Full length articleExploring rape culture in social media forums
Introduction
Digital media consumption in contemporary society has become a standard of how many people acquire their news and viewpoints on cultural issues. For instance, the American Press Institute survey found that 69 percent of respondents accessed news information from their laptops and computers within the last week (American Press Institute, 2014). Recently, the Media Insight Project surveyed 1046 Millenials and found that 85 percent polled say, “keeping up with the news is somewhat important” and 69 percent of these individuals read news daily (Media Insight Project, 2015). Most interesting, 86 percent of Millennials report seeing “diverse” opinions in social media on news topics and 40 percent of them pay for a news-specific service, application, or digital subscription (Media Insight Project, 2015). The digital communication through websites and news reports being posted by individuals on those websites contributes to an intersection of cultural discourse about news related events. Thus, leading some sociologists to name the phenomenon as the “digitalization of everyday life” (Lövheim, Jansson, Paasonen, Sumiala, & Teologiska, 2013). This digitalization of everyday life both obscures and reminds us of that fact that identity, agency, and power cannot be attributed to the individual or the machine alone: rather they are the outcome of interactions and negotiations within a network of actors (p.26).
Social science researchers and feminist research have both started to focus on how women, people of color, and sexual identities take shape through words on a webpage. For instance, a recent study by Moss-Racusin, Molenda, and Cramer (2015) analyzed over 831 online comments responding to journalistic articles discussing scientific evidence of gender bias in STEM fields, most notably amongst STEM faculty members. Using thematic analyses, researchers found that although most comments acknowledged that a gender bias exists and some even called for social change, there was still a sizable amount of denial and justifications of gender bias.
Stavrositu and Kim (2015) examined how blogs and the resulting comments sections influence opinions and intentions of the writers making the comments. It was found that user-generated comments could interfere with the message given by the blog itself. Interestingly, when commenters shared optimistic narratives, it could influence the person reading the comment to agree with them. Conversely, if the person commented pessimistically about a risk (in this study, the risk was skin cancer), the responder would not see themselves exposed to the same risk, but rather different from the other commenter.
Similarly, pessimistic discourse in a comment thread has also shown to shape public commentary on social media. Anderson, Brossard, Scheufele, Xenos, and Ladwig (2014) found that both positive and negative discourse can be helpful in shaping and molding public opinion, however the amount of negative discourse can also have a negative impact on healthy dialogue. They state:
Much in the same way that watching uncivil politicians argue on television causes polarization among individuals, impolite and incensed blog comments can polarize online users based on value predispositions utilized as heuristics when processing the blog’s information (Anderson et al., 2014, p. 383).
This article will study the digital discourse of rape culture within comments threads that follow a sexual assault news story. The cultural phenomenon of ‘rape culture’ has been defined by Herman (1984) to be created in society because “it fosters and encourages rape by teaching males and females that it is natural and normal for sexual relations to involve aggressive behavior on the part of males” (p. 52). Recently, Time contributor Zerlina Maxwell described rape culture as “a culture in which sexual violence is the norm and victims are blamed for their own assaults” (Maxwell, 2014). Furthermore, Suran (2014) declared that rape culture was no longer a subculture of feminism, but a systematic and collective problem. Suran asserts that rape culture shows that the “cultural or societal explanation of rape [has] moved causation from a micro to a macro level” and is due to “the prevailing heterosexual power hierarchy to which we have all been inured” (2014, p. 277–8).
Grubb and Turner (2012) reviewed rape myths, gender roles, and substance-use on victim blaming. In this analysis, men demonstrated a higher rape myth acceptance than women, a finding also supported by Suarez and Gadalla (2010). Furthermore, men also blame women more often than women blame women for an alleged rape. Of particular relevance to the present study, Grubb and Turner (2012) discovered that the literature states that women who consume alcohol prior to being raped had higher rates of victim blaming by both sexes, as compared to women who were assaulted while sober.
Most recently, Boux and Daum (2015) examined how technology and social media is used in the investigation of rape and sexual assaults when perpetrators and their peers document the incident. The researchers asserted that technology creates new avenues for victim blaming in regard to rape cases and society, overall. Consequently, it was found that social media challenges, as well as reinforces, rape culture within society by adding rape myth commentary to the discussion. The present researchers seek to expand on this innovative research by exploring rape culture within social media.
Moreover, the present researchers are interested in exploring how social media comment threads following newspaper articles shape discourse on attitudes and viewpoints about rape and sexual assault. Specifically, if rape cultural beliefs are observed to be a part of comment threads. As the incidence of sexual assault rises among men and women in the United States, and the media reports on it, the researchers seek to explore how viewpoints on the crime of sexual assault are discussed in social media comment threads. That is, is there a discourse of rape culture within the thread of comments under newspaper articles reporting about rape?
Section snippets
Publications
The researchers reviewed newspaper periodicals in order to assess for evidence of rape culture. According to documentation by the Alliance for Audited Media (2013), the researchers gathered the top four newspapers in the United States, as determined by average circulation of the top twenty-five U.S. newspapers. This list included digital editions, comprising of those accessible on computers, smartphones, tablets, restricted websites, as well as branded applications.
The periodicals chosen for
Results
The major themes that emerged from the qualitative content analysis include, Victim Blaming and Questioning, Survivor Support, Perpetrator Support, and Statements about Law and Society. For more information on thematic findings refer to Table 1, which summarizes all major themes and sub-themes coded in data analysis. These themes, along with various sub-themes will be discussed in detail below, along with quotations from the data to exemplify the themes. All quotations are direct quotes, which
Discussion
The present study sought to examine how prominent rape culture is within online social media forums following news articles reporting about rape and sexual assault. The results show that rape culture is prominent within online social media comment threads and victim blaming is the prevailing attitude in which it is expressed. Even though there are many factors, it appears victim blaming and questioning may be the driving force of rape culture in social media, as it creates hostility and
Limitations
Despite the authors’ efforts to select articles in a systematic method, there are limitations to this study that prevent further conclusions from being drawn. First, during the data collection period, the media climate was rampant with articles about rape and sexual assault, particularly on high profile cases. Bill Cosby is a revered celebrity who is loved by many, which may have influenced the audiences’ views toward Mr. Cosby and the accusations against him may have prompted his fans to
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