Laura Bates on everyday sexismWomenSocial media users have been taking pictures of themselves in the same position as an alleged rape victim, and sharing them with the hashtag #JadaPose. We need to take actionWhat are the consequences when a teenage victim's sexual assault can be ridiculed on social media before she is even aware of what happened to her?
That was the horrifying question that arose after last year's Steubenville rape case, in which a teenage girl in Ohio was raped whilst incapacitated by alcohol and awoke the next morning to find graphic posts depicting and discussing the assault on Instagram and Twitter. It was the sort of case you hope will never be repeated. Yet here we are, less than two years later, asking the same questions all over again.
Jada, a 16-year old girl from Houston, Texas, has described waking up the morning after she attended a party to find pictures of herself, naked and unconscious, online. She started receiving messages from friends asking her if she was OK. She believes her drink was spiked, and that she was raped. But the echoes of the Steubenville case don't stop there. Just as the victim in that case was criticised and ridiculed online, so the social media machine swung into motion in Jada's case too. The alleged perpetrator is reported to have written tweets mocking her, calling her a "hoe" who "snitched" and denying the assault.
Sickeningly, it gets worse. Other social media users started taking photographs of themselves in the same spread-eagled position in which Jada's unconscious, stripped body was pictured, and sharing them online using the hashtag #JadaPose. The posts, some of which have since been deleted, included captions like "hit that" and "#Thot" (an acronym for "that ho over there").
What happened to Jada can't be dismissed as a painful aberration. It isn't only reminiscent of the Steubenville case, but also of an incident involving three fraternity members at James Madison University, who filmed themselves sexually assaulting a female student and shared it with others online. And the online dismissal and ridicule of the victim follows the April 2012 case in which the rape victim of footballer Ched Evans was abused on social media, accused of "crying rape", and named more than 6,000 times.
Showing immense bravery, Jada chose to speak out about her ordeal, telling KHOU News: "Everybody has already seen my face and my body, but that's not what I am and who I am." But the part of Jada's interview that strikes a horribly familiar chord for me is the moment she quietly utters these three words: "Reputation? That's over."
Jada's case didn't happen in a bubble. It happened in a world that teaches women and girls, from an ever younger age, that their entire worth and value is defined by their looks and sexual appeal to men. That they have to be sexy enough, but not too sexy. That refusing to strip off or engage in sexual activity makes them frigid, uptight and prudish; but going "too far" in the other direction condemns them forever to the label of slag, slut or whore. That even if they are abused, assaulted or raped, it is their "reputation", not that of their attackers, that will be destroyed.
There are two parts to this problem. The first is the idea that a girl's entire identity is bound up in her sexual activity in the first place. The second is that the censorious judgement for that "activity" (whether it is consensual, or assault) focuses on girls alone, while boys seem to emerge unscathed.
As I've visited schools across the country, I've heard story after story of girls who were bullied or coerced into "sexting" images of themselves to boyfriends, and are then universally excoriated for being "sluts" when the images are shared online. In many such cases, the girls are forced to move schools. Meanwhile, the boys are hailed as lads, players or studs.
The double standard prevails even in cases of rape. One teenager told me about a girl at her school who had been raped by a male peer. Afterwards, the girl was isolated and bullied by the whole year group. When they wanted to shame her, people would simply shout the name of the boy at her in the corridor. She would visibly cower. Even though he was the perpetrator and she the victim, his very name became a symbol of her worthlessness.
One young woman who added her story to the Everyday Sexism Project website wrote: "I was passed out drunk at a party last year and a boy there took advantage of me and ended up raping me. At school, everyone was making jokes about me and calling me a slut because 'it was my fault I was so drunk'."
Another explained how word of her rape spread quickly at her high school. Afterwards, she said: "Many boys called me a slut and hoe and tried to take advantage of me at parties … Many boys thought it was OK to tweet me about rape and say I was asking for it."
We need to connect the dots between these cases. For young men to be able to mock the assaults of their female peers and even share images of the events online indicates an immensely powerful sense of detachment in their attitudes towards these girls. It suggests that they see them as less than human. Jada's case happened within the wider context of a world that objectifies women, and hypersexualises black women, in particular, to the point of dehumanisation. These are trends that must be challenged, and urgently need to be addressed in the classroom. Jada's case has prompted a powerful and inspiring backlash against the trolls, but reactive measures alone are not enough. If we keep seeing these cases as isolated incidents, instead of looking at the bigger picture, we will continue to fail girls such as Jada.
When it happened once, it was a shocking anomaly. When it happens again and again, it is a pattern.
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