Christopher M. Anderson uses Rolling Stone’s recent retraction about their University of Virginia story about on-campus rape to underscore the crucial need for responsible journalism in cases involving victims.
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All of the recent stories of sexual abuse—from accusations against Bill Cosby, to Shia LaBeouf’s rape disclosure, to Rolling Stone’s piece about the brutal rape of a University of Virginia student—are bringing into focus a profound gap between what is known to science and what is believed by the general public. Our understanding of the neurobiology of trauma clearly shows that survivors cannot be expected to have perfect recall of traumatic events such as rape. A survivor’s story can contain discrepancies or gaps.
These problems can often lead people to dismiss and attack the person who has come forward as a liar. This pattern plays out often in investigations and/or prosecutions of sexual crime. I believe these cynical and destructive attacks survivors face are a primary reason why sexual violence is one of the least reported crimes in the US.
This issue goes straight to the heart of all the questions being raised about Rolling Stone‘s UVA article.
In short, Rolling Stone has chosen to shame the victim in an attempt to clear the magazine’s own name.
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Subsequent investigations by other journalists have found discrepancies in “Jackie’s” story [the person at the center of the story who has said that she was brutally gang raped at a fraternity party]. These discrepancies have raised serious doubts as to whether or not “Jackie” was raped at all. Unfortunately, in response to questions and concerns about the piece, Rolling Stone chose to issue a statement laying the blame for all of this squarely at the feet of the victim herself. Will Dana, Managing Editor for Rolling Stone wrote, “our trust in her was misplaced.” In so doing, he has turned what had been an important discussion on campus sexual violence into a debate on false allegations and the credibility of one single person.
In short, Rolling Stone has chosen to shame the victim in an attempt to clear the magazine’s own name.
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Many in the victims’ rights community, and many journalists as well, have voiced their strong denunciation of Rolling Stone’s actions:
“Such an apology really does have a huge ripple effect, and unfortunately fuels people who disbelieve victims,” says Laura Dunn, a campus rape survivor and founder of the legal advocacy group SurvJustice. “I still believe something horrible happened to [Jackie].”
Others, like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes have been far more pointed in their critique:
Also, fuck you RS for trying to throw your source under the bus: this is on you, not her http://t.co/xb8g3aAveM
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 5, 2014
But in the maelstrom of outrage on both sides of this controversy it is critically important to point out 2 things.
- First, the majority of people who come forward with disclosures of being raped or sexually abused are not lying. According to one recent study researchers determined between 2% and 10% of rape allegations to be false. While this means that a majority of rape allegations are not false, it also means that a portion of them are. Therefore it is critical for any media outlet to be truly cautious before taking a survivor’s story public.
- It is also vitally important that we not lose sight of the lived experiences of survivors and how that can impact what and how they disclose. While the experiences of those who are falsely accused are terrible, so too are the traumas that survivors face. Defending persons from false allegations does not justify flagrant attacks upon survivors whose stories do not align neatly with our expectations. There is no “model” victim, we have to take every survivor as they are. Lindy West, who last week wrote a powerful criticism of Piers Morgan’s uninformed attacks on Shia LaBeouf’s rape disclosure, also made this crucially important observation in response to Rolling Stone’s retraction: https://twitter.com/thelindywest/status/540987874607648770
Why do we demand that people remember, in flawless detail, traumatic events that our brains are physiologically designed to forget?
— Lindy West (@thelindywest) December 5, 2014
Survivors of rape and sexual abuse can often experience a kind of terror that can impact cognitive functioning. As Rebecca Ruiz wrote in Slate recently, “The brain’s prefrontal cortex—which is key to decision-making and memory—often becomes temporarily impaired. The amygdala, known to encode emotional experiences, begins to dominate, triggering the release of stress hormones and helping to record particular fragments of sensory information.”
There are many reasons why a survivor’s recollection of rape may be flawed:
First, the memory of a traumatic event can often be fragmented for a survivor. This can make it difficult to offer up a coherent and linear recollection of every specific detail of an attack.
In addition, many persons who experience a violent attack can often literally freeze in the face of trauma (as opposed to the more commonly presumed reactions of fighting to fleeing). This “freezing” can be a form of extreme dissociation in which a person disconnects from the moment. This impedes their ability to recollect clearly some of the details. In addition, this freezing can often be misinterpreted as giving consent to a perpetrator by investigators who conclude that if a victim didn’t put up a fight, then they must have wanted it.
Lastly, every detail in a victim’s account need not be factual in order for an allegation to be found true. If a perpetrator tells a victim a detail about themselves (say that they are a member of a certain fraternity), it is always possible that the perpetrator was lying in order make the victim seem less credible.
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Good journalism requires skepticism, critical analysis, and a willingness to confirm details. We owe it to persons or institutions who might be accused of wrongdoing the basic burden of getting the facts right before making them public. We also owe that burden to the survivors who stand to be harmed even more if the story they shared is shown to be lacking in places.
We owe it to persons or institutions who might be accused of wrongdoing the basic burden of getting the facts right before making them public. We also owe that burden to the survivors who stand to be harmed even more if the story they shared is shown to be lacking in places.
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In some circumstances, this could even be of great service to a survivor who not only had their bodies violated, but also may have had their memory broken and battered as well. It is possible to independently investigate and clarify the truth of what actually occurred without compounding the harm that a survivor of rape has experienced. This requires that journalists who report on sexual violence and other forms of trauma become better educated about the impact of trauma on survivors lest they cause even greater harm.
Responsibility for the damage done here still falls squarely on Rolling Stone and not Jackie. Rolling Stone made a mistake in running the story without properly investigating and corroborating the details, and then doubled down on that by throwing Jackie under the bus. Further by running the piece (over Jackie’s wishes to be removed from the article it now appears) without fact-checking it the magazine not only co-opted a survivor’s pain for their own purposes, they have done her, and potentially many other survivors, even more harm.
Instead of people talking about Jackie’s courage, and the problem posed by campus sexual violence, we are forced to yet again fight to have survivors be heard and believed. Rolling Stone’s dismissal of Jackie, and the subsequent attacks on survivors’ credibility this has caused, is sadly another form of victimization with which survivors and their allies are all too familiar. It is also one that we require everyone’s help to address at the same time we engage in the battle to end sexual violence itself.
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Photo Credit: Screen shot of Rolling Stone article (overlay text added)
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A very lengthy breakdown of the issue here, with updates and citations; it talks about many of the issues related to journalist integrity, the role of skepticism & impartiality, and its intersections (or collisions) with gender politics:
https://riversong.wordpress.com/yellow-journalism-and-the-meme-of-rape-culture/
update this story
I think Frank and Neil and others have gotten to the core of a very powerful dichotomy here- This is also a very personal and sensitive issue for many people, with a lot of relativities and subjectivities, and unique perspectives that are harder to appreciate person to person. I’ll offer my perspective, and apologize in advance if it comes off as bit too cool or detached, or insufficiently sympathetic: Speaking broadly and philosophically, in western democratic societies our whole foundation of justice and due process is that it is to be premised on the notion of ‘innocent until proven guilty’… Read more »
FYI, here is an article on MSN that looks at “Jackie’s” case from the POV of the three friends she was with the night she was supposedly raped. Until I read the article, I hadn’t doubted that she was raped. I just looked at it as a misidentification, which is not good for those misidentified. Now, it seems that she may have invented the entire thing. “And photographs that were texted to one of the friends showing her date that night actually were pictures depicting one of Jackie’s high school classmates in Northern Virginia. That man, now a junior at… Read more »
I just saw that and it does seem like something is going on other than what she’s claiming. It wouldn’t surprise me if she was raped or sexually assaulted, but it does seem less and less likely that she was gang raped as the more we find out about this the less like the original account. This really ought to serve as a warning that people publishing accounts need to be more careful about what is published. That’s not to say that if somebody comes to any of us claiming to have been gang raped that we need to establish… Read more »
@ Frank “It wouldn’t surprise me if she was raped or sexually assaulted, but it does seem less and less likely that she was gang raped as the more we find out about this the less like the original account.” I’m no longer convinced that she was raped at all. Hanna Rosin has an interesting take on it. “She appears to have invented a suitor, complete with fake text messages and a fake photo, which suggests a capacity for somewhat elaborate deception.” “That could mean one of two things: Jackie could have given Erdely fake contact information for Randall and… Read more »
The National Coalition for Men has called for the resignation of the President of the University of Virginia Teresa Sullivan. http://ncfm.org/2014/12/action/ncfm-press-release-calling-for-the-resignation-of-university-president-teresa-sullivan/ There is no excuse for punishing innocent members who engage in Greek life here. We should also note that Jackie had the courage to take her story to a national publication in the form of Rolling Stone. So far as I know that publication does not offer any protection whatsoever, or at the very least they are not bound by the law to protect the accuser in any way. Jackie did not take her accusation to the police, when… Read more »
I’m disappointed in the comments here. Every disputed fact in the story could be removed, and the account that is left would still be harrowing. And believable. Jackie’s story rings true, not because the scenario is unrealistic, nor because every detail can be fact-checked, but because terrible things happen and get brushed under the carpet by all manner of people, tragically sometimes including the victim. Perhaps this is an object lesson in why journalists and the outlets that pay them need to be more rigorous, in proportion to the stakes of the particular article or broadcast. But bad journalism does… Read more »
Good grief. They shouldn’t have been on the hook for an event that’s not been reported and likely didn’t happen as reported. Survivor rights do not and should not trump the rights of other parties that may or may not have done anything wrong. It disgusts me the way that advocates seem to think that the ability to make an allegation is the same thing as the activity having taken place. It’s certainly possible that she’s telling the truth to the best of her ability, but regardless of that, there are people who are definitely having their lives ruined without… Read more »
Well said Frank, well said.
I’ve heard people who defend our system of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ use the saying ‘Better 10 guilty go free than one innocent be wrongly convicted”. It seems with these sexual assault and rape cases(male perp and female victim that is) a lot of people are calling for the opposite. As we saw with the Duke case, those young men had to PROVE THEIR INNOCENCE!
Seems the ‘Victims’ here are actually the falsely accused students. Unfourtunitily , as with their Duke counterparts. they probably won’t even receive an apology much less any restitution.
It’s more than just the students accused here. The President of the University of Virginia suspended *all* fraternity activities of *all* the fraternities on campus because of this accusation.
This is a disaster which will hurt everyone involved. Thank you Rolling Stone. How could you screw up this badly?
Yet, Rolling Stone simply did what liberal / feminists / progressives say people should do, believe a rape accuser without qualification. We should never question the account of a rape accuser because that is victim blaming. There was some push back of the criticism of Rolling Stone and defense of Rolling Stone’s reporting from some in the feminist community. “As some begin questioning the recent Rolling Stone account of a gang rape at the University of Virginia — apparently based on the perplexing notion that the journalist’s failure to do everything she could to get comment from the accused men… Read more »
“Responsibility for the damage done here still falls squarely on Rolling Stone and not Jackie.”
Unless Jackie actually did falsify her claim.
“Further by running the piece (over Jackie’s wishes to be removed from the article it now appears) without fact-checking it the magazine not only co-opted a survivor’s pain for their own purposes, they have done her, and potentially many other survivors, even more harm.” It simply isn’t known whether or not this girl is a survivor. The very retraction made by Rolling Stone implies that Rolling Stone does not believe there exists enough evidence to claim that Jackie is a survivor. So, no, Rolling Stone has not necessarily co-opted a survivor’s pain. And no, they haven’t done so for their… Read more »