Rape - FishbowlLA

BACKLASH: Politically Correct Female Journos Gang Up on PTSD Essayist

Pandora Young — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 14:48:09 +0000

San Francisco-based journalist Mac McClelland recently wrote a devastatingly honest essay for Good about the rape-related post-traumatic stress disorder she suffered after working in Haiti. The story was not about Haiti, it was about how the author dealt with the psychological trauma of sexual violence. But that didn’t stop a group of 36 female journalists and researchers attacking McClelland in an open letter.

Here’s how they use PC bullshit to criticize a woman for speaking about her personal experience with sexual harassment and violence:

In writing about a country filled with guns, “ugly chaos” and “gang-raping monsters who prowl the flimsy encampments,” she paints Haiti as a heart-of-darkness dystopia, which serves only to highlight her own personal bravery for having gone there in the first place. She makes use of stereotypes about Haiti that would be better left in an earlier century: the savage men consumed by their own lust, the omnipresent violence and chaos, the danger encoded in a black republic’s DNA.

Um, no. McClelland gave an honest account of her personal experience. She never once suggested sexual violence was a problem limited to Haiti, or perpetrated primarily by black men. Did these people even read the essay? Can you say “projection”?

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NY Times Defends Victim Blaming Coverage of Child Rape Case

Pandora Young — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 14:08:18 +0000

A NY Times story about the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl by 18 men has sparked outrage – and not just at the horrific nature of the crime, but at the paper’s coverage. The NYT article needlessly wrote that the child dressed older than her 11 years, that she wore makeup, that she hung out with teenage boys at a playground. In the case of any rape, how a victim dresses and who she is friends with has no relevance to the crime committed against her.

But despite the public outcry, the NYT remains unapologetic. Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokesperson for the paper, made the following statement to Yahoo! news blog The Cutline:

Neighbors’ comments about the girl, which we reported in the story, seemed to reflect concern about what they saw as a lack of supervision that may have left her at risk. As for residents’ references to the accused having to ‘live with this for the rest of their lives,’ those are views we found in our reporting. They are not our reporter’s reactions, but the reactions of disbelief by townspeople over the news of a mass assault on a defenseless 11-year-old. We are very aware of and sensitive to the concerns that arise in reporting about sexual assault. This story is still developing and there is much to be learned about how something so horrific could have occurred.

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