties.
It’s fascinating to think that how the media reports human behavior can influence that behavior itself.
There’s a lot about the Baum study to unpack, but one thing seems likely. If the local media reports sex crimes in a way that embraces victim-blaming and perpetrator exoneration, more sexual assaults can occur in that area, and they probably will.
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