When Rape Goes Viral
“I was raped at an off-campus event,” Kelsey (not her real name), who just finished her freshman year at University of California, Berkeley, tells me. She tentatively chooses the word and drags out the first letter: “rrrrraped.” She never reported the assault.
About a week later in her dorm, a group of students was clustered around a guy holding a phone. “A bunch of my floormates had gone to a party,” says Kelsey. “There was a video of him, very drunk and laughing, and fingering a girl who was very drunk and crying. And everyone on my floor was gathered around the phone watching this video and laughing about it.” She was horrified. “When I said something, I was told to shut up and f--k off and it wasn’t my business.”
This wasn’t the guy who had raped Kelsey, and she didn’t know the girl in the video. But “it was really similar to my situation,” she says. “I just kind of put myself in her position and imagined: what if everyone in my perpetrator’s dorm is doing the exact same thing?”
She says she went to a school administrator, who was sympathetic and asked Kelsey to get her hands on a copy of the video. But because Kelsey had already expressed her outrage, none of her classmates would forward it to her. She says she tried to follow up with the administrator a few more times, but nothing much happened. Of course, it’s certainly possible that action was taken behind the scenes, without Kelsey’s knowledge. But at least as far as she knows, the student “didn’t face any repercussions for his actions at all.”
Kelsey is one of the anonymous plaintiffs in a national complaint against the Department of Education and several universities for violating students’ civil rights by failing to thoroughly investigate reports of crime on campus, and for failing to follow the Clery Act, a federal law that requires colleges to keep accurate crime statistics. (Janet Gilmore, spokeswoman for UC-Berkeley, says the university has yet to see the complaint, but “we care very much about this issue and work hard to encourage students to report sexual assaults. We thoroughly investigate these cases and work with surviving students to ensure they are getting the counseling, support, and any additional care they may need.”) But even though Kelsey is deeply engaged in activism surrounding the issue of rape, she’s also been very private about her own experience as a victim. Right now, she’s home for the summer, and her parents still don’t know that she was assaulted. She feels incredibly lucky that she didn’t end up like the girl in the video her floormates watched: the victim not only of a sexual assault but of a gross affront to her privacy.
And yet, even as she seeks to maintain privacy about her assault, she says she wishes more people would have seen the video of the crying woman being attacked. Assuming the university failed to act, perhaps the release of the video would have changed that. “If the video had gotten published or something, maybe the university would have actually done something if it would have tarnished their reputation,” Kelsey says. “There’s a history of sexual assault and harassment being swept under the rug to make the campus look like a perfect and safe place, and it’s difficult but I feel like if something would have happened with this video ...” She trails off, and corrects herself: “It isn’t even about the video though. It’s that it happened and the university didn’t do anything.”
In a way, though, it is kind of about the video—and the stark dilemma it created. That video—grotesque as it was—probably represented the best hope for shaming people into taking strong action in this case. It was also, however, a vicious weapon that if widely circulated could have ruined a young woman’s life.
Both of those outcomes have repeatedly proved to be consequences of our hypersocial digital culture. As social media has become enmeshed in the lives of young people—and a fair number of not-so-young people—so has the widespread sharing of information about specific sexual assaults, especially video and photos. In recent years, a half-dozen high-profile sexual-assault cases have centered around photos or video of the crime that were shared on social media. In 2010, a 16-year-old girl was drugged at a rave in Vancouver and violently raped by a half-dozen men while a bystander snapped photos and later uploaded them to Facebook. Soon the whole school had seen photos of what was undoubtedly one of the worst experiences of her young life. This past April, a 17-year-old named Rehtaeh Parsons took her own life in Nova Scotia. A year and a half earlier, Parsons had been gang-raped at a party and harassed about it on Facebook.
Probably the most notorious incident occurred in Steubenville, Ohio in 2012. There, two high school football players and a handful of bystanders took photos and tweeted about the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl who had passed out at a party.
Then there was the case of 15-year-old Audrie Pott. In September of last year, Pott told her parents she was sleeping over at a friend’s house in her hometown of Saratoga, California, on the western edge of Silicon Valley. Instead, she went to a party where she drank so much vodka and Gatorade that she passed out in a bedroom and woke up to find her body written on with a Sharpie—someone had scrawled his name and “was here” on her leg, like graffiti on a bathroom stall. Her shorts were off. She had no memory of what happened. The next day, photos of her naked body made the rounds on Facebook.
Sheila and Larry Pott were unaware of their daughter’s sexual assault at the time of her suicide. ROBERT GALBRAITH/REUTERS“I have a reputation for a night I don’t even remember, and the whole school knows,” she messaged a friend on Facebook. It wasn’t just that she had been physically violated and still wasn’t sure what had happened to her. Now even her classmates who weren’t in the room had seen an intimate part of her body. And they were taunting her about it. In another message, she wrote, “My life is ruined. I can’t do anything to fix it.” She didn’t tell her parents what had happened, and she didn’t go to school authorities. She certainly didn’t press charges.
Instead, one week after she woke up in that bedroom after the party, she hanged herself in her bathroom. At the time of her funeral, her parents still had no idea that their daughter had been assaulted. But over the next few days, the story started to come out. Classmates came forward with anecdotes and names. Eventually, three 16-year-old boys were charged with sexual battery and distribution of child pornography.
Social media can offer victims a path to legal relief by, in effect, creating more witnesses.
What all these stories have in common is a wrenching Catch-22 at their core. For decades, the challenge facing anti-rape activists was to take what is often an intensely private crime—54 percent of sexual assaults are estimated to go unreported—and bring it to national attention as a pervasive crisis. Now that cases regularly crop up in which photos and videos of sexual assaults are circulated on social media, it’s becoming harder to argue that rape is anything but a public scourge. We are all bystanders. We all bear witness.
Yet the increased attention on social media often has tragic consequences for victims. They don’t just have to grapple with the physical and psychological ramifications of being sexually violated. They have to deal with the fact that everyone else knows what happened, too.
After being gang-raped, then bullied on Facebook, 17-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons took her own life. Rape was long considered to be a crime carried out by sex-crazed men who targeted strangers—women who were stupid or unlucky enough to walk alone down a dark alley or leave their doors unbolted. But starting in the late 1960s, feminists began working to change this common misperception of sexual assault. In her influential 1975 book Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller argued that “rape is a crime not of lust, but of violence and power,” a social tool that men used to assert dominance over women and communicate that dominance to the wider world. At the time, it was still legal in most states for men to rape their wives, and many states required all sexual-assault allegations to be corroborated by a third party. Both legal distinctions sent a clear message that what happens behind closed doors between two people—even if it’s a violent sex crime—is not something the rest of us should be particularly concerned about.
In the 1980s, victim-advocacy organizations began publicizing the fact that the majority of sexual assaults are committed by someone the victim knows. There are simply not that many nefarious strangers, not that many dark alleys. This is a crime that happens every day, in the spaces where we live and work and sleep and, yes, drink. Places where we feel safe. It is a crime that usually involves existing friendships, acquaintances, and relationships.
When we see photos and videos of a teen girl’s body or of a high school boy bragging about taking advantage of her, this reality is thrown into stark relief. And when we see ordinary kids engaged in extraordinarily terrible behavior, we don’t always look away. Often, we click “share.”
That was exactly what happened in Steubenville, Ohio. Thousands of us clicked on grainy images taken at a house party and saw a girl whose body had gone slack, held by her arms and legs by two high school football players. We read tweets from bystanders who joked, “Song of the night is definitely Rape Me by Nirvana.” We watched a video of those boys laughing about it and saying “she is so raped her p**s is about as dry as the sun right now.” Most people who saw all of this online could not even locate Steubenville on a map, but now they were witnesses to an awful crime that had occurred there.
Indeed, the Steubenville case is perhaps the best representation of how social media can offer victims a path to legal relief by, in effect, creating more witnesses. Arguably, the case never would have resulted in a conviction if the images had not been circulated through social media.
But social media does more than offer legal relief. The Steubenville tweets and photos infused the crusade to end rape with a new degree of urgency. Suddenly we weren’t talking in abstractions about what “he said” or “she said.” We were looking at an Instagram photo of a comatose teenager being dragged around. “That picture was a come-to-Jesus moment for a lot of people,” says Kate Harding, author of a forthcoming book on sexual assault called Asking for It. “We had a conversation in the wake of Steubenville that we’ve never really had before as a country. All of these things have been coming out, and it’s something that we’re hearing about on MSNBC and on CNN and in the big newspapers. A lot of what we’re talking about is driven by the fact that there is video and social media. Social media is used as a demonstration of how many people care and are watching and listening.”
The simple truth is that salacious photos help to get the media interested in what isn’t exactly a new issue. “That’s why media is covering these stories more,” says Jaclyn Friedman, executive director of the advocacy group Women, Action & the Media (WAM) and co-editor of Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape. “It’s sad to me that this is a question of, does this make good TV or not? But I do think that it improves the chances for justice when those photos or videos are sent around. I don’t think on balance it’s worth it, but I’m not the one who gets to decide.” She adds, “It’s traumatizing to the victims and all of us, but if perpetrators choose to do it, we take advantage of it and use it against them.”
It isn't just the mainstream media that pick up on these stories and move them forward: in several cases, video and photos that had been circulated only among teens were brought to wider attention by members of the hacker group Anonymous. After no one was charged in Rehtaeh Parsons’s gang rape in Nova Scotia, Anonymous hackers found and published the names of young men allegedly involved in the 2011 attack. A 12-minute video of Steubenville boys joking about the assault—which includes comments like “she’s deader than a doornail,” followed by laughter—was also made public by Anonymous. It got more than 717,000 views.
