When Every Word Counts

Combating rape culture usually involves going after big, widespread problems. But some of the most pernicious battles currently being waged focus on just one word at a time.

Perhaps the recent word most loudly decried was “forcible”. That one was inserted into HR3, the Republican House bill full of all sorts of anti-choice, anti-women policies, including the expansion of “conscience clauses” to cover ER doctors who refuse to perform them even in life threatening cases, imposing a new tax on people who buy health insurance plans that cover abortion, and denying women in the military the right to pay privately for abortions in military hospitals abroad. But what caught many people’s attention was the attempt to redefine rape. Under the bill, abortions would only be funded by Medicaid in instances of “forcible” rape, a qualifier never used before. This led to the (unanswerable) question: what exactly is non-forcible rape? Kristen Schaal on The Daily Show explained that it is “what is merely rape-ish.” The use of this word could have meant that women seeking abortions after being raped would have had to show their bruises to prove that enough force was used to qualify (because the process of reporting a rape and pressing charges isn’t traumatizing enough). The GOP has now promised to drop that language after a veritable firestorm erupted, including another valiant Twitter campaign by Sady Doyle, #DearJohn. (Although the language may actually still be in the bill.)

A lesser-noticed bill in Georgia also focuses on one word: “accuser.” Republican Representative Bobby Franklin has introduced a bill into the state legislature to call women who report their rapes “accusers” instead of “victims.” Franklin claims that it’s unfair to call someone a victim until there’s a conviction – even though, as Carolyn Fiddler of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee points out, “Burglary victims are still victims. Assault victims are still victims. Fraud victims are still victims.” All before the crime is proven by a jury of the victim’s peers. This takes our attention away from the fact that the woman in question is a victim of a horrendous crime and diverts it to the possibility that she is merely accusing an innocent man. Using such language diminishes the seriousness of a rape accusation and the vulnerable position of someone who has experienced sexual assault.

And then there’s the word “rape” itself, which Stephanie Gilmore noticed was glaringly absent from Super Bowl coverage of accused rapist and Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. It was said that he “had sex with” his victim, that the incident in question was just a “drunken night,” it was just a “poor and classless decision.” As Gilmore puts it, “When we avoid the words ‘rape,’ ‘statutory rape,’ and ‘sexual assault,’ we dehumanize and silence victims.” Rape charges get demoted to “sexual misconduct” or simply being “involved” with an unwilling woman and are considered something other than rape. “Having sex with” implies consent that is absent when the act is forced. You can see the effects of this kind of thinking in the Canadian case where a judge withheld jail time from a rapist because the victim was drunk and wearing a tube top with no bra. The case wasn’t about rape, in his words; it was about “misunderstood signals and inconsiderate behaviour.” By refusing to call the act rape he completely changed the sentencing – and avoided laying blame where it was due, at the feet of a man who forced sex on his unwilling victim.

Refusing to use the word rape can have serious effects for victims as well. As Chloe Heintz recounts in a video explaining how Planned Parenthood saved her life, it wasn’t until someone described what happened when her boyfriend forced sex on her as rape that she understood it as such. Only then did she really come to grips with what it meant and process how it related to her identity. Gilmore connects our horrendously low reporting rates to the lack of conversation around what rape is – if you don’t know what constitutes it, you may not know you should report it. Would Chloe perhaps have pressed charges against her boyfriend if she had recognized his crime as rape at the time? It’s more likely. And as Jaclyn Friedman points out, it creates an environment in which even Whoopie Goldberg feels there is a difference between “rape-rape” and real rape.

Each misused word only serves to diminish the seriousness of rape and sex crimes, making victims more vulnerable and empowering attackers. And they all seek to roll back the clock to a time when it wasn’t taken seriously. “Forcible rape” hearkens back to when women had to somehow prove that they resisted an assault for the crime to qualify as such. “Accuser” puts women and the crimes that happen to them in a category apart from others. And calling rape a euphemism that obscures the facts smacks of calling domestic violence “putting a woman in her place.” The battle to protect the rights of rape victims, to prevent rape from happening, and to get our society to face rape culture head on is a challenging one, but it starts with language. Friedman calls for someone to sit down with editorial boards “to challenge their resistance to saying that what is alleged is rape.” Someone clearly also needs to sit down with legislators and judges. The words that frame this debate and become encoded in law sets the stage for the rest of the fight.

Tags: rape, sexual assault, women