Tiger GPS: Government and Public Service Blog

“Y RAPED X” – THOUGHTS ON LANGUAGE LITERACY by Amber Mann

With the Harvey Weinstein / Hollywood sexual assault stories in the news lately, I’ve found myself thinking on the perils of the language we use to frame important topics. Publications on instances of rape, assault, and harassment tend to be phrased passively, like the headlines “1 in 4 Women Experience Sex Assault on Campus” from the New York Times (9/21/2015 by Pérez-Peña, or “Every Woman I Know Has Experienced Sexual Harassment or Sexual Assault #MeToo” from The Huffington Post (10/17/2017 by Adcock). We say, “X was raped,” as opposed to “Y raped X,” as if sexual crimes are a phenomenon experienced only by the victim – as if they did not have a perpetrator. We talk about sexual harassment in the work place like it is an unfortunate, and preventable, thing that just happens – not like it’s being actively committed by our coworkers. And we treat those arguments which dismiss harassment and assault – the violation and degradation of another human being – as misguided, but valid viewpoints, rather than as morally repugnant.

We seem to think that our words carry no weight in the world. Yet we’re living in a society where the federal government imposes mandatory minimum sentencing on drug trafficking crimes, but not for rape; where a full 16% of convicted rapists in the U.S. do not serve any time in jail, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Paquette, 2016; Schuppe, 2017). While our Secretary of Education doesn’t find Title IX sexual assault investigation guidelines too important to drag into a war of politics, our politicians are regularly caught victim-blaming and dismissing sexual violence concerns with misinformation (Andrews, 2016; Bailey, 2017; Morris, 2017). Only 44% of Americans agreed that, had Donald Trump been proven guilty of sexual assault, he should have been disqualified from holding the highest office in the nation (Moore, 2016). Obviously, we don’t take sexual crime very seriously.

I’m not making the ridiculous argument that words have gotten us to where we are. I do believe, however, that our thinking is to blame. A culture dismissive of sexual crime is one built out of the objectification and oppression of women, one whose ugly underside reveals an existing systemic problem with the success of women often being dependent on their appearance and fear of the men in power. And government social policy is only a reflection of the beliefs the society it represents. Studies show that words and moods infect others similar to how a virus works (Barsade & Gibson, 2007; Kramer, Guillory, & Hancock 2014). Perhaps if we made an effort to change the way we speak about sexual crimes, we might begin to change the way our society views them, and ultimately, the way our institutions and officials behave when faced with them.

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” -Bobby Kennedy.

 

References

Andrews, B. (2016, February 29). There are still politicians who think you can’t get pregnant from rape. Mother Jones. 

Bailey, C. (2017, June 10). Indiana state rep. apologizes for ‘how not to be a victim’ of rape post. NBC News. 

Barsade, S., and Gibson, D. (2007). Why does affect matter in organizations? Academy of Management Perspectives, 21, 36-59.

Kramer, A., Guillory, J., and Hancock, J. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 111, 8788-8790.

Moore, P. (2016, October 18). Most Republicans don’t think sexual assault would disqualify Trump from the presidency. YouGov. 

Morris, A. (2017, May 9). N. H. rep Robert Fisher lambasted by women at hearing about his role in misogynistic online forum. Concord Monitor. 

Paquette, D. (2016, June 6). What makes the Stanford sex offender’s six month jail sentence so unusual. Washington Post. 

Schuppe, J. (2017, May 13). Attorney General Sessions charts course back to long drug sentences. NBS News.



2 thoughts on ““Y RAPED X” – THOUGHTS ON LANGUAGE LITERACY by Amber Mann

  1. Thank you for this well written blog post. I really liked your point about words and how they can impact our culture and the way we think. Having studied language in undergrad, I have a great appreciation for how we can use words to create something beautiful or powerful. Unfortunately, the media seems to be unaware of how much power their words can hold. With success being measured by the number of hits, it seems the goal is to create a headline that will pique curiosity with no regard as to how these words affect us on a larger scale.

    1. Thank you, Ashley! You’re absolutely right – the media’s obsession with viewership is causing us so many problems. While I disagree wholeheartedly with the premise of President Trump’s attack on the media, one can understand that it’s not completely unfounded. In many ways, the media – *the* facilitator between the people and the government – is failing us.

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