I missed this last Friday—perhaps you did, too? New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane agrees with me and at least half the internet on how not to cover a story that involves the alleged gang rape of an eleven-year-old girl. He admitted that the paper’s recent coverage inadvertently blamed the victim by the nature of its reporting:

Brisbane writes:

While the story appeared to focus on the community’s reaction to the crime, it was not enough to simply report that the community is principally concerned about the boys and men involved — as this story seems to do. If indeed that is the only sentiment to be found in this community — and I find that very hard to believe — it becomes important to report on that as well by seeking out voices of professional authorities or dissenting community members who will at least address, and not ignore, the plight of the young girl involved.

Brisbane notes that the Times is working on a follow-up story. Hopefully, this piece will be more balanced.

Former Stranger news writer Cienna Madrid has been a writer in residence for Richard Hugo House, a local literary nonprofit. There, she taught fiction classes and wrote 4/5 of a book about a death-row...

15 replies on “Our Bad! Little Girls Shouldn’t Be Blamed for Gang Rapes!”

  2. America’s precious male population are falling victim to those predatory children out there– just ask the Catholic Church.

  3. If they have to try really hard to write a story that isn’t victim-blaming, they’re doing something (very) wrong.
    It shouldn’t be difficult to write a story about the gang rape of a child without blaming the child. It should be automatic. I
    Seriously, I was appalled at how the boys/men were depicted as victims in the original story.

  4. Someone in the comments thread under the Brisbane piece made a very good point:

    I also would like readers to consider how impossible this sort of reporting would be had it been an 11 year old BOY who had been gang-raped by 18 men. Would we report that the boy was hanging around with those older men, dressing like a 20-something, and so on? Would that be reported, even if someone had said it to the reporter? Would we lament how those poor men would have to live with their gang-rape of that 11 year old boy for the rest of their lives?

    I would like to add that if the victim-blaming, rapist-coddling commentary they quoted in the original article was representative of public opinion in that town, then there’s your follow-up story right there. A nice long expose about the cultural attitudes of people in a town of rape-apologists and how that contributes to the victimization of young girls.

  8. I didn’t think the author of the original piece was blaming the victim, but reporting the fact that the people in the town where this horrendous act occurred were doing so. But then, the title of the original piece (“Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town”) wouldn’t seem genuine: nobody interviewed seemed particularly shaken by what happened to the girl, certainly not as compared to what might happen to the perpetrators.

    Also, the idea that a story like this needs to be “balanced” by finding some random person to say “the gang rapists did a bad thing” is, in my mind, not the way to frame where the article went wrong.

  9. Brisbane’s comment acknowledges simply that the story “lacked a critical balancing element.” That it contained no quotes of someone sympathizing with the victim rather than the perpetrators. That it wasn’t neutral. And yes, the story would have been better if it had included some of those quotes, rather than giving the impression that nobody in Cleveland cares about the girl who was raped, as I surely hope is not the case. It would have come closer to representing the truth. But the truth itself isn’t neutral. The truth is that it’s called rape for a reason, and that is that the victim is never to blame, even slightly. It seems extra abhorrent because the girl was only eleven years old, but this would be just as true if they had gang-raped a twenty-eight year old woman. That’s a fact that might have escaped a number of people in the Cleveland area, but it ought to be expressed overtly by someone reporting on the situation objectively: “Somebody in this story suggested something that isn’t true. Here are the actual facts.” And don’t tell me that reporters have an obligation to keep their opinions out of their stories– that might be true, but the law is not a matter of opinion, and the law says that it doesn’t matter what the girl was wearing or how much makeup she had on, why she was in a dangerous part of town, or where her parents were. If she was raped, she was raped, and that is entirely the fault of the men and boys who perpetrated it. Period.

    Should we, as a readership, have known this full well and not have needed to have it pointed out to us? Yes, absolutely. But clearly that’s not the case– not if anyone from Cleveland (for example) reads the New York Times. I would say that they should, except that apparently they won’t find any corrections on their misconceptions there. At least, not today.

  15. @17: If you knew what recursion meant, you wouldn’t have used it in the context you did. I’m fluent in two programming languages; trust me, I know the true meaning of recursion.
    You seem…upset.

Comments are closed.