Abstract
From Fritzl to #metoo examines rape coverage in the British mainstream press between 2008 and 2019, taking particular events as representative of different media approaches to sexual violence: the traditional media focus on ‘monster rapists’ (Joseph Fritzl); and the increasing presence of celebrities in media reporting on sexual violence (#metoo). The study traces trends, continuities, and changes in the language used by mainstream media with the aim of mapping dominant discourses and understandings of rape. Drawing on the conceptual framework of rape myths and attentive to processes of racialisation and othering, Tranchese specifically explores the persistence and reconfiguration of two myths – that rape is always perpetrated by a violent stranger (stranger danger) and that women easily lie about rape (the cry-rape girl). Her analysis points to some major trends in the period under analysis. On one hand, ‘real rape’ continued to be associated with bodily harm, including torture and death, and othered from ‘our society’. It is also viewed as a single exceptional event perpetrated by deviant individuals (the ‘monster rapist’) and tends to operate as a tool of exclusion used to define the ‘Other among us’ (e.g. racialised men such as those identified as part of a grooming gang in the child sexual abuse scandals, which took place in Rotherham, UK, during the 1990s). ‘Real rape’ is also typically viewed as something happening far away in wars and/or in societies that are ‘culturally different’ from ‘ours’ (e.g. the gang rape of Jyoti Singh in Delhi, India in 2012). On the other hand, sexual violence by celebrities and men who are perceived as being part of ‘our’ imagined community tends to be mediated through wording which implied ‘less serious’ forms of sexual violence: ‘sexual abuse’ when reporting about children and adolescents in the context of the Catholic Church and sports, ‘sexual assault’ when referring to celebrities, and ‘sexual harassment’ in the context of the workplace.
By examining the repercussions of #metoo in the media coverage of sexual violence, Tranchese convincingly shows that it contributed to increased media attention to sexual harassment and sexual violence, but that this ‘did not coincide with a better understanding of the issue; instead, it resulted in a backlash, which encouraged disbelief towards women’ (p. 239). The ‘celebritization’ of news of sexual violence, which the study traces to the years before #metoo, was accompanied by processes of narrative immunity for elite men accused of rape, which reshaped the dominant pattern of reporting about sexual violence. As an example of the discursive trend to produce ‘himpathy’ for the perpetrators, Trachese points the spread of the use of ‘alleged rape’, as a calcified and frequent phrase, instead of semantic possibilities like ‘reported rape’, which do not cast doubts on the victim status of the women who speak out (pp. 215ff.). The study concludes that even though overt victim blaming seems to have faded from mainstream media in more recent times, ‘age-old myths persist, but in different forms’ (p. 256), and the language adopted by mainstream media is precisely part of this problem: ‘the insinuation of blame has become subtler and centres around casting doubts on women’s words and their reliability as witnesses of their own assault’ (p. 255).
Tranchese obtained these insights by developing methods of critical discourse analysis (CDA) anchored in the systematic linguistic and discursive analysis through the use of software for big data analysis, with the aim of overcoming the suspicions of lack of objectivity and representativeness that are sometimes associated with CDA. The significant length of the book is due partially to the detailed explanation of specific methodological tools, which are most likely unknown to readers who do not have a Corpus Linguistics background. Hence, while the conclusions of the study may not be much of a surprise for scholars and activists working in the area of sexual violence, the study offers extremely valuable evidence for feminist concerns regarding media coverage of rape. For instance, the perception that the press does not ‘assign credibility and sympathy to all women in the same way, and at all times, but it’ does ‘so selectively, mistrusting women when accusing powerful men, but “trusting” them when they accuse “Others”’ (p. 185) is sustained in the study by solid linguistic and semantic data. As such, the book exemplifies the continued potentialities of applied linguistics and close textual and linguistic analysis for feminist research and activism.
Tranchese positions her study within a radical feminism tradition which understands sexual violence as a pervasive everyday gendered phenomenon framed by male dominance, which affects women disproportionally. Although her corpus of analysis refers to at least one significant case outside this dichotomy – sexual abuse within the Catholic Church – her conceptual framework and approach are centred on women, based on the premises that male rape is ‘not part of a system of oppression that keeps men in a position of subordination (to women) in society’ (p. 9) and that the fear of rape ‘does not have the effect of structuring and policing men’s lives in the way that it does women’s lives’ (p. 9). In that sense, the challenges posed by the (problematic and/or absent) coverage of sexual violence against LGBT + people and the contributions of queer studies and research on male rape to the field of sexual violence remain largely unaddressed in this study.
Wartime rape also tends to be sidelined from the analysis, as it serves mostly to sustain the study’s argument about the media framing of ‘real rape’ as something that happens in faraway geographies and cultures. By not systematically engaging with research on conflict-related sexual violence, namely, critical literature about rape as a weapon of war, the study leaves media’s coverage on this particular issue largely unchallenged. However, the study’s methodologies had the potential to offer important insights about the entanglements between mainstream media’s (selective) coverage of conflict-related sexual violence and the UK’s geostrategic interests as a key player in international politics and an ally of the United States. Had it been raised, the issue of which wartime rapes and forms of conflict related sexual violence tend to be covered by the British media, and which tend to be ignored, would certainly have generated very interesting insights.
Even though such aspects could have enriched the study, From Fritzl to #metoo is definitely an important contribution to feminist research and engagement with sexual violence. It offers a nuanced and constructive approach to #metoo beyond the dichotomy of its achievements versus failures. Drawing on research that contests the assumption that #metoo is a movement (e.g. Boyle, 2019), Tranchese critically explores mainstream media framing of the hashtag and the sociopolitical context in which it emerged and was disseminated – a context deeply affected by neo-liberal feminism’s unwillingness to challenge structural inequality. The study argues that by focusing the coverage of #metoo on a few high-profile cases, mainstream media – but not necessarily the hashtag – reproduced social hierarchies framed by race, class, sexual orientation, and nationality. Furthermore, by conflating it with feminism and looking for the flaws of individual women who adhered to the hashtag, instead of challenging historical structures, media constructed #metoo as ‘an abstract feminist entity’, which could be held accountable for its (un)ability to change society (p. 403). In that way, ‘what was constructed as the failure of #metoo could easily become the failure of feminism’ (p. 353). However, so Tranchese argues, #metoo did fulfil its promise: it showed the magnitude of the problem and encouraged women to speak out and share their stories, thus contributing to a framework to make sense of sexual violence as a structural problem. It was up to society to use that knowledge to invest in social change. In sum, Tranchese critically explores the broad sociopolitical context in which #metoo emerged and was disseminated. She highlights the potentialities of #metoo and its interconnections with broader feminist initiatives and agendas, while refusing to engage in feminist in-fighting, which she perceives as divisive ‘wars of the poor’ (p. 411). Tranchese’s hope is that her book (and approach) will ‘stir other feminist academic work to shift back towards the crucial issue of demanding structural, rather than individual change’ (p. 412).