“Right Now It’s Not The Time To Feel Completely Safe"
The Red and Black’s Textual Construction of Rape in Athens
By Addison Godel
I. Introduction
In the fall of 2000, the Athens, Georgia community was rocked by a series of terrifying and highly-publicized rape cases that centered around downtown Athens and the adjacent North Campus portion of the University of Georgia. Let it be understood that as a suburban white male of the middle class, and a freshman arrival to the University, I was shocked and scared by the notion of rapes happening in the very same spaces in which I shopped and socialized. I remember inviting a friend to join me at a coffee shop and being told “Is that downtown? I don’t feel safe going there.” These were dramatic times, and it was only as I began this project, expecting to focus on the way that the spaces the rapes were committed in facilitated criminal violence, that I realized how much my understanding of rape in Athens was mediated by rape’s portrayal in the campus newspaper, the Red and Black. In attempting to piece together how these textual representations of rape affected me, and how I still experience that influence today, I found myself with a new goal. Specifically, I wanted to put into words the way in which the Red and Black influenced the way I feel about existing in certain spaces – my own sense of safety and belonging in North Campus and downtown Athens are, I believe, shaped in no small part by the way in which rape has been constructed by this news source.
With this background in mind, I have chosen a somewhat unconventional structure for this paper. I attempt to sketch a subjectively quantified picture of the Red and Black’s coverage, categorizing articles based on how I interpret the spatial indicators in their text. I follow this with a less formal discussion of what I consider the implications of this study to be, integrating my personal experience directly into the discussion. This section may irritate some readers; I was challenged by it and considered separating the personal testimony entirely. However, I felt the acknowledgement and incorporation of overtly subjective experience was consistent with a feminist research method (drawing specifically from Donna Haraway). By implication, the entire paper is subjective, coming as it does from a specifically situated individual: me. Consider it a cross between research and personal narrative – it is either, or both at once.
A disclaimer: Some readers may be irked or confused by my choice in this paper to employ personal pronouns, specifically “I” “me” and “mine” to refer to myself, plus the attendant set of second-person pronouns occasionally used to reference “the reader” – that is, you – directly. In the latter case pure habit and stylistic convention causes me to be somewhat inconsistent; however, I was vigilant about the first-person references as I feel it is necessary that the reader be under no illusions that this paper was constructed by a disembodied (thus displaced) and objective voice. I feel that this, too, reflects a feminist approach by demystifying the author of an academic treatise and disavowing any pretense of neutral objectivity. Indeed, I took the project in a direction that makes my individual and distinct experiences integral to the manifest content of the text itself – it would be difficult to escape the “I” in writing about the emotions I feel in the spaces being discussed. In any case, consider yourself forewarned.
II. The Red and Black Articles
The Red and Black, the University of Georgia’s ubiquitous campus paper, is published independently on weekdays and is available free to anyone in central Athens through one of the countless distribution bins found around campus. It also has a mirror website, www.redandblack.com , which features all of the print paper’s content and a searchable archive. Given its ubiquity and the no-cost archive it was an ideal text for me to consider the question of rape’s construction in media. There is another reason why I chose to look at the Red and Black – on a personal level, it is through Red and Black coverage that I have indirectly come to understand the phenomenon of rape as it pertains to Athens. This coverage, it is safe to say, has had a profound effect on me, as I will discuss later in the paper.
The sample used consisted of the one hundred most recent Red & Black news stories, as of March 19, 2003 which contained the word "rape." One hundred is the largest number of results that the search engine at the Red and Black webpage will accommodate, hence its use as a convenient stopping point. One incidental (and quite unexpected) result of this was that the sample roughly captures the time period in which I’ve lived in Athens as a student. This sample was later cut down to 45 relevant articles, as discussed later.
I read over each of the articles to see how the texts framed the search terms; that is, how was "rape" depicted in these articles? There are a number of themes that leap out at me in the text of these articles, and I would urge other researchers to consider examining the portrayal of rape in campus newspapers like the Red and Black - there is much to discuss, from the racialization of rape to the way in which victims are portrayed[1] to the kinds of 'safety tips' offered to help prevent rape. I will attempt to touch on these and other themes, but my primary interest in this paper is construction of rape as a spatialized crime. That is, how do the texts participate in giving the reader a sense of where rapes take place, and what information does that place-information carry with it? With this in mind, I divided the articles up into five categories[2] based on the types of spaces that they seemed to set rape in: Public World Rapes, Private World Rapes, Either/Or, Wartime Rapes, and Non-Spatialized.[3] Follow-up stories on specific rape cases which would be recognized by the reader as falling into one of the other categories were placed in those even if the stories themselves did not suggest the scenario of the rape directly. I was uncertain of exactly how to categorize such stories as the April 19, 2001 "News Notebook," which discussed non-rapes, in this case the court proceedings surrounding an allegedly false report of rape. I ultimately decided to list them under the spatial category that they were alleged to have.
I labeled articles as "Public World Rapes" if they exclusively discussed rape as something taking place downtown, on North Campus, or in some other place that would not be considered a residence or private domicile. For example, an article asserts that “Nearly every woman has experienced it -- that sick feeling that forms in the pit of her stomach while walking to her car late at night -- a sign that something's about to go wrong.”[4] I think it is safe to say that this type of phrasing gives the reader some sort of information about place that suggests public space (a parking lot, a street, something of that sort).
I labeled articles as "Private World Rapes" if they discussed acquaintance rape primarily or depicted a recent rape or a "typical rape" as being inside a place of residence (apartment, dorm, house, etc.). I believe it is valid to treat texts which discuss acquaintance rape as having a spatial dimension even if the content of the text does not specifically create a geographical setting. This is made particularly clear by the fact that news coverage of acquaintance rape in the Red and Black often includes statements like "According to the Centers for Disease Control, approximately 80 percent of sexual assaults are committed by friends, acquaintances, intimates or family members of the victim." (November 02, 2000, "Rally To Be Held Tonight")[5] It is my intuition that, absent any other information, most people would mentally place friends, acquaintances, and especially intimates and family members in a private-space, particularly home-space, setting, rather than an on-the-street assault scenario.[6]
"Either/Or" indicates articles that in some way suggested both scenarios. These tended to be articles that focused on awareness of rape as a problem in general, or news coverage of events designed to raise such awareness (rather than news coverage of specific rapes). An example would be "Rally To Be Held Tonight," (November 02, 2000) which frames a rape awareness event in terms of a recent rash of public-space rapes but includes quotes from sources that emphasize the high incidence of acquaintance rapes.
The niche category of “Wartime Rapes” contained only one story[7], which dealt with the use of rape as a tactic of war. While war penetrates both public and private space, and indeed can obscure the line between them, I think it is safe to say that for most Athens readers, “war” conjures up a sense of another place (if not another time!) than the day-to-day world that the reader experiences. I thus put this story in its own separate category.
"Non-Spatialized" indicates articles where rape was mentioned but never placed in any clear geographic setting. Most of these were stories about generalized crime, or the investigation of specific crimes with rape mentioned as an example of police technique; typical is "Task Force Formed To Probe Slaying," (Feb 09, 2001) which concerned an unsolved murder case dating back three years. The mention of rape here amounted to an officer explaining that "We sent the same detectives that worked on the rape last semester that ended in the arrest of Sylvester Collins." I also placed in this category a few stories, such as January 12, 2002's "Adams to address State of the University Today," which made mention of rape only as a very minor point. In this case, a long article about a speech by the university's president mentioned, essentially as a footnote, that his speech would not include any discussion of a recent rape case.
At first glance, the Red and Black seems to weight its coverage strongly towards the "Private World" category: forty (40%) stories fell into this category, thirty-one (31%) into the "Public World" category, seven (7%) in the "Either/Or," 1 (1%) in the special "War" category, and twenty-one (21%) in the "Non-Spatialized" category. It would seem that the Red and Black constructs rape as a crime carried out in private spaces, with all that that might imply.
However, this is somewhat misleading for a number of reasons. First, the content of the articles does not neatly fit my labels; in fact, four of the seven cases marked "Both" were, in my opinion, predominantly written from the "Public World" take on rape. More significantly, many of the stories were in a sense redundant, dealing with the minute unfoldings of specific, high-profile rape cases. I struggled with whether or not to count these continuing update stories - after all, in some sense, they would carry significance in the reader's mind, reinforcing her or his conception of where rape takes place. Ultimately I felt that, to really get at the heart of the question, it would be best to zero in on the first coverage of a given rape report, which is likely to have the strongest mental and emotional impact on the reader.
Finally, since my focus was on the construction of spaces in Athens as spaces where rape could take place, I took out all the stories dealing with rapes in other parts of the country. These were almost all short segments of the "News Notebook" section which typically appears on the second page of the Red and Black, but this also includes the lone story on rape as a weapon of war, which is clearly not intended to relate to the world of Athens.
With these constraints on the sample (and the total sample size cut to 45 article) the breakdown comes out as follows. The “Non-Spatialized” category now led with twenty-one stories (46.7%), followed by the “Public World” category with eleven stories (24.4%), the “Private World” category with seven stories (15.5%) and finally the “Either/Or” category with six stories (13.3%). Bear in mind that four of the seven “Either/Or” stories were, in my view, primarily focused on the “public” scenario (two quite strongly emphasized the possibility of rape in a private space and one was deleted for being foreign to Athens). While it is still meaningful to record the fact that these few articles did seem on close reading to depict rape as something that could happen anywhere, I find it appropriate to point out that these “Either/Or” stories were not utterly neutral and were, overall, tilted towards the “Public” portrayal.
So while a plurality of stories did not clearly place rape in any location at all, when it was spatialized, it was significantly more likely to be constructed as a something taking place in public spaces: clubs were mentioned, as was the nebulous space of “North Campus” and, overwhelmingly, the generalized area of “downtown.” “Downtown,” “on her way home from downtown” and “in the area of downtown” became depressingly familiar phrases over the course of the project. One article even went so far as to remind the reader that the site of a reported rape “is just more than one mile from the intersection of Broad Street and North Avenue downtown.”[8]
Is this meaningful, or even surprising? After all, most of the rapes reported to police did take place in public spaces, most of them downtown. I wish to emphasize the reading of news as a text – like all texts, it will be interpreted and digested by its readers in different ways depending on the notions they bring to it already in their head, and it will in turn provide them with images and ideas to add to their larger array of existing information. In this model, news is not simply the neutral reporting of what happens in the world, but a participant in a discourse which is involved in the construction of everyone’s – readers, writers – ideas about the subjects discussed. The reader may find it helpful to imagine a visitant from outer space, whose knowledge about rape would come entirely from reading the Red and Black. What impressions would she have, what images? How would she define "rape"? Where would she picture it taking place? Clearly, while the Red and Black is under some legitimate pressures to inform its readers of violent crimes reported to the police, this does not mean we cannot critique the text or question its implications to the reader. I offer the following speculations for your consideration; the most I can hope is that they ring true to you.
A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?
Does rape mostly happen in public space? Is this an accurate image to pass on to the reader? The Red and Black’s own reporting suggests not. Sources quoted declare that "It's a myth that most sexual assaults happen at night or outside”[9] and that the growing number – “approximately 80 percent” – of acquaintance rapes could explain why “A lot of rapes are actually happening in the apartments of the victims or the perpetrators."[10] Again, acquaintance rape reads as taking place in private spaces, while stranger rape reads as taking place in public spaces.
And since the Red and Black does incidentally inform the reader that acquaintance is more than four times as likely than stranger rape,[11] and that “approximately 80 percent of sexual assaults are committed by friends, acquaintances, intimates or family members of the victim,”[12] then a very paradoxical message is coming across. The sheer volume of the coverage constructs rape as a public-space crime, while the text of a select few articles makes it clear that most rapes are unlikely to be committed in public spaces. No outside research is necessary to prove this point – the Red and Black’s own text reveals its emphasis to be at best misleading.[13] Perhaps most striking, and ironic, is an article which quotes a source as saying that “despite the fact that recent media coverage of Athens-area rapes has drawn considerable attention to stranger rapes, little has been said about acquaintance rape.”[14] Of course, as I feel I’ve shown, the Red and Black itself is engaged in the drawing of attention to stranger rapes rather than acquaintance rape.
So why does this skewed coverage continue? It would be an easy way out to say that the Red and Black simply reports the news, and that sadly, acquaintance rapes are severely under-reported to police, meaning that the Red and Black doesn’t know about them and can’t cover them. This reasoning strikes me as evasive for two reasons. First, it is clear from the statements cited above that the Red and Black does know about acquaintance rape, at least in a general sense, and so it is feasible that with some creativity it could be presented as news even without specific reported crimes to write on. Second, and to me more importantly, it is safe to say that a major part of the reason for the under-reporting of acquaintance rapes is that the victims have not been culturally primed to think of the experience as something to be reported to the police, if they consider what took place to be a rape at all. Janice Du Mont, et al, cite Tomlinson, who observes that most of the motivations women have for not reporting rapes can be traced back to culturally embedded rape myths.[15] Exact responsibility for “cultural embedding” is a difficult thing to pin down, but clearly a news document with the penetration and reach of the Red and Black is going to be engaged in this process to some degree – and, thus, broadcasting a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is: the Red and Black, basing its coverage on the material that makes it to the police blotter, suggests to the reader that the reportable crime of rape is committed by strangers in public places; thus, the reader does not report a rape which does not fit this model; thus, that rape fails to reach the police blotter; thus, it is not reported in the Red and Black.
Athens and the Myth of the Black Rapist
Obviously, this model is highly simplistic, but I think it draws us closer to an understanding of the way in which the Red and Black perpetuates its own limited coverage, and its readers’ beliefs in rape myths – a term referring to a constellation of interlocking and mutually supportive ideas about what rape is, who it happens to, who does it, and where it happens. The rape myth I find most fascinating and painfully close to home is the myth of the black male rapist. In Women, Race and Class, Angela Davis argued that the dominant culture has found it useful to link rape with black men, for example by lynching black men for the supposed rape of white women and then claiming that black men possess innate “irrepressible rape instincts.” Davis clearly showed that this tactic has worked to reinforce both racism and sexism. And she linked the convenient myth to the incompleteness of rape statistics:
“The myth of the Black rapist […] must bear a good portion of the responsibility for the failure of most anti-rape theorists to seek the identity of the enormous numbers of anonymous rapists who remain unreported, untried and unconvicted. As long as their analyses focus on accused rapists who are reported and arrested, thus on only a fraction of the rapes actually committed, Black men – and other men of color – will inevitably be viewed as the villains responsible for the current epidemic of sexual violence.”[16]
Davis was specifically interested in the clumsy rape theories of early feminist scholars, but if one removes her references to analysis and focuses on the matter of reporting, she could have easily been talking about the text of the Red and Black. I found coverage of only one rape case which specifically gave a non-black race for a rapist.[17] Elsewhere, they are all black – except when, oddly, no race is given: “The suspect is described as a male of six feet with a medium build. He is reported to have entered the victim's home through an unlocked door with a handgun and wearing a dark-hooded sweatshirt and jeans.”[18] This invisibilising of race when a minority is not specifically involved is a common outgrowth of domination, and any claim that the Red and Black is off the hook because they can only print what gets handed to them by the police may be dismissed as easily as similar claims were in the preceding section.
So, the Red and Black sends the message that rapists are black men. Aside from reinforcing endemic racism in general, this racialization of rape, fused with the spatialization I've discussed at length, helps explain why I, a male, would feel anxiety about rape being located in the spaces I inhabit. After all, one definite unanimous theme throughout all the articles was that rape victims are female. Aside from the anxiety of being near the site of crimes even if they don't directly affect me, and also the basic humanity of being concerned about the suffering of others, there is another way in which these constructions of rape drive danger and fear directly into my own experience: if I internalize the belief that rapists are black men, and furthermore the belief that rapes take place in public spaces, specifically North Campus and downtown Athens, then when I encounter a black men in these places (particularly at night, when I'm told rapes take place), I feel, on some level, that I am in the presence of a criminal. This belief is somewhere deep within me; I do not want to think of myself as a racist, but after a lifetime of living in a sheltered, largely-white community, with a few scattered explicit statements engaged in racializing space[19] thrown into my upbringing, I have little information to go on. I have to actively fight to not be the prisoner of the story the Red and Black is implicitly telling me. Obviously, the Red and Black exists in a larger context of similar materials. But again, my reliance on it as a student means that its picture of the Athens world holds a lot of sway.
It'd be easy to be frightened walking through North Campus at night anyway. The carefully laid-out quads, framed elegantly by academic buildings, is in my experience pleasant in the daytime, but at night, the fact that all the buildings (save the library) are nearly deserted at night[20] is worrisomely obvious. There are, additionally, certain areas where visibility is blocked by landscaping or architecture, especially the outdoor corridors that lead around either side of Old College, the Founder's Garden area, and the passage under the law school. In this environment, fears can take root quickly. Stranger rape, though gendered, is a violent crime whose image, for me, conjures up images of other violent crimes, especially mugging - not coincidentally also linked in the cultural imagination to black men. As if just being in a space that I've been led to believe is the site of unspeakable crimes that are focused on members of a gender other than my own wasn't bad enough, I can also fear my own imminent victimization. And I've been sold the belief that the physical avatar of this danger is the black man.
Nearly every day I have to live with, and fight down, the almost-unconscious tension that needles its way through my body when I alone pass a black man on the street, or on campus, at night. Obviously I have many people, texts, and institutions at whom I could point my finger in blame for this unwanted and unacceptable embedded instinct. The Red and Black assuredly bears a non-insubstantial share of this guilt.
Rape in the Context of Gendered Public Space
Consider one comment by an organizer for “women’s safety” published in the Red and Black: “I'm a grown woman, and I don't appreciate not being able to walk downtown where I please because of a rapist […] I'm allowing my college experience to be stolen away from me because as soon as it's dark outside, I'm trapped inside.”[21] What I think this really suggests is that the entire labyrinth of rape-myth construction that I’ve been dealing with ultimately suggests a deeper, broader, gendered rule on space: public space belongs to men and women should not expect it to welcome them. The focus on rape as something that women experience when out alone in the public sphere acts, in my opinion, to reinscribe this notion. The hostility of public space to women has been explored in such different efforts as Maggie Hadleigh-West’s film The War Zone (in which the auteur carried a camcorder through city streets and confronted men who sexually harassed her in passing) and Grizelda Pollock’s “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” which focused on the different subjects and presentations available to male and female painters of urban settings in the late 19th century, and a thousand other efforts. The theme throughout is that, despite liberal pretenses of public space being egalitarian, welcoming all strangers to mingle, it is in fact riddled through with power imbalances, specifically the power men hold over women. For Hadleigh-West as well as Pollock this power appears as a right of men in public to gaze upon and even comment on the bodies of women in public. I do not think it goes too far to speculate that this perceived right to view exists on the same continuum with other, even scarier perceived rights – the right to touch women’s bodies, or invade them physically. How many times have you heard of the defense of a male rapist which claims the victim was “asking for it” by being in a certain (public) setting – the wrong part of town, a particular bar, and so on? Even the choice of “safety tips” that appear in Red and Black articles on rape seem to place some sort of implicit blame on women for being in public space at all. Students are told “to be careful, especially when walking at night”[22] and that “girls walking away from downtown [should] stay with [their] friends, stay in a group […] Right now it’s not the time to feel completely safe.”[23] This seems like reasonable advice at first, but I feel it suggests, essentially that girls who do walk alone at night and get raped should have known better than to arrogantly “feel completely safe.” The fight for an ideal world in which anybody can feel safe in public space as an independent individual is in some sense given up at this point. Rape, we sense, can be easily avoided if women just stay home or don’t go out independently into public space. I don’t mean to downplay the danger that does exist in many cases for women walking by themselves at night – this danger is real and is, like the choice of tips, the consequence of the gendered power dynamics of public space. But at the same time, we need language and content that very clearly takes the side of the victim and refuses to even run the risk of implying that victims going out on their own made a foolish error to start with. It is plausible to say that continuing coverage of rape in a way that treats public space as inherently and essentially hostile to women may act to support the rationalizations and legitimizations of rapist behavior.
To summarize: I believe the Red and Black’s mode of covering rape for the most part suggests that rape is a crime committed by strangers in public places. This is problematic not only because it is inaccurate (and thus failing the standards of good journalism), but because of the power wielded by the Red and Black as a major news source for the local community. The inaccurate spatialization of rape in the text perpetuates rape myths that have a great psychological impact on the reader, giving her or him a sense of what “counts” as a rape. If the reader later commits a rape, or is raped, they will be less likely to see it as such and act accordingly if the rape does not fit the narrow model suggested by the Red and Black’s text. Additionally, the reader is encouraged to do certain things to become safe from rape, which I believe are apt to be ineffective for the majority of rapes since the conception of rape that they draw from is inaccurate with regard to place. Beyond all this, I believe that the reader, by being drawn into the interlocking web of rape myths, is apt to experience a greater sense of fear and anxiety when they are in the places constructed as prone to containing rape.
Is there a way out? I believe so. The Red and Black’s writers and editors can direct conscious, creative energy towards finding a way to represent rape accurately and completely. If police reports (in the present) do not tell the story of private-space acquaintance rapes, the Red and Black must be all the more vigorous in trying to make the public aware that these rapes take place and that they count as rapes. One radical approach might be to write generic news stories on unreported acquaintance rapes, acknowledging them as fictions but pointing out that they are likely to be real at least in some way. Failing this, more regular coverage of ongoing efforts to raise awareness of and fight acquaintance rape would be helpful, as well as an effort to provide “safety tips” which are not exclusively geared towards protecting oneself in public. All this would acknowledge, rather than obscure, the statistical biases that leave this largely private crime out of the news and thus deflect so much attention onto the more easily-written-about public rapes. Of course, the latter should continue to be covered, but their misleading share of the news must be proportionately reduced. Finally, driving the myth of the black male rapist from the pages of the Red and Black may prove difficult, but if this myth is indeed linked to the disproportionate emphasis on public stranger-rape, then lessening that emphasis may weaken the power of the stereotype. Beyond this, again, simply acknowledging in news stories on rape statistics that these statistics are incomplete and unintentionally biased may do a lot.
I am faced with more than simply one newspaper’s ingrained habits and ways of approaching the news. Broader, older traditions of news reporting and cultural impressions of what rape is are folded into this mix; however, one must start somewhere. I believe that if even this one paper begins to place rape in space in a different way, there can be meaningful and substantial benefits to the quality of life for its readers over the long term. Perhaps the ideas expressed in this paper will somehow over time trickle into the consciousness of the Red and Black’s writers and editors. This is my hope. Thank you for your time.
Addison Godel
April 23rd, 2003
Works Cited
Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class. New York and Toronto: Vintage Books, 1981.
Du Mont, Janice; Miller, Karen-Lee; Myhr, Terri L. “The Role of ‘Real Rape’ and ‘Real Victim’ Stereotypes in the Police Reporting Practices of Sexually Assaulted Women.” Violence Against Women, Vol. 9: Apr. 2003. pp. 466-489.
Hadleigh-West, Maggie. The War Zone. 1997. Available through the Media Education Foundation (www.mediaed.org).
Pollock, Grizelda. “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity.” Vision and Difference: femininity, feminism and the histories of art. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 50-90.
The Red and Black. See www.redandblack.com.
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