Tara Murtha at Philadelphia Weekly brings us Watch Your Language: Pedophilia, gang rape and erroneous Fox29 reporting, which has an opinion from a forensic semanticist about calling rape “having sex” or “a sexual relationship” in court:

But after a recent episode of American Idol (team Bowersox), I accidentally caught some of MyFoxPhilly 29’s local news at 10.

I was shocked. Twice. First by the story of 45-year-old accused pedophile Kenneth Schneider. A local attorney, he allegedly traveled to Russia, found a 12-year-old victim and sexually assaulted or raped him for years. Unfortunately, in this day and age, that isn’t what’s shocking. It’s that Fox News reported that Schneider had been accused of traveling to Russia to have sex with a 12-year-old.

I went to the Web site to check it out and sure enough, the same language was there, along with another story so heinous it grabbed international headlines: In Trenton, N.J., a group of up to seven guys—a mix of adults and minors—paid a teenager for her 7-year-old sister. They allegedly gang-raped the girl as the rest of the partygoers looked on.

Yet, the lead in the Web site story began, “Police in New Jersey’s capital say a 15-year-old sold her 7-year-old sister to have sex with as many as seven men and boys.”

Breaking news: The 7-year-old girl from Trenton didn’t “have sex with” up to seven men. If there was sexual contact, she was gang-raped. The 12-year-old boy from Russia didn’t “have a sexual relationship with” the attorney either. If there was sexual contact, he was raped.

Since neither a 12-year-old nor 7-year-old can legally choose to have sex, there’s no room for any of the he said/she said game-playing that makes it so difficult to prosecute rapists who assault other adults. If sexual contact occurred, it was rape. Period.

“If this came to court and I were an expert witness, I think I would have a pretty good argument to say that these reporters are actually reporting the story wrong, that what they are saying is untrue,” says Dr. Muffy Siegel, associate professor of English at Temple University and forensic semanticist.

“We know that what comes in the subject position of ‘have sex with’ is someone who is actively and willingly having sex,” explains Dr. Siegel. “That’s part of the definition of the verb. Since it’s part of the definition … it’s a false statement to say that that little girl had sex with those men, because she wasn’t a willing agent.”

Siegel says that for a similar but technically distinct reason, the way Fox News described what the pedophile attorney did to the 12-year-old as having “a sexual relationship with” the boy is also incorrect.

She says the phrase belongs to a class called ‘symmetric verbs,’ which in layman’s terms means the action has to be consensual.

“It is false to use the verb if they both weren’t agents in it, and clearly they were not,” says Dr. Siegel.

Unfortunately, the issue isn’t just that Fox News is a geyser blowing steaming piles of bullshit into our brains (though of course, it does). They’re not alone. I’ve heard Oprah say “had sex with” when she meant rape, for chrissakes.

But it’s wrong. “[The listener] has in fact literally been told that the children were agents in this activity,” says Dr. Siegel. […]

The language used by Fox News here is even more dangerous because it’s like a new breed of euphemism hidden in plain sight. The language exists already. It’s the language of the perpetrator—and his defense team. It’s language that takes the point of view of the attacker—it was consensual; we had sex but I didn’t rape her, man.

In particularly astonishing news, the comments, at the moment at least, aren’t completely clueless and abusive. (I cannot warrant that this will be true for future comments.)

[hat tip to meloukhia]

Categories: language, violence

Tags: consent, fox news, gang rape, journalism, pedophilia, rape, sex, victim blaming