The Fashionable Regulation Library
‘When Rape Goes Viral’ seems at why circumstances like Steubenville occur
Three high-profile circumstances of sexual assault in 2012 adopted a fundamental sample: A teenage lady was sexually assaulted at a home get together by a number of teenage boys whereas she was incapacitated by alcohol. The assaults had been recorded, and the photographs, movies and tales had been shared on social media or through texts. The photographs and movies had been used to ridicule the victims amongst their friends. These texts and posts later turned proof in prison circumstances.
These incidents came about in Steubenville, Ohio; Maryville, Missouri; and Saratoga, California, and sparked nationwide conversations about youths, expertise and sexual assault in 2013.
“The query gnawing at everybody, myself included, was: What had been these children considering?” writes Anna Gjika, a sociology professor who research crime and gender points.
Greater than 10 years later, Gjika has tried to reply that query in her new ebook, When Rape Goes Viral: Youth and Sexual Assault within the Digital Age. She took a detailed take a look at the three assaults in 2012 however identifies plenty of related cases which have occurred extra just lately.
One of many parts that the general public discovered surprising in regards to the circumstances was what number of bystanders filmed or photographed the unconscious women or the sexual assaults as they had been occurring, with out intervening.
In speaking to individuals concerned within the circumstances and to teenagers on the whole as a part of her analysis, Gjika discovered that the younger individuals didn’t consider their social media as archival a lot as “of the second.” They filmed and posted what was occurring round themselves as a result of they had been used to doing that.
“Sharing an expertise has develop into an integral a part of the expertise,” Gjika writes.
On this episode of The Fashionable Regulation Library podcast, Gjika and the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles talk about her analysis into generational attitudes towards social media and sexual assault, the guarantees and pitfalls of digital proof in sexual assault circumstances, how social media will be empowering or degrading for survivors, the social accountability held by the authorized neighborhood and the tech trade, and what interventions might be efficient to stop such assaults from going down.
Digital proof, resembling cellphone movies and texts, will be extraordinarily helpful to prosecutors seeking to show incidents of sexual assault, significantly when victims are unable to recount their expertise as a result of they had been unconscious or impaired through the assaults.
However Gjika explains that this sort of proof isn’t uncomplicated. The best way that juries understand the proof will nonetheless be filtered by societal expectations and prejudices. Protection attorneys shouldn’t have the identical entry to digital proof from tech corporations and often lack capability to course of immense quantities of knowledge.
The experience, willingness and sources of police departments and prosecutors’ places of work to hunt out this proof additionally differ extensively. And the victims will be additional traumatized by the use in court docket of photos and video of their assaults and the information that the photographs proceed to be disseminated on the web.
In closing, Rawles and Gjika talk about what actions will be taken by faculties, the authorized neighborhood and the tech trade to stop such assaults or to help victims whose assaults have been digitally documented. Gjika thinks that instructional packages and trainings for teenagers need to concentrate on peer teams and norms, fairly than emphasizing particular person accountability, and “should be grounded inside adolescents’ lived experiences, fairly than on grownup fears and anxieties.”
She additionally argues that adults, in addition to teenagers, would profit from “moral digital citizenship initiatives,” the place ideas resembling privateness and on-line decision-making might be mentioned. And she or he suggests the creation of government-funded organizations to help survivors with eradicating digital content material from the web.
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In This Podcast:
Anna Gjika
Anna Gjika is an assistant professor of sociology on the State College of New York at New Paltz, the place she teaches undergraduate programs on crime and society, the sociology of violence, and gender and crime. Her analysis explores the intersections of gendered violence and expertise. She is the creator of When Rape Goes Viral: Youth and Sexual Assault within the Digital Age.
