Steubenville, Ohio has been reemerging in the news since December of 2012, when the group Anonymous released a disturbing video of drunken Steubenville high school students joking about female student who had just been publicly raped. The video caught the attention of national media, and quotes from the boys involved, such as, “she was deader than Trayvon Martin,” as well as tweets like “song of the night is definitely Rape Me by Nirvana” spread across the internet like wildfire.
The fire has only grown since then. The trial began in early March, and the recently announced verdict convicted two of the boys on the football team for rape, as well as convicted another for disseminating a nude photo of the raped minor, referred to in the case as “Jane Doe.” News outlets reporting on the case such CNN, ABC, and NBC were distraught over “promising” lives and careers of star football players “falling apart” in the courtroom after the verdict, instead of mentioning the actual victim, who was peed on, pictured in child pornography, and publicly raped. These media outlets, along with other individuals who sympathized with the rapists or blamed the victim, have received intense public criticism.
To be clear, the criticism is not claiming the boys should have been vilified by the news, nor is it claiming that is wrong to be upset that more young are men entering a broken system of incarceration. It is only claiming that rapists should not be portrayed like victims when they are the ones who did the crime.
Zerlina Maxwell has also received negative feedback for her opinion on the case, not for sympathizing with the rapists, but for instead suggesting that we should educate men about rape so this doesn’t happen. She stated on Hannity, “If you train men not to grow up to become rapists, you prevent rape.” Her comment received disdain from other media sources, as well as numerous threats of violent rape from online “trolls.”
But this isn’t simply an issue of a few boys making a mistake; this is an issue of the social and political culture we have created around rape. Our girls and boys are learning from our justice system that rape kits will go unused and that rapists will rarely be prosecuted. They are learning from our colleges that victims who report rape will be brushed off, and from our political news media that teenage rape is only sad for the star athletes who go to jail. What they are not learning is about consent and preventing sexual violence.
Clearly this is a problem, but it is not one without solution. The steps in ending rape culture begin with accountability, education, and activism. It’s time that we hold our government, our media, our community, and ourselves accountable. It’s time that we educate our youth and the role models who teach them about consent and ending sexual violence.
Cases like Steubenville will keep happening across the country unless we stop portraying rape as a sideline “women’s” issue and start making it a political justice issue that we fight for.