Media misinterprets response to article
Amid the past year’s explosion of campus assault awareness, one September 2012 case stood as an emblem for the horrors of rape culture and its effect on college campuses. Now, the November 2014 Rolling Stone article vividly recounting the assault of “Jackie,” a student at the University of Virginia who used a version of her first name to remain anonymous, has been disproven on so many accounts that it seems absurd it was ever published.
On April 5, Rolling Stone published a commissioned report from the Columbia School of Journalism on its website that details the journalistic errors of the controversy. The idea was to correct its mistakes by bringing in a credible outside source. Yet, despite the magazine’s explicit insistence that it was responsible for verifying details, the public has mistaken this instance as proof that rape culture does not exist. This is not the case. Good intentions aside, the fact that the media allowed one alleged sexual assault to represent an epidemic proves that our society has a serious misunderstanding of rape culture.
As the Columbia report details, journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely reached out to rape survivor and UVA staff member Emily Renda, asking for an “emblematic college rape case” to illustrate the current climate for U.S. campuses. She hoped to demonstrate not only the prevalence of assault on college campuses but also the pervasiveness of a rape culture in which women are constantly sexualized. Renda ended up noting one prominent instance which had occurred the previous fall. Believing “Jackie” was a credible source because of her connection to Renda, Erdely proceeded to correspond with Jackie on a somewhat erratic basis.
Jackie’s detailed account seemed too intricate to be fabricated. In vivid detail, she described attending a date function at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity with a fellow university lifeguard, following her acquaintance upstairs after midnight, and thereafter falling victim to physical and sexual abuses at the hands of seven other men. After the alleged attack, Jackie reached out to three friends, only one of whom urged her to seek help. Understandably, Jackie’s story resonated with Erdely, but Erdely let her blind trust cloud her judgment. Erdely and her team moved forward, dragging many innocent students, faculty members and rape victims down with them.
The initial Rolling Stone article attracted 2.7 million views online alone and elicited absolute horror from the public. UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan suspended all Greek-life activities until January and asked the Charlottesville Police Department to conduct an investigation of Jackie’s assault. Reputation tarnished, Phi Kappa Psi suspended its UVA chapter. Feminist activists attributed to Jackie’s story the same significance Erdely hoped it would achieve. Even as gaping holes appeared in Erdely’s report, social media hashtag #IStandwithJackie appeared across the Internet.
Now that experts have disproven many details of Jackie’s assault, reactions have been volatile. An article for Slate cites writer Arielle Duhaime-Ross’s ominous prediction, “[T]he credibility of rape victims will be put into question for years to come.” This fear has surfaced in feminist sources covering the mishap, thanks to the ending of the original redaction: “[W]e have come to the conclusion that our trust in [Jackie] was misplaced.”
Despite the Columbia report blaming journalistic failure for the mishap, Rolling Stone cannot reverse the damage of these words; by apparently shifting the blame to an alleged victim, the magazine provided a weakness for anti-feminists to attack. A video featured on A Voice for Men’s website aligns Erdely with American feminism. The narrator asserts that the “credibility of real female victims is … thrown under the bus by a bunch of liberal arts degree, first-world feminists” who “see a rapist behind every tree and a rape culture on every campus.”
Jackie’s story is a reminder of the campus rape horrors. Suzannah Weiss points out that “just [2] to [8] percent of all sexual assault reports are false” and that 95 percent of college victims and 68 percent of victims overall do not report their assaults. She observes that most perpetrators do not serve jail time, even after they have been reported.
Bearing the facts in mind, we can all take a breath. Rolling Stone’s blunder does not justify arguments against feminism, nor does it end for anti-assault activism. Whether or not Jackie actually was assaulted, every incident of sexual assault is different; turning one story into an allegory for an epidemic is not the solution, but increased awareness of general statistics is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, the media will seize this opportunity to rectify its perceptions of rape culture and how the nation responds to these recent developments.
Jennifer Frazin is a sophomore majoring in English and theatre. Her column, “Not That Kind of Girl,” runs Wednesdays.
No, Jackie’s story is about a HOAX. She made up an identity for an attacker who never existed and then created an elaborate ruse to fool her friends into thinking he existed by pretending to be him and then texting them.
Repeat after me: Jackie. Was. Not. Assaulted. She is VERY lucky that the fraternity and some of her friends aren’t suing her personally.
Also, there is no epidemic of rape on campuses. There were a few at the Seven Sisters I attended in the seventies, and the stats haven’t changed since then. Ditto for other colleges.
If the author of this “column” is hoping for a career in journalism, she needs to stop being like Erdely and get rid of her pre-conceived “agenda.”
As a journalist you should be much more interested in how this nightmarish hoax came to be printed.
And you should also stop and think about the impact of what these heinous false accusations did to the young men at UVA as well as one of the deans and an assistant dean, about whom Erdely made stuff up.
This author has got a lot of growing up to do.
Ms. Frazin, three errors in your piece:
1. When you make a statement such as “…the public has mistaken this instance as proof that rape culture does not exist,” it should be backed up by some solid evidence. Additionally, it would be nice if you defined “rape culture,” because without a clear definition, the term can, and often is, used in many different ways and contexts (though usually for simple shock value).
2. “…rape survivor and UVA staff member Emily Renda…” It is unlikely that Emily Renda was a victim of rape. There is a greater possibility she has been the victim of a sexual assault, but also evidence to suggest otherwise. How about “Emily Renda, who also identifies as a rape survivor…” or similar.
3. “Jackie’s detailed account seemed too intricate to be fabricated.” While the term “rape culture” to me is mainly an issue of semantics, this statement and the widespread acceptance of the Rolling Stone article evidence the fact that we also have a “bigoted view of white males” culture. If you could read the Rolling Stone article without a shred of doubt then you are there’s a good chance you are a bigot. The details of the story, the lame (fabricated) quotes from Jackie’s friends were so clichéd, etc. were so over the top and clichéd that the story read like a bad after school special on campus rape. As someone with some familiarity of college culture like that of UVA, I immediately doubted the details of the story. The fact that many people are so ready to crucify young, white men, makes me wonder if in addition to “rape culture” our society also suffers from a “young white misandry culture.”
“the fact that the media allowed one alleged sexual assault to represent an epidemic proves that our society has a serious misunderstanding of rape culture”
As there is nothing even approaching an “epidemic” of sexual assault, particularly on campus where it occurs at a rate 20% lower than for similarly-aged non-student women, is reduced 50% from the late 1990s, and happens at a rate of only 0.61% per year (6 out of 1,000), it is also demonstrable that nothing like a “rape culture” exists in the US, except in the minds of dogmatists and activists with an agenda.
Frazen reminds us that “increased awareness of general statistics is a step in the right direction”, and yet propagates demonstrably false statistics, such as “just [2] to [8] percent of all sexual assault reports are false and 95 percent of college victims and 68 percent of victims overall do not report their assaults.”
The FBI lists as “unfounded” between 2% and 20% of rape allegations (depending on what years are included), which is four times as high as the average of other serious index crimes, but that is only for those incidents reported to the police. The actual rate of false rape allegations, we know from careful research, is as high as 50% (particularly in campus settings).
And the latest and most comprehensive study ever done on the subject, the 18-year DOJ study released in December 2014, puts the rate of campus non-reporting to the police at 80% – still quite high but hardly the 95% claimed here.
That “most [alleged – why is that qualifier always omitted?] perpetrators do not serve jail time” is that most claims of rape cannot be proved, and even among those who are convicted – according to the Innocence Project – 25% are consistently exonerated by DNA evidence, meaning they were either falsely accused or wrongly identified.
To claim at this point that “Jackie’s story is a reminder of the campus rape horrors”, is to insist that even a known fabrication can serve to advance the “cause”, that facts are irrelevant when it comes to The Big Story, and that all that matters is for people to believe the propaganda and the myth of “rape culture”.