Women, Action & the Media

WAM!mer Jina Moore covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs for the Christian Science Monitor, Newsweek, and a host of other influential publications. Her journalistic voice is simulatneously expert and invitingly warm — no small feat. But it’s one particular article of hers that’s landed her on our 16 Days of Action list: her essay in the Columbia Journalism Review entitled “How Not To Write About Rape.”

Anyone who follows coverage of rape in the news media know it can do a lot more harm than good. From the New York Times focusing on the clothes and makeup of an 11-year-old gang rape victim, to the recent spate of headlines that characterized the allegations of sexual harassment and abuse against Herman Cain as a “sex scandal” (as opposed to the violence and abuse-of-power scandal it actually is), there are no shortage of damning examples. And yet few journalists get any training in how to stay on the right side of the line between illuminating and exploitative.

That’s where Moore’s essay comes in. She writes:

If readers feel implicated, they will blame us. After all, it is in their name that we impose the discomfort of our nosy questions on trauma survivors. When Nicholas Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, named a nine- year-old Congolese rape victim in his New York Times column in January 2010 and broadcast her face in an online video, reader outcry was so strong that Kristof wrote a detailed follow-up on his blog, explaining what his column had not: that he’d secured the girl’s and her aunt’s permission to use the name, and that he’d weighed public exposure in an American newspaper against the likelihood that exposure would reach her village in Congo.

In other words: not only do a journalists intentions not matter in making rape reporting effective; their actions often don’t either unless the reader also knows about them. And for good reason. Here’s Moore again:

Most journalism seeks to convey information objectively, but trauma stories have an agenda: they call to the reader to witness, to agree with the writer that “This should not have been.” If there is no agreement between reader and writer, or if the writer fails, the story is an exercise in voyeurism. In rape stories, we are publicly exposing the personal suffering of survivors. If we do this with any other intention than that rape should not happen—or if we do this without any clear intention at all—we are indulging in a kind of storytelling that critics do not hesitate to call pornography.

But our favorite thing about this essay is her simple examples of what can go right in covering sexual violence. Moore’s model isn’t complicated — it takes little effort and even fewer column inches. It just requires a journalist who cares, and who knows which choices can make all the difference. For example:

Take this npr story by Ofeibea Quist-Arcton about the sexual abuse of women in Guinea last year, when soldiers killed 157 pro- democracy protestors. Before she even says the word “rape,” Quist-Arcton con- textualizes the graphic details we are about to hear: “It was the soldiers’ brutal assaults on women that have so shaken Guineans. They keep repeating: C’est du jamais vu—never before have we wit- nessed such acts.” This lessens the likelihood that the details we’ll soon hear will feel merely lurid; the Guineans, too, felt shocked, as we surely will.

Before Quist-Arcton quotes a survivor, she discloses her reporting practice, even acknowledging that her questions violate a boundary: “Through an intermediary, I met with some women in a small room in an opposition safe house to talk about their ordeals.” She goes on to admit that her journalism put her subjects at risk: “The woman who arranged the meetings for me . . . was herself terrified that she’d be found out and punished.” Now the audience knows these risks, too. We feel like we—and the vulnerable people we are listening to—are in safer hands when such risks are acknowleged.

Then, for nearly five minutes, Quist-Arcton, and her audience, sit with the same women. This generous amount of time has value; it gives these women presence. That, in turn, transforms the graphic details of their suffering, from “color” dropped in to bait the listener into telling detail.

For more telling detail, go read the whole thing here. And then make your action for today sharing this important article with everyone — especially the journalists — you know.