RADAR ALERT: NPR Gives Raped Males The Unworthy Victim Treatment

Started by RADAR, Jun 30, 2010, 09:07 AM

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RADAR ALERT: NPR Gives Raped Males The Unworthy Victim Treatment




Last week, June 23, Attorney General Eric Holder missed the deadline for issuing standards to prevent prison rape.1

Men being raped in prison is so accepted by mainstream America that Saturday Night Live's writers saw nothing wrong with doing 4-1/2 minutes of ass-rape jokes in a sketch called "Scared Straight" that ended with Betty White saying emphatically, "Wizard of Ass"!2  Blogger Scott Starnes states the attitude explicitly.  Under a graphic stating "Ass-Rape: It's Always Funny," Starnes asks: "Who honestly cares about criminals being ass-raped in prison?"3

Ignorant callousness is an obvious problem for reformers trying to eliminate prison rape.  But an even more insidious problem is the media's treatment of male victims as unworthy of concern, as NPR's Morning Edition recently did.4.  NPR chose to ignore the fact that 90% of incarcerated individuals are male, and instead focused their story solely on a female-prisoner's experience of prison-rape.  This form of bias is so subtle that most listeners won't even notice it.  But it is a classic example of the very media bias described by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their book  Manufacturing Consent5, in which they write:
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"Our hypothesis is that worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically, that they will be humanized, and that their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will generate reader interest and sympathetic emotion. In contrast, unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage."


NPR's decision to focus solely on a female victim's experience demonstrates that they view female rape victims as "worthy" and male victims as "unworthy."  And their mischaracterizing the issue will inevitably lead to stronger protections for female inmates and weaker or non-existent protections for the vast majority of inmates -- the male inmates.

Society's indifference to male victimization helps explain why the Department of Justice can't get its act together to come up with standards that are already pretty well known.  Columnist Robert Franklin summarizes the DoJ's cynical attitude about missing the deadline as, "Why bother?  It's mostly men who are abused, right?"6

Cultural assumptions play an important role in the creation of public policy.  And a subtly biased story coming from a mainstream media outlet like NPR is far more effective in propagating and perpetuating bias than anything an obviously biased blogger like Scott Starnes could come out with.  Therefore, efforts at exposing subtle bias and trying to correct it are essential to RADAR's mission to reform the nation's domestic violence laws.

Kindly contact Morning Edition

http://help.npr.org/npr/includes/customer/npr/custforms/contactus.aspx?sid=1

and ask them to do a follow-up story on the DoJ's failure to issue standards for the prevention of prison rape.  Let them know that their listeners want them to treat male victims as equally worthy of sympathy as female victims.  In Chomsky and Herman's words, the suffering of male victims should be featured prominently and dramatically, the male victims should be humanized just as NPR's stories have done for female victims, and stories on male victims should give sufficient detail and context to generate reader interest and sympathetic emotion.

When you contact NPR, please be polite.

1 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lovisa-stannow/attorney-general-misses-h_b_622777.html
2 http://www.hulu.com/embed/Jg9atJtz6ba4_jem0HfKUw
3 http://scottystarnes.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/doj-lead-by-ag-eric-holder-is-worried-about-ass-rape-in-prison-system
4 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127376570
5 http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Manufac_Consent_Prop_Model.html
6 http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=4841




Date of RADAR Release: June 29, 2010

R.A.D.A.R. -- Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting -- is a non-profit, non-partisan organization of men and women working to improve the effectiveness of our nation's approach to solving domestic violence.  http://www.mediaradar.org
           



Copyright (c) 2005-2010. RADAR -- Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

       

poiuyt

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-men
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Sexual violence is one of the most horrific weapons of war, an instrument of terror used against women. Yet huge numbers of men are also victims.

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Because there has been so little research into the rape of men during war, it's not possible to say with any certainty why it happens or even how common it is - although a rare 2010 survey, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that 22% of men and 30% of women in Eastern Congo reported conflict-related sexual violence. As for Atim, she says: "Our staff are overwhelmed by the cases we've got, but in terms of actual numbers? This is the tip of the iceberg."

Later on I speak with Dr Angella Ntinda, who treats referrals from the RLP. She tells me: "Eight out of 10 patients from RLP will be talking about some sort of sexual abuse."

"Eight out of 10 men?" I clarify.

"No. Men and women," she says.

"What about men?"

"I think all the men."

I am aghast.

"All of them?" I say.

"Yes," she says. "All the men."

The research by Lara Stemple at the University of California doesn't only show that male sexual violence is a component of wars all over the world, it also suggests that international aid organisations are failing male victims. Her study cites a review of 4,076 NGOs that have addressed wartime sexual violence. Only 3% of them mentioned the experience of men in their literature. "Typically," Stemple says, "as a passing reference."

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[Stemple's findings on the failure of aid agencies is no surprise to Dolan. "The organisations working on sexual and gender-based violence don't talk about it," he says. "It's systematically silenced. If you're very, very lucky they'll give it a tangential mention at the end of a report. You might get five seconds of: 'Oh and men can also be the victims of sexual violence.' But there's no data, no discussion."

As part of an attempt to correct this, the RLP produced a documentary in 2010 called Gender Against Men. When it was screened, Dolan says that attempts were made to stop him. "Were these attempts by people in well-known, international aid agencies?" I ask.

"Yes," he replies. "There's a fear among them that this is a zero-sum game; that there's a pre-defined cake and if you start talking about men, you're going to somehow eat a chunk of this cake that's taken them a long time to bake." Dolan points to a November 2006 UN report that followed an international conference on sexual violence in this area of East Africa.

"I know for a fact that the people behind the report insisted the definition of rape be restricted to women," he says, adding that one of the RLP's donors, Dutch Oxfam, refused to provide any more funding unless he'd promise that 70% of his client base was female. He also recalls a man whose case was "particularly bad" and was referred to the UN's refugee agency, the UNHCR. "They told him: 'We have a programme for vulnerable women, but not men.'"

It reminds me of a scene described by Eunice Owiny: "There is a married couple," she said. "The man has been raped, the woman has been raped. Disclosure is easy for the woman. She gets the medical treatment, she gets the attention, she's supported by so many organisations. But the man is inside, dying."

"In a nutshell, that's exactly what happens," Dolan agrees. "Part of the activism around women's rights is: 'Let's prove that women are as good as men.' But the other side is you should look at the fact that men can be weak and vulnerable."

Margot Wallström, the UN special representative of the secretary-general for sexual violence in conflict, insists in a statement that the UNHCR extends its services to refugees of both genders. But she concedes that the "great stigma" men face suggests that the real number of survivors is higher than that reported. Wallström says the focus remains on women because they are "overwhelmingly" the victims. Nevertheless, she adds, "we do know of many cases of men and boys being raped."

But when I contact Stemple by email, she describes a "constant drum beat that women are the rape victims" and a milieu in which men are treated as a "monolithic perpetrator class".

"International human rights law leaves out men in nearly all instruments designed to address sexual violence," she continues. "The UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 treats wartime sexual violence as something that only impacts on women and girls... Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently announced $44m to implement this resolution. Because of its entirely exclusive focus on female victims, it seems unlikely that any of these new funds will reach the thousands of men and boys who suffer from this kind of abuse. Ignoring male rape not only neglects men, it also harms women by reinforcing a viewpoint that equates 'female' with 'victim', thus hampering our ability to see women as strong and empowered. In the same way, silence about male victims reinforces unhealthy expectations about men and their supposed invulnerability."

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