I’m a day late, but here I am Taking Back the Blog. Today’s rant: the passive voice.
When it comes to reports of men abusing and oppressing women, the passive voice prevails.
Women are discriminated against
Women are paid less
Women are objectified
Women are groped
Women are sexually harrassed
Women are exploited
Women are threatened
Women are assaulted
Women are abused
Women are raped
No big deal, right? It’s just a bit of linguistic flipping, with neutral semantic effect, surely? No. This ostensibly innocent bit of subject-camouflage has real consequences. If you can’t see it, you can’t fight it, and you can’t blame it. The perpetrators of violence are rendered invisible. The culprits are shoved beyond the frame.
When someone is hurt, the first thing people do is look for someone to blame. When the perpetrator subject is veiled in this narrative sleight-of-hand, the free-floating responsibility seems to find somewhere to land. In the case of gendered injury, all too often, people slap this blame onto the object.
The “raped woman”.
The verb “rape” attaches to the object, and in the logical next step, is even adjectivised. “Raped” morphs smoothly from a descriptor of an actively committed crime to an attribute of the victim. And so, you end up with BBC headlines like this one:
“SHOULD WOMEN BE MORE RESPONSIBLE?”
“… these women are behaving irresponsibly and putting themselves at risk of being sexually assaulted or raped.”
UCLA researchers[1] found that agent (subject) deletion in reports of sexual violence has three outcomes:
(a) it minises the perception of the agent;
(b) it alters the attribution of blame; and
(c) it alters the attribution of harm.
“When men read rape and battery stories written in the passive voice, they attributed less blame to the perpetrator – and less harm to the victim – than for the active-voice versions. The effect was specific to sexual violence: verb voice did not alter how men viewed murders or robberies.”
Rapist-deletion and raped-adjectivisation keeps the “raped woman” at the centre of the rape narrative. Abuse and rape becomes something that is about women, and women alone. It’s a short hop from there to victim-blaming. Before long, you get asshats flailing about women “turning themselves into victims” or deliberately adopting a “victim mentality”, as in the case of the intertubes fallout after someone terrorised tech blogger Kathy Sierra with rape and murder threats. Sierra was re-abused, over and over, for not “being responsible”. For not filtering her email, for not “taking it like a man”, for daring to be a woman in a man’s world, for using her real name, and above all, for “letting herself” be a victim. Yes, she did it to herself, apparently. The abuser was summarily disappeared, and who fell into his empty subject position? The abused woman, of course. Twisty sums up:
“Thus, even some feminists think we ought to criticize Kathy Sierra for not taking her reaming like a man. We recognize that victimhood does not equal personhood, but beyond that we’re constrained by some dim twilight denial. We can’t believe, even though it is true, that victimhood the only available outcome, so we say insane things like, “don’t act like a victim, you idiot!”
Kathy Sierra was threatened for the crime of Writing While Female (have I mentioned yet that you should be reading Kate Harding?), just as women and girls everywhere are abused, raped and killed for the crime of Being Female In Public, Being Female In Their Own Home, or Being a Female Child. What we need to re-introduce to the conversation is the reality that someone is doing the threatening, the abusing, the raping, the killing.
So – what does it look like when we re-reveal the subjects in discourse around gendered violence? How difficult is it to flip the words back to Subj-V-Obj position? How does this feel for you, as a reader? I pulled this International Women’s Day letter out of Hansard.
“For many of us, what some women across the world are subjected to or forced to do, simply because of their gender, is incomprehensible. [...]
World wide, a quarter of all women are raped during their lifetime and, in a number of countries, women who have been raped are sometimes killed by their own family to preserve the family’s honour. Depending on the country, 25 to 75 per cent of women are regularly beaten at home and more than 120 million girls and women have undergone female genital mutilation. [...]
The report says that, out of three girls sitting in classrooms worldwide learning to read and write, one will suffer violence directed at her simply because she is female. [...]
Of three women sitting in a market, selling their crops, one will be attacked-most likely by her intimate partner-and hurt so severely she may no longer be able to provide for her family. [...]
Throughout the world, this violence will be repeated: Globally, one in three women will be raped, beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime.[...]
In fact, in the ACT, women are overwhelmingly the majority of victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. Statistics show that one in three women over the age of 45 has experienced domestic violence and 86 per cent of all reported sexual assaults during 2001 were perpetrated against women.”
Anyone want to have a go re-activising this litany of terror? Let me know how it feels to read the version with the subjects restored.
[1] Syntax, Semantics, and Sexual Violence: Agency and the Passive Voice
Nancy M Henley et al
Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 1-2, 60-84 (1995)
Summary at Psychology Today
Original abstract
Similar Posts:
- Foregrounding the object redux: rape research from the UK by Lauredhel
- Draft Blog Reader’s Code of Conduct: Don’t threaten to rape and kill her. by Lauredhel
- Jessica Valenti on cyberbullying by tigtog
- Smouldering: most Australians rape apologists by Lauredhel
- Chestpuffing Pillock of the Week Prize by Lauredhel
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That last comment, Mindy, was so far outside what I was saying it’s not even funny. I’ve never for a moment suggested that all men are rapists, or even that all men contribute to rape culture. I don’t believe my partner does, and I’m sure if you don’t believe your partner does, then he doesn’t.
But if you honestly think that the “nice men” in your life, including your husband, would be offended because they think a headline that says “A man raped a woman” is implying that THEY are a rapist, then you/they seriously need to have a good hard look at WHY.
I apologise for my last comment. I didn’t differentiate between the sexist behaviour the link discussed and actually being a rapist, and I should have.
I agree we should look at the mindset that thinks headlines about rape that include the word men mean all men. I think we also need to acknowledge that it’s a mindset that exists out there and that is perhaps why the media doesn’t use headlines like “A man raped a woman”. What my first thought is, upon reading such a headline, ‘a man – it could be any man, I could be sitting next to him on the bus right now’ panic response. And I could, but it’s highly unlikely as my brain soon realises. And for me that is the rub of it. I don’t like to think that someone could be looking at my husband/brother/son etc wondering if they are a rapist, even for a second, and I wonder if some men feel the same. Waht I suppose I’m trying to work out is – is it just laziness on the part of the headline writers, or is it more to do with how people react to the headline?
As I said earlier, even some male commenters on this blog take comments personally that are (to me) obviously not directed personally at them. I think it’s part of the ‘it’s all about me’ thing that we see often on topics like this.
“Waht I suppose I’m trying to work out is – is it just laziness on the part of the headline writers, or is it more to do with how people react to the headline?”
It’s neither laziness nor a respect for how people react to a headline, it’s the entrenched values of patriarchy that put a woman at the centre of rape, rather than the perpetrator.
Spot on, Mindy. The “I could be sitting next to a rapist!” side of things is interesting.
And I think there’s a big cultural disconnect here. On the one hand, women are constantly told that when in public, they SHOULD be acting as though they could be sitting next to/walking in front of/in the same room as a rapist. We’re told to dress certain ways, behave certain ways, engage in a whole pile of restrictive protective behaviours.
But at the same time, we’re not supposed to ever admit to ourselves or to others that the man we know, we’re chatting to, that serves our drinks, or teaches our children, the actual man himself, could be a rapist. “Rapists” are supposed to be this big monolithic deviant unchangeable amorphous danger, an Other of extreme proportions. Not actual people – people who exist in the world when they’re not raping, people who interact with other people, people who make choices.
That’s what has come up in law – the disconnect between the ways in which we talk about rapists – as the psychotic evil predatory monster, deranged and waiting in the bushes, and then this excusing of ‘just your regular guy’ who *has* raped, you know, the ‘boys will be boys’ stuff, the lads out drinking and getting carried away, the *decent guy who got carried away* or was *confused*, the ‘drunk man who siezed an opportunity’ (oh yeah, it’s actually been said).
To not discuss the fact that *men* do rape, lots of them do – just look at the stats (it’s by far and away generally committed by a ‘regular guy’, someone no one would have suspected than by the disturbed stranger) gives these attitudes hidden spaces in which to breed and gain strength.
The one caveat I have with this is sometimes it is used to make it sound as though women feeling this fear while out in public are being *silly* since it’s far less often the stranger scenario – it still happens often enough and brutally enough for it to be a constant awareness, a constant (and reasonable) concern.
It certainly must be difficult for men to be walking and realise a woman is afraid of them, to feel ashamed and embarrassed knowing that women walking alone view them as a potential threat. And while I feel bad for them, this is *because rape is so prevalent* and *because women are still not respected* and *because many men have very bad attitudes to women* – and *because we know it can, has and does happen*. So while that’s difficult for men, it’s much more difficult for the women who need to walk around in a society where you have to be concerned about the threat of rape from men you know AND every time you walk down the street.
I feel bad for the guys that pick up on my fear when I hear them approaching behind me, but nowhere near as bad as I do for women’s needs to constantly be on alert for the sounds of approach when out in public.
Okay, now I’m getting it. I suspect the headline thing is probably just a by-product of this then. So, how do we un-entrench these values?
It’s also interesting how women are told to behave in ways to protect ourselves, yet when it’s turned around to say – ‘women need to protect themselves because of potential rapists’, men get upset that we could possibly think of them that way. A rapist is supposed to be a scary weird person who couldn’t possibly be someone you interact with everyday, or even be one your(male)self because she said xxx, or she would have said xxx etc.
“So, how do we un-entrench these values?”
That’s the $64,000 question!
“A rapist is supposed to be a scary weird person who couldn’t possibly be someone you interact with everyday”
Which is a very good point, Mindy – because most women are raped by someone they know, not a scary stranger in the street. In fact by teaching girls “stranger danger” we are probably teaching them entirely the wrong lesson – we should be teaching them how to deal with someone they KNOW.
It just struck me as I am in the middle of drafting a blog post about the critisisms of Sarah Palin’s decisions during her last pregnancy, that when we read about children being born, we have an opposite problem, where the woman disappears from the frame – think about headlines like Taxi driver delivers baby in car
or Rookie taxi driver delivers baby in car
and of course anything written about doctors delivering babies too – the woman who is actually the subject is reduced to invisibility.
Rebekkas last blog post..Update to abortion post: an email from Senator Simon Birmingham
Absolutely, and we are obviously going wrong somewhere with our boys, because it keeps happening.
“we are obviously going wrong somewhere with our boys, because it keeps happening.”
Although I think we need to teach girls to navigate patriarchy, I’m wary about what you mean by “we” in your second suggestion. I agree that clearly something is going wrong with boys, but if you’re referring to the people who raise individual boys, then I’d say it’s not so much that we’re going wrong, it’s that we are raising them in the context of patriarchy.
Do you think it’s possible to raise them outside the context of the patriarchy, or does that bring us back to the $64 000 question?
Not really possible, no, unless you live in complete isolation cut off from the world. What we can do is teach them to recognise the patriarchy – and navigate it.
But that’s not happening, generally speaking. Yes, in feminist households, and possibly *some* others – but patriarchy and its many manifestations of violence doesn’t appear to be a topic of conversations in many households. Which is what I thought Mindy’s comment was getting at.
I thought we were talking about what an *individual* could do to raise boys and girls who are aware of the patriarchy and how to navigate it, clearly this doesn’t happen in most households, or the patriarchy would stop being perpetuated, yes?
Both really. What I can do personally so that my kids grow up recognising what the patriarchy is and how to work around it, but also what we as a society can do to stop the violence.
Sorry Rebekka, that’s kind of what I was getting at – I think I’m trying to say the same sort of thing, but maybe interpreted Mindy’s point differently and therefor was coming at it from a different angle? I guess that my stance is that we are going wrong as a society precisely because in individual homes people are not talking to their kids about sex and bodies and respect for others and patriarchy and violence – that this kind of ‘Gosh, why would you raise that?’ kind of attitude means that we’re never dealing with the fact that it is ‘regular’ kids who are growing into ‘regular men’ and that some of these ‘regular kids/regular men’ will rape. So I guess kind of thinking that our individual families would be quite unique in our discussions of society/patriarchy/respect etc, but that we’re still kinda implicated? Not sure if I’m making it any clearer or not – have been home looking after my sick son and wading through High Court judgments – I’m a little foggy in the head right now.
But in essence, yes, I agree – you can’t escape the effects of patriarchy, but you can discuss it, name it, and give your kids ways to navigate it.
“because most women are raped by someone they know, not a scary stranger in the street.”
This gets said a lot, and it’s even true. But it’s kind of a blow for women who actually have been raped or assaulted by a total stranger, and god knows there are plenty such women, because some versions (not this one) of the statement pointing out that most rapes are done by people known to the victim also go on to call the stranger kind a myth.
“In fact by teaching girls “stranger danger” we are probably teaching them entirely the wrong lesson – we should be teaching them how to deal with someone they KNOW.”
The whole point. Teach both boys and girls to treat themselves and other people with respect. Don’t teach girls how to construe themselves as potential victims.
I think this is a really important point and also goes to what Rebekka was talking about on another thread: the importance of not obliterating, through our concentration on central themes(which are often validated by the usual patriarchal reliance on statistical measures), the narratives of women whose experience is not representative of a statistical,and therefore inherently believable,majority.
I know I feel really ticked off when I see a circumstance which I experienced dismissed as an almost mythical occurrence.
Word, su.
I don’t honestly see how saying one thing – most women are raped by someone they know – negates another – some women are raped by strangers.
I certainly don’t think stranger rape is a myth. But in terms of where the focus of teaching girls how to navigate patriarchy (and by that I definitely don’t mean teaching them that they’re potential victims), the focus surely needs to be on the most likely risks?
As far as I know, the focus when it comes to teaching kids safety is still ’stranger danger’ – don’t talk to strangers, strangers are scary, strangers could hurt you.
We don’t tell them what to do if someone they know gets them alone and touches them on parts of their body that are not for other people to touch. We don’t tell them what to do if an adult they know makes them feel uncomfortable. We don’t give them the tools they need to navigate these sorts of situations, which are far more likely than stranger danger type situations. And children need to be taught to trust their instincts about strangers as well as people they know.
By saying that one situation is more likely than another, I’m not negating the other situation. And I do think there should be space to discuss both (and children need to be taught both). But the emphasis is currently weighted the wrong way.
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