[298] in peace2
media coverage of central park sex assaults & choice at risk
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Aimee L Smith)
Tue Jun 27 13:58:59 2000
Message-Id: <200006271758.NAA06379@mint-square.mit.edu>
To: peace-list@MIT.EDU, peace-women@MIT.EDU, greens@MIT.EDU, gwg@MIT.EDU
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Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2000 13:58:47 -0400
From: Aimee L Smith <alsmith@MIT.EDU>
Two important posts relating to womens rights:
1) the right to choice-- supreme court to rule on "partial-birth"
abortion
2) the right to safety-- networks propagate exploitation of women
molested and exposed in central park and then BLAME THE WOMEN
for the behavior of the perpetrators!
This patriarchy bullshit has simply GOT TO GO!!
------- Forwarded Message
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 23:01:08 -0400
From: Andrea Mullin <mullina@earthlink.net>
Subject: re: Supreme Court Decision
Hi Everyone!
This week, we are expecting a decision from the Supreme Court on the
Nebraska ban on abortion procedures. This is an incredibly important
decision, and whether it's good, bad or mixed, it's important that the
pro-choice community respond. Accordingly, we are planning a zap action
on the day that the decision is released outside the Park Street T
station. We'll start at about 5:00. I think it is most likely that the
decision will be handed down on Wednesday, but I'm told it could also be
Thursday or Friday as well. Please plan to attend and pass this info
along to every pro-choice person you know. Thanks!
- -Andi Mullin
MA NOW President
------- End of Forwarded Message
------- Forwarded Message
Subject: media coverage of central park sex assaults
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 17:12:48 -0400
From: Susan M Buchman <susan1@MIT.EDU>
sorry for the awful formatting...
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and news reports
ACTION ALERT:
Dateline NBC Exploits Central Park Victims
June 23, 2000
When dozens of women were sexually assaulted in and around Central Park on
June 11, the story became front page news locally and nationally.
While many outlets focused on allegations that police officers did little to
prevent the attacks or help the victims, a disturbing trend emerged in coverage
of the story. In a media climate accustomed to sensationalized images of mass
crime scenes, news outlets seemed to use the Central Park "wilding" story as an
excuse to feature lurid amateur video footage of the assaults.
Outlets from the Fox News Channel to the New York Post repeatedly featured
images of nearly naked women crying, screaming or trying desperately to cover
themselves as they were forcibly stripped and molested.
Adding serious insult to injury, many of these outlets disregarded newsroom
policies preventing the identification of victims of sexual crimes (policies
established because assault victims are less likely to come forward if they
believe their attacks will be hyped by the media as a spectator sport).
Some outlets partially obscured the faces or bodies of the victims; others
showed close-ups of victims' faces and even slow-motion visuals of a woman
attempting to hide. While outlets such as the New York Times and NPR (both
6/19/00) correctly questioned the ethics of outlets running clearly
identifiable
images of victims' faces, they missed the larger point-- that repeated airing
of
these lurid images were exploitative regardless of whether the victims' faces
could be seen.
Sexual assault on this scale-- and the police force's failure to respond to
it-- is certainly news. But media did not have to run tape of in-progress
sexual
assaults to tell the story. Victims caught on tape attempting to cover
themselves
didn't want bystanders in the park to see them naked; by running this footage
over
and over, news outlets made sure that the victims were exposed to anyone tuning
into the TV news for weeks to come. In doing so, news outlets have further
humiliated the victims, exposing them on a grander scale than did the original
attackers.
One of the worst examples of coverage was a Dateline NBC (6/20/00) broadcast
reported by Bob McKeown. The broadcast opened with McKeown describing "young
people wearing very little at all" at the parade; his first interviewee,
parade attendant Andre Holmes, sets the tone for the broadcast: "Everything
was hot. The women are hot. The food is hot." Interspersed between interviews
with victims, men who had videotaped the assaults and police spokespeople were
constant visuals of women being sexually assaulted.
As if this prurient display wasn't bad enough, Dateline
went on to raise the "delicate question" of whether the victims should be
blamed for
the assaults on them: "What responsibility, if any, did the women have for
what
happened that day in the park?" McKeown asked.
To answer that question Dateline turned to Amy Holmes,
identified as a USA Today columnist but not as a member of the anti-feminist
Independent Women's Forum. Holmes cited the videos in claiming that the
assaults
started out as "almost consensual sexual play and roughhousing and
exhibitionism."
The theory that the sexual assault of passersby by an
aggressive mob was triggered by "almost consensual... play" is, to say the
least, a
dubious and regressive one. Even if the assaults were preceded by mutual
"roughhousing,"
to suggest that this somehow implicates the victims of the subsequent assaults
is like
saying that a woman consensually kissing on a date somehow mitigates date
rape-- or, to use a more accurate analogy, the rape of women other than the
one
that went on the date.
Dateline completed its analysis of this "delicate question" by consulting a
man present
at the assaults, who insisted that though he was "not blaming anyone," there
were "two
sides to this coin." He described the assailants as "a crowd of guys, just
oversexed and
overheated, provoked to a point to where it allowed them to do what they
wanted to do.
They saw open flesh and they just got hungry for more."
It is disturbing that Dateline would uncritically present the discredited and
sexist
argument that men who sexually assault women do so because they are provoked
to the
point of losing control.
In one revealing segment, McKeown described the motivation of one the men who
videotaped
the assaults: "He had gone there, he admits, to record videotape of pretty
girls, many
of them scantily clad.... It turns out several men we met were doing the very
same thing
that day." McKeown explained that this was "one reason there would be so many
pictures of
the mob mayhem that followed."
Dateline's implication is that the existence of home video "pictures of mob
mayhem" was
due to a libidinous, voyeuristic urge on the part of male onlookers in and
around Central
Park. To what, then, can we attribute Dateline's repeated airing of these
explicit,
humiliating pictures of sexually assaulted women?
ACTION: Please ask Dateline why it felt it was appropriate to repeatedly run
exploitative images of women being stripped and groped against their will, and
why
the show framed its investigation with the question of "what responsibility"
victims
bear for such assaults.
As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if you
maintain
a polite tone. Please cc fair@fair.org with your correspondence.
CONTACT: Dateline NBC dateline@nbc.com
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