Virtualized Violence and Anonymous Juries: Unpacking Steubenville’s “Big Red” Sexual Assault Case and the Role of Social Media

Abstract

In this article, we analyze a 2012 sexual assault case from Steubenville, Ohio, and the hacktivist “Anonymous” group response to the sexual assault. Drawing on Paul Virilio’s discussion of dromoscopy and concept of virtualization, we demonstrate the speed at which a “local” sexual assault can be exposed and go viral and how broader publics can be interpellated as bystanders in such cases. We show how emerging forms of online activism are exposing and contesting these new forms of violence against women and consider their potential to erode criminal justice blockages to justice for survivors of sexual violence.

Keywords

sexual assault technology dromoscopy social media criminal justice violence against women activism

Introduction

News stories are ephemeral in virtual contexts, moving through time and space quickly due to the vast quantity of information circulating the Internet on a daily basis. Yet every so often one story or image evokes massive public attention and emotion and crystallizes a set of emerging social issues. In 2012, a case from Steubenville, Ohio, presented such an event. The story of high school athletes perpetrating sexual assault in a tightly knit, football fanatical town encapsulated deeply embedded power dynamics surrounding sexual violence and sports. However, the case became particularly newsworthy for two reasons: first, the assault was captured and shared through tweets and digital photos on social media by perpetrators and complicit bystanders, as they documented themselves carrying an unconscious young woman from party to party where she was repeatedly sexually assaulted. Second, the case remained a local event for several months until blogger Alexandra Goddard’s efforts eventually led to a New York Times story and intervention from hacktivist collective Anonymous, which catapulted the case into national and international attention. As a contribution to feminist criminology, this case study of the Steubenville sexual assault and prosecution provides an important site for advancing our understandings of sexual violence, new technologies, and the criminal justice system, including continued debates around rape law, victim-blaming, and documentation of evidence (see Spohn, 1999).

In this article, we unpack the implications of what we refer to as the virtualization of sexual assault through a study of the Steubenville sexual assault case and the societal reaction, including an Anonymous hacktivist operative’s response to the sexual assault. We define virtualization of sexual assault as the creation and circulation of online representation(s) of sexual assault that has occurred in a different time and space. We argue that the existence of this online representation shapes both the act of sexual assault and the social response it generates. Furthermore, the Steubenville case, as a case study of virtualization of sexual assault, reveals some of the unique possibilities and challenges at the intersections of digital media, protest movements, and sexual violence against women response and prevention. First, it reveals the process by which a “local” sexual assault can be uncovered and brought to global attention. This transition from local to global shifts the event from a localized context where individual attributes such as perpetrator’s athletic abilities are focal points, and links it to larger antiviolence movements as well as cultural scripts about sexual violence, rape culture, and sports heroes. Second, this case reveals how broader publics can be interpellated (brought in and take on positions) as active bystanders (Banyard, Plante, & Moynihan, 2004; Burn, 2008; Coker et al., 2011) and operate outside the criminal justice system as a form of public jury online. The role of publics as juries in these cases is particularly salient when the accused parties are high-profile figures in the local context, such as the Steubenville football players. Although negative (re)actions such as victim-blaming can and do occur in social media, there is also a shift where the spotlight is removed from the particular survivor¹ when the event becomes part of a larger narrative about sexual violence.

In what follows, we review the extant literature on sexual assault survivors’ interactions with the criminal justice system, in order to highlight the systemic issues that are focal points for antiviolence advocates and activists. Next, we discuss some key works in digital activism and offer an overview of Paul Virilio’s concept of dromoscopy to highlight the importance of notions of time and space in digital activism, and to consider the implications of dromoscopy on understanding sexual assault in the context of social media. Following this, we explain the infamous Steubenville sexual assault case and explore its relationship to broader publics and bystanders through social media. We consider this case both in terms of its impacts on survivors and in terms of how it provides possibilities for changing existing institutional and extrainstitutional responses to sexual assault perpetrators.

Scholars have discussed cybercrime (Brenner, 2010; Wall, 2008) and new forms of sexual violence enabled by digital technologies more broadly, such as sexual harassment online and nonconsensual sharing of intimate images (Powell, 2010; Salter, 2013). However, there has been little reflection on how these 21st-century technologies necessitate changes to the police response to sexual violence and shifts in broader public attitudes surrounding sexual violence (see Powell & Henry, 2018), and also the influence of these shifts on criminal justice actors, who define boundaries of criminal behavior (Small, 2015). Our analysis of this case broadens understandings of sexual violence against women in two fundamental ways. First, by introducing the work of Paul Virilio and dromoscopy to discussions of new media, we contribute to understanding the impacts of new media on sexual violence against women in terms of considerations of time and space. Second, we demonstrate how emerging “public squares” of online activism (Schulz & Cannon, 2012) are exposing and contesting these new forms of sexual violence against women and may therefore have the potential to erode systemic blockages to justice for survivors of sexual violence. In relation to both contributions, speed and virtualization are central to our understanding the harms of digital perpetration of violence as well as the need for rapid social responses to these events.

Sexual Violence and the Failure of the Criminal Justice System

The criminal justice system is the institutional means to hold individuals accountable for sexual assault but has historically failed in encouraging survivors to report their victimization (Spohn, 1999). Feminist criminologists emphasize how the system does not serve women’s interests (Taylor & Norma, 2012) and argue for the need to focus on long-term criminal justice reform that addresses the “fundamental inadequacies” of criminal justice responses to sexual assault (Smith & Skinner, 2012, p. 298). Sexual violence against women continues to be one of the most heavily underreported crimes (Johnson & Dawson, 2011; Spohn & Tellis, 2012; Stubbs, 2008), despite the fact that surveys reveal it to be common (e.g., World Health Organization & London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 2010) . This underreporting can be attributed in large part to the fact that survivors of sexual violence who report these crimes are subjected to procedures within the criminal justice system that are often revictimizing (Kaukinen & DeMaris, 2009). Jan Jordan (2001, p. 679) argues that police and sexual assault survivors remain “worlds apart” in their perspectives and needs, and as such, “little in the way of substantive improvements appears possible within this historically and cross-cultural fraught area.”

One way that survivors’ realities and criminal justice response to sexual assault remain so far apart is due to notions of the “ideal victim” (Christie, 1986; Removed for review) that are deeply embedded in discourse around sexual assault. Here, survivors are seen as more credible when they meet certain criteria believed to indicate that they have experienced a “real” sexual assault, such as the following: They made a report immediately after the assault, a weapon was used, and/or there is clear evidence of physical trauma. However, a majority of incidents of sexual violence are not representative of these standard rape myths. That is, most perpetrators are known to the survivor, weapons are not often used to commit the assault,² and survivors often do not report the incident immediately (Johnson & Dawson, 2011). These characteristics of sexual assault cases contradict misconceptions of what sexual assault looks like. Yet the criminal justice system’s reliance on these forms of evidence means that survivors must endure the scrutiny and disbelief of many police and officials. This disbelief, combined with the negative responses and stigma attached to reporting sexual assault, leads many women to not report these crimes (Belknap, 2010; Clay-Warner & Burt, 2005; Lonsway & Archambault, 2012; Orchowski & Gidycz, 2012). When women do in fact report instances of sexual assault to police, they may run into further barriers such as aggressive questioning, insensitivity to the trauma that has been inflicted by the assault, victim blaming, and refusal to continue with an investigation due to disbelief on the part of the officer (Maier, 2008, p. 793). These attitudes and procedures stem in part from improper training of police for dealing with sexual assault cases and victims (Maier, 2008, 2012; Prokos & Padavic, 2002).

Furthermore, systemic problems exist even when charges do go forward. Research has shown that there has been a steady decline in arrest rates in sexual assault cases in the United States (Lonsway & Archambault, 2012), and that police definitions of rape may vary from legal definitions (Campbell & Johnson, 1997). Police use their discretion when deciding whether to make an arrest in sexual assault cases, and this discretion is based on the individual officer’s perception of victim credibility and whether a case will go to trial and arrive at a conviction (Patterson, 2012; Spohn & Tellis, 2012). Factors that influence this credibility include the survivor’s ability to remember the assault and identify the perpetrator, her willingness to press charges, the amount of time between when the incident occurred and when the incident was reported, whether she knew the perpetrator, and if a weapon was involved (Spohn & Tellis, 2012, p. 174). Thus, even if individual police officers believe the survivor, they may be hesitant to proceed if they feel that the account will not hold up through the criminal justice proceedings.

Finally, survivors of sexual assault are also often revictimized through the various processes within the actual court system. According to Herman (2005), revictimization of survivors stems from the court’s design, which is predicated on the idea that all individuals that come before the court are equal, and ignores discrepancies in power that are based on age, gender, race, and social status. Similarly, the adversarial method by which the court attempts to arrive at the truth is one that allows “aggressive argument, selective presentation of the facts, and psychological attack” (Herman, 2005, p. 572). These processes, particularly in our rape-myth saturated society, are revictimizing for survivors and allow only a select few ideal victims (Greer, 2007) to hold up in court. Finally, in the cases where survivors do subject themselves to the criminal justice processes, conviction rates of those accused of sexual assault are low (Lees, 2002; McGregor, Mont, & Myhr, 2002), and even lower when the accused is an athlete (Benedict & Klein, 1998).

Thus, the criminal justice system not only fails victims of sexual assault through low conviction rates, it revictimizes individuals in a variety of different ways that ultimately leads to a lack of justice for victims of sexual assault. Moreover, the consequences of ideal victim myths may be magnified in situations where the accused possesses a specific type of status or hero quality in society, such as a high-profile athlete. The Steubenville sexual assault case highlights a need for feminist criminology to consider the relationship between official criminal justice system treatment of survivors and notions of justice. While criminal justice responses have been more generally studied within feminist criminology, this article considers the role of social media in relation to the level of case exposure, visual imagery, and the speed of online activism, and further illustrates the limitations of the criminal justice system in achieving justice for sexual violence survivors.

Digital Activism, Dromoscopy, and Social Movements

While the failures of the criminal justice system to address sexual violence have been highlighted in recent years, the possibilities of digital activism for social justice operations have garnered much attention. Digital activism is a political campaigning practice that uses digital network infrastructure to pursue social change (Joyce, 2010) and emphasizes interactivity and participation (Lievrouw, 2011). In this landscape, new forms of civic participation are visible: These “participatory civics” are dissatisfied with existing governments and thus use digital media to act beyond influencing representative governments to pursue change (Zuckerman, 2014; see also, Karatzogianni, 2015). Debates reign on the democratic potential of digital activism and technologies’ ability to facilitate change (see Joyce, 2010; Hands, 2011). Hands (2011) explains that

the mere fact that something is online does not make it egalitarian, emancipatory or democratic; by the same token, and contrary to the concerns of many cyber-pessimists, it does not automatically make it an example of domination, populism or mob rule. (p. 20)

Digital activism has a broader reach of global audience and lower barriers to entry in terms of cost (Earl & Kimport, 2011). For the purposes of this article, however, we are primarily interested in digital technologies’ role in the reshaping of social events and protest movements through the affordances they offer in terms of time and space. Here we are drawing from Earl and Kimport’s (2011) notion of affordances as “the type of action or a characteristic of actions that a technology enables through its design” (p. 33). Digital activism involves a shift whereby protest is no longer dependent on social movements or long-term activists, where those not physically present can be involved and where “innovative uses of web technologies allow time to become a variable for social movements rather than automatically set to ‘long’” (Earl & Kimport, 2011, p. 186; see also Bruns, 2011).

Thus, to integrate digital activism scholarship with more theoretical understandings of time, we introduce a new body of work into the discussion of virtualization of sexual assault: the work of French cultural and political theorist Paul Virilio and, in particular, the concept of dromoscopy. Virilio is considered one of the most original thinkers of the late 20th and early 21st century and prominently known for his work on technology and how it is fundamental to the shaping of human experience. He focuses on speed and what he refers to as dromology, the science of speed. Dromology is the body of knowledge concerned with the phenomenology of speed, and specifically, the way speed determines and/or limits the manner in which things appear to us (see James, 2007). Dromoscopy is the experience of speed and its potentially destructive impact on contemporary society. Virilio (2008) insists that vectors of movement and the speed of transmission with which these vectors of movement are achieved at a decisive and fundamental level shape all social and political space. The ever-increasing speeds that have determined movement in modern Western society have caused “the traditional political structures to implode” (Virilio, 2008, p. 57). For Virilio, the speed enabled by technology, specifically, shapes our individual and collective apprehension of time and space. His questioning of technology is intended to allow critical reflection on the dominant technologies of our time, but this concept has not been used with a feminist criminology lens. Thus, we take up Virilio in order to explore how speed and alternative political structures shaped the events in Steubenville.

Virilio contends that the accelerated speeds of transmission and communication afforded by modern technologies lead to a loss of immediate presence and aspects of lived embodied experience. In terms of the instantaneity of telecommunication, there is a negation of space, a crisis of dimensions and of representations, and distortion of worlds (Virilio, 2008; Virilio & Beitchman, 2009). Virilio is interested in the ways in which perception is conditioned by physical possibilities and orientation of the material body in the world. He distinguishes between physical presence, which involves both seeing and touching, and virtual presence, which involves a separation of what is perceived in any visual field and the ability of our body to touch, use, or manipulate that which is perceived. Virilio refers to virtual presence as resulting in a loss of density, durability, and thickness of physical bodies. He laments that the “emergence of forms, of volumes destined to persist in the duration of their material support has been succeeded by images whose sole duration is that of retinal persistence” (Virilio, 1991, p. 26). The image becomes all that remains. It is then manipulable and open for transmission across large expanses of time and space. Concomitantly, virtual presence brings a new “chronopolitics” consisting of “dromocratic” forms of participation and ever increasing number of spectators across national borders (Virilio, 2002).

While Virilio views accelerated speeds of transmission and communication as having destructive effects on contemporary society broadly, here we focus on how acceleration of communication technology enables positive features in the context of digital activism. Specifically, they allow for the coming together of activists across vast spaces and times to protest (Earl & Kimport, 2011), and for 24/7 news cycles and protest movements (Bruns, 2011). In this article, then, we are interested in the role of technology in mediating both the perpetration of sexual assault as well as the social reaction to this crime. We use Virilio’s work on dromology both to unpack the particular importance of speed and collapsed contexts of time and space and to show that the acceleration in speeds of transmission and communication of images afforded by modern technologies allows for a much broader context of social response to sexual assault witnessed through social media. In particular, witnessing images instantaneously across vast space reveals how contemporary technological advances have not only shaped our sense of embodiment (Kilteni, Groten, & Slater, 2012), but, additionally, how mediatized images can be invested with complex emotions (Ahmed, 2004; Clough, 2010; Virilio, 2007). While we view the efficacy of technology in society in a different sense than Virilio,³ we point to the fact that it is precisely these shifting notions of time and space and, specifically, the speed and geographic reach of social media that allow for the interpellation of far more bystanders and that increase possibilities for justice for survivors than in the past. These broader protest actions upset the traditional role of the justice system in virtualized sexual assaults, as the justice system is reacting not only to the events of the actual sexual assault but also to the verdict delivered by the public jury mobilized through social media and catalyzed by actors such as Anonymous and their supporters. In light of the events in Steubenville, then, we ask, how does the virtualized nature of this sexual assault encourage new understandings of the sexual assault itself, as well as justice system and social movements to address sexual violence?

The Case: The Big Red Football Team and the “Rape Crew”

The widely publicized events of the Steubenville sexual assault case (see Table 1) unfolded on August 11, 2012, when two young men and various complicit bystanders sexually assaulted a 16-year-old girl at a series of parties in and around Steubenville. As Gwynne (2013, para. 3) explains, an alleged “rape crew” dragged the girl from party-to-party while she alternated between barely conscious and vomiting, and passed out. Witness testimony suggested that she experienced multiple sexual assaults while she was unconscious (Gwynne, 2013). Various people, including at least two Big Red football team members, documented the assaults through Twitter comments and photographs, and comments made by another team member describing the assaults were posted on YouTube. As Macur (2012, p. 1) explains, “Twitter users wrote the words #rape and #drunkgirl, and some referred to the girl as “the dead body.” At least one Twitter comment suggested that the girl had been urinated on.” In the days that followed, the girl’s parents were told about what had unfolded at the parties and online and they went to the police. Big Red football players Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, both 16, were arrested on August 22.

Table 1.

Timeline of Events.

August 11, 2012	Assaults occur at a series of parties in Steubenville, Ohio, documented and shared through social media.
August 14, 2012	Parents of victim file reports with the Steubenville police department using photographs and video obtained online.
August 22, 2012	Mays and Richmond arrested.
August 23, 2012	Blogger Alexandra Goddard begins blogging about the Steubenville Big Red Rape Accusations at prinniefied.com
August 29, 2012	Ohio Supreme Court appoints Judge to case.
October 2012	Two parents of a Steubenville teen attempt to stop Alexandra Goddard from publishing allegedly defamatory posts about their son in relation to the sexual assault (Saltsman v. Goddard).
October 12, 2012	Hearing where Judge rules probable cause for rape charges.
November 1, 2012	Judge rules both defendants will be tried as juveniles, both released under house arrest.
December 2012	Saltsman v. Goddard case dismissed after Goddard agrees to post a statement that the Saltsman was remorseful about his role in the aftermath of the Steubenville High School rape case.
December 16, 2012	New York Times publishes piece in Sports section, “Rape Case Unfolds on Web and Splits City.”
December 23, 2012	Hacker collective Anonymous hacks Big Red fan website “Roll Red Roll,” alleging a cover up among school officials and football coaches and threatening to reveal personal information about those involved.
December 30, 2012	Occupy Steubenville holds the first of three rallies in support of victim Jane Doe.
January 2, 2013	Lostutter releases video of former Big Red student Michael Nodianos joking about the sexual assault. Elicits calls from several groups for Nodianos to be charged as well. Local Leaks released a large quantity of data called “The Steubenville Files” that made various allegations against prominent Steubenville residents.
March 17, 2013	Mays and Richmond found guilty at trial, and receive a 2-year and 1-year minimum sentence respectively.
April 15, 2013	FBI raids Derek Lostutter’s home in connection with the Anonymous hacks related to the Big Red football team.
January 5, 2014	Richmond released from detention.
August 2014	Richmond rejoins the Steubenville Big Red football team.
January 2015	Mays released from detention.
January/February 2015	Charges against superintendent Michael McVey dropped in exchange for resignation as superintendent; IT director Rhinaman reaches deal with prosecutors and pleads guilty to one count of obstructing official business.

Despite the social media evidence, there was little mainstream press coverage of the events for some time. In fact, starting on August 23, 2012, and continuing for several months, blogger Alexandria Goddard, a web analyst and crime blogger who had previously lived in Steubenville, was the only person reporting on the assault. Goddard documented social media postings made the night of the assault through screenshots and called for attention to the case. Goddard identified several current and former Steubenville athletes by name, accused them of playing a criminal role in the assault by failing to stop it, and by disseminating photos of the assault (Macur & Schweber, 2012). As the weeks went on, online debate grew heated and many anonymous commenters condemned the high school, its football coaching staff, and the local police for their lack of response and alleged cover up (Macur & Schweber, 2012). Steubenville was a town divided between those standing behind the players and their families, and those who felt the untouchable nature of the Big Red athletes was a toxic influence in the case and needed to come to an end.

Notwithstanding the heated debate (or perhaps because of it), there was great difficulty in building a tight case for the sexual assault, and the Steubenville Police Chief struggled to get witnesses to come forward with information on the case. The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation confiscated and analyzed 15 phones and two iPads, yet these devices yielded little in the way of hard evidence, as most of the photos and mobile postings had been deleted (Macur & Schweber, 2012). Goddard’s efforts to bring widespread attention to the case had been essentially quashed after being hit with a defamation lawsuit by one of the player’s families who had been involved in posting photos from the assaults. However, in December 2012, the New York Times published a piece on the sexual assault and alleged cover up in Steubenville that was read by now identified Anonymous member Derric Lostutter, a 26-year-old programmer in Lexington, Kentucky. A friend of Goddard’s connected with Lostutter over social media and passed on the incriminating postings collected to date, and Lostutter (whose mother was a survivor of domestic abuse) told them he would “take it from here” (Kushner, 2013, para. 23).

The Response: Anonymous Retaliation and the Criminal Justice Response

On December 23, 2012, the case took on a new level of attention with the involvement of hacktivist collective Anonymous. Recognizable for their activist tactics aimed to collectively challenge concentrations of power deemed corrupt, Anonymous’ controversial hacking tactics, as well as their refusal to have a hierarchy or leader, have garnered much attention in recent years. While a full understanding is beyond the scope of this article (see Coleman, 2014), key to the origin and nature of Anonymous is a complex and diverse system of networks that emphasizes anti-individualism, collective identity, and challenging power and corruption in creative and public ways. Despite the general impossibility of simple packaging of the movement and the identification of a celebrity leader (Coleman, 2014), in the case of Steubenville, Anonymous actions were primarily driven by one Anonymous operative, though it was this association with Anonymous that, in part, garnered international attention. As the New York Times reported at the time,

computer hackers hijacked the Web site of a prominent Ohio high school football team late Sunday, threatening to release the personal data of school officials, coaches and every player on the team if those involved in a suspected rape did not publicly apologize to the girl and her family. (Macur, 2012, p. 1)

It was later learned that this threat to release personal information (known as “doxxing”) was made by Lostutter, who was going by the name KYAnonymous online. It quickly attracted the attention of other people identifying as Anonymous (called Anons). The threat was not carried out at the January 1, 2013, deadline because the survivor, Jane Doe, intervened, letting KYAnonymous know that she did not want innocent members of the team targeted. However, on January 2, Lostutter uploaded a 12-min clip of a former Steubenville athlete. According to Kushner (2013),

the 12 minute clip showed Michael Nodianos, a former Steubenville jock, drunkenly joking about the rape on the night of the attack, referring to the victim repeatedly as the “dead girl.” He said, “they raped her harder than that cop raped Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction” and “peed on her. That’s how you know she’s dead, because someone pissed on her.” Through his lawyer, Nodianos later apologized. (para. 36)

That same day, another site called Local Leaks released a large quantity of data called “The Steubenville Files” that made various allegations against prominent Steubenville residents (Kushner, 2013). The social media response was swift, with major media sites and blogs linking to the post, mounting outrage, and the targets of the allegations declaring defamation. As public outcry grew and reports came in of independent Anons taking matters into their own hands (harassing Steubenville residents, throwing rocks at their homes), backlash emerged on social media. Lostutter himself asked that people respect Jane Doe’s wishes, yet recognized that “there was little he could do to close Pandora’s Box” (Kushner, 2013, para. 40).

Shortly after the case gained global attention, Lostutter received a tip that the FBI was watching him. Minutes after tweeting that he was “going dark” for a while, Lostutter received a tweet from an unknown account identifying him by full name and city. A few months later on April 17, one month after Mays and Richmond were convicted for the assault, the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided Lostutter’s house. Mays and Richmond, the Big Red athletes charged in the assault, received 2-year and 1-year sentences, respectively (their potential maximum sentences were greater than 25 years). Richmond was released in January 2014 from a juvenile detention center after serving 9 months of his 1-year sentence, and in August 2014 returned to the Big Red football team. In October and November 25, 2013, a grand jury indicted William Rhinaman, the IT director for Steubenville City Schools, and Michael McVey, Steubenville’s School Superintendent, respectively, on felony charges involving obstructing justice, tampering with evidence, obstructing official business, and falsification (Kushner, 2013). Two other school officials were also indicted, facing misdemeanor charges including failure to report child abuse and making false statements (Dahl, 2013). In February 2015, Rhinaman reached a deal with prosecutors and pled guilty to one count of obstructing official business and was sentenced to 90 days in jail, 80 of which were to be suspended if Rhinaman completed 1 year of community service (Pelzer, 2015). Charges against the other two school employees were dropped in exchange for community service, and charges against superintendent McVey were dropped on the condition that McVey resign as superintendent (Pelzer, 2015).

Discussion: Social Media and Exposing “Local” Sexual Assault

There are numerous layers and details to the Steubenville sexual assault case that are not possible to fully unpack here. But what is clear is that this case has been a catalyst for attention to the relationship between sexual violence and social media. As Gwynne (2013, p. 2) explains,

at the very least, the case is a disturbing reflection of America’s rape culture. But it’s also an interesting glimpse into social media, and how it cannot only implicate people in a crime, but also be used to hold them accountable when the justice system has not. Should Anonymous be correct that there was a subpar investigation of the alleged rape, social media has allowed Americans outside of the town to rally for the victim and demand justice. Without that, her case may have been confined to the small town where half of the residents reportedly believe that she is the one to blame.

To further our understanding of the role of social media in the virtualization of sexual assault, we identify and discuss three aspects of social media that are salient to the Steubenville sexual assault case: technology-facilitated evidence dissemination and evidence capture, challenges to the authority of local sports heroes, and interpellation of active bystanders and virtual juries.

Virtualization of Evidence in Social Media

Two of the affordances (Earl & Kimport, 2011) that social media platforms such as Twitter offer are (a) the ability to share content in live time and (b) the ability to screenshot and capture content that then remains as a digital image, even after the original content is deleted. As Gwynne argues above, social media did indeed enable Americans, as well as international publics, to rally for the victim and to demand justice. However, important social media-facilitated processes had to occur first. In particular, the speed of evidence capture played a critical role in the case. Blogger Goddard took screenshots of tweets and images related to the case in the early days following the assault, before the police investigation began, and before those who had witnessed and been active participants in the assaults deleted their tweets and photos. In this situation, social media enabled a locally and technologically connected individual to provide time-sensitive evidence, as well as to expose the raw evidence in more global contexts. It was this individual’s work that garnered the attention of the New York Times and then, consequentially, Anonymous. In the months following the assault, when Goddard was silenced by the defamation lawsuit from local parents, this digital evidence was shared with Anonymous operative Lostutter, who then took a different tactical approach through targeting the Big Red website and doxxing individuals seemingly involved with protecting Mays and Richmond.

In this article, virtualization of sexual assault refers to the creation and circulation of online representation(s) vis-à-vis images or descriptions of a sexual assault that has occurred in a different time and space. In the Steubenville case, this virtualization shapes both the act of sexual assault and the social response it generates. Documenting the assaults on the unconscious young woman using social media not only provided evidence of the assault, but, perhaps, garnered additional outrage because it was local evidence of a broader cultural pattern of male athletes’ violence against women. That there were witnesses who did nothing to intervene, and who promoted the violence in virtual contexts, challenges the notion that sexual violence is the product of a few isolated individuals. In addition, the virtualization of evidence broadens the context under which the violence takes place and significantly increases in the number of witnesses. Tweets, blogs, and Facebook posts serve to generalize the image of sexual assault and create a series of interconnected bystanders who may not be in the corporeal copresence of the sexual violence but are “there” nonetheless. They are “there” in the sense that they are witnesses to a case that is still unfolding: there has been no criminal justice resolution, no official ruling on who are the guilty parties. Through the speed at which images are transmitted to these intentional and unintentional bystanders, dissemination and evaluation of evidence by public juries becomes a process occurring outside of the traditional criminal justice system.

Local Culture and Dromoscopy in Social Media

Once the assault was virtualized, it was taken out of its local context where the perpetrators were two known, well-regarded young sports heroes. In the local context of Steubenville, these young men’s reputations and futures, as well as those of the renowned Big Red football team, were something to be guarded, protected, and defended. However, in the social media context where “traditional political structures implode” (Virilio, 2008, p. 57), the story became about more than eventual criminal justice outcomes: It became a movement to put forward support and solidarity through online and physical protest, to express outrage that such a chain of events had been allowed to occur in this local context, and to hold those in power accountable online in ways that bypass official justice mechanisms. Beyond holding individual perpetrators accountable, however, this case demonstrates how Anonymous operated in social media to highlight the failure of other actors (coaches, school board officials). In virtual, geographically collapsed contexts, this mobilized outrage is rhizomatic (Beck, 2016) in that it originates from dispersed locales and is not necessarily connected via a central institution such as a union or coalition. Targets of this outrage were the abuse of power by athletes and officials, victim degradation, and a culture that often implicitly or explicitly accepts violence against women as an inevitable side effect of athletic dominance. In a participatory online environment that favors speed of message and timely actions, the circulation of images of the assault and the rape-supportive commentary were so highly evocative for so many people that these witnessing audiences became mobilized publics demanding national conversation about sexual violence, rape culture, and social media.

The privileged position of male athletes in society is well established and has received much attention in relation to the treatment of the Steubenville perpetrators following the assault. However, in addition to thinking about the attitudes or actions of individual athletes, advancing feminist criminology within sport and social media requires further consideration. Specifically, Steubenville provides one example of how hypermasculinist sports culture may combine with technological opportunities presented by social media in the context of sexual assault and its virtualization. For example, Messner and Stevens (2007) identify suppression of empathy, voyeuring, and a culture of silence as particularly relevant to understanding violence against women perpetrated by male athletes. The suppression of empathy toward young women is evident in the Steubenville case through the objectification and degradation of the young woman (“the dead body”). Whether she was targeted prior to becoming unconscious (i.e., drugged or intentionally plied with alcohol) or afterward is unknown, but what is clear is that, once unconscious, the perpetrators felt entitled to treat her as an object deserving of humiliation and sexually violent actions. Voyeuring played an important role in the virtualization of this sexual assault through the images, screen shots, and videos captured and accompanied by content glorifying or trivializing the sexual assault. At a time where there is growing understanding of cyberviolence and online sexual shaming as a form of sexual harassment (Citron, 2009, Salter, 2013), this secondary victimization was, for many, seen as an extension of the sexual assault, or an additional piece of sexual violence perpetrated by online publics. In this way, the meaning of the images of the assault came to represent not just the act of sexual assault, but the entitlement, misogyny, and normalization of sexual violence that surrounded this crime and the societal reactions it generates. Finally, blogger Alexandra Goddard identified a culture of silence in the months following the initial assault, both in terms of unwillingness to come forward and from active obstruction of justice through deleting images relevant to the investigation. The resulting public horror created a public jury of Anonymous and their supporters, pushing for mass media attention and criminal justice action.

Interpellation of Publics as Bystanders and Virtual Juries

In addition to speed, features such as convergence (of technologies and audiences) and user-generated content characterize social media. Because of this, former audiences can become interpellated or “hailed” as bystanders on particular cases or social issues within social media. In this way, broader publics may serve as a sort of public jury: As with the criminal justice system, they can potentially revictimize and silence survivors (by blaming, shaming, threatening, or taunting), or they can be allies and supporters (by believing, listening, expressing support, calling for systemic change). At the same time, we must remember, as Earl (2014, p. 171) explains, that when new media is involved, it is tempting “to assume that findings are actually new instead of part of a larger and already well-known social pattern.” Bystander intervention in sexual violence is not a new phenomenon, but the speed and distance in which they can be engaged and mobilized is different. Virilio’s work on dromology is helpful to feminist criminology here insofar as it allows us to attend to the importance of speed and collapsed contexts of time and space. It is these shifting notions of time and space and, specifically, the speed and geographic reach of social media that facilitates the interpellation of bystanders to sexual violence within social media. These processes upset the traditional role of the justice system in virtualized sexual assaults because the public debate about where responsibility lies is taking place long before the criminal justice verdict is produced. In Steubenville, we see that it also confuses the traditional role of the justice system because the survivor’s testimony is replaced by evidence (images, tweets, videos) of the assault as well as accounts from witnesses or interested parties/advocates (such as Goddard). Following the insights of Virilio, we understand this to have both negative and positive effects. As a benefit, there may be less survivor secondary victimization than having to retell the story repeatedly in hostile criminal justice contexts, and to be “present” in, or at the center of, public and media spaces (e.g., giving television interviews). However, it also has the potential drawback of privacy invasion through heightened visibility of the traumatic event (e.g., having images of the sexual assault circulated globally), as well as being the target of much sexist, violent, and victim-blaming commentary that follows online news stories of sexual violence.

Virilio argues that the accelerated speeds of transmission and communication afforded by modern technologies lead to a loss of immediate presence and a diminution of experience. In light of Steubenville, we argue that this notion should be refined somewhat to account for the social response to sexual assault witnessed through social media. Specifically, the virtualization of sexual assault appears to draw in bystanders who would otherwise not be present to experience the events, such as Anonymous and the many social media participants attempting to exert online influence over the interpretation of events. While the physical presence of survivors and perpetrators may be diminished, the virtual presence of images and tweets present a durability and thickness of experience and narrative that hails attention of individuals who may otherwise move on in cyberspace. Because every online citizen has similar access to “like,” “share,” and “retweet” functions, their ability to participate in this virtual jury of bystanders is, theoretically, equal.

Extra-Judicial Juries?

In reflecting on the events of Steubenville, it is important to be mindful that Anonymous operatives and the general public (bystanders) are distinct. In virtualized spaces, actors such as Anonymous “can be conceptually set apart from other users because of their closeness to the machine” (Coleman, 2011, p. 512). This results in an increased capacity to act in ways that may be criticized for vigilantism. In the Anonymous intervention into the Steubenville case, we see an emergence of swift, punitive justice indicating the convergence of justice system and activist roles. Rather than simply petitioning the criminal justice system, Anonymous took on the role of “handing out” justice to those deemed implicated in the Steubenville assault. Generalizations about Anonymous cannot be made from Lostutter’s actions in the Steubenville case (and indeed it is difficult to make general statements about Anonymous at all; see Beck, 2016; Coleman, 2014). However, researchers who have extensive knowledge of Anonymous are able to surmise that Anonymous “is premised on a robust antileader, anticelebrity ethic, and its operations are open to all who care to contribute” (Coleman, 2011, p. 511). Moreover,

Hackers’ politics . . . are fundamentally grounded in acting through building: writing and releasing free software, building technical infrastructure for secure communication for use in leaking documents without fear of discovery, coding the software through which they communicate, configuring servers so as to erase logs, and, as Anonymous has brought dramatically to bear, even expressing dissent technologically. (Coleman, 2011, p. 512)

Acting in this spirit of hacker politics, Anonymous tapped into public outrage and bypassed bureaucratic requirements and lengthy criminal justice practices (including, many would argue, vital features such as due process). Instead of the criminal justice system calling the shots, Anonymous acted as a form of counter power in a networked society (Castells, 2007) to cast a wide net of responsibility in this case, and to ensure that the normative criminal justice system attrition of sexual assault cases would not be possible in this case.

The impact of these public juries on actual criminal justice processes, however, is less clear. On the one hand, the threat of “local exposure” may influence local authorities to act more promptly and effectively to cases that they may otherwise ignore or, in the case of sexual assault by prominent athletes, actively cover up. In addition, the indictment of Steubenville’s local officials demonstrates that covering up sexual assaults is a criminal act, and the digital activism surrounding the case is evidence of increased pressure for authorities to be held accountable for such cover-ups. Of course, additional issues remain to be considered here. Deleting social media content once the investigation has commenced would be tampering with evidence, but what about the lag between assault and criminal charges? Without the captured posts and videos, Steubenville may well have remained a local rather than a virtualized assault.

On the other hand, local exposure has potentially negative consequences. Virtualized evidence and virtualized juries mean that a much larger audience witnesses the violence, and there is an awareness/privacy trade-off for survivors. When an image of sexual violence circulates online, it is beyond the survivor’s control. Their image is manipulatable and open for transmission across large expanses of time and space. Dromoscopy, the science of speed, is helpful to understand how the general public can become active bystanders in high-profile cases of sexual assault. This is particularly the case given the lengthy and drawn-out nature of the criminal justice system and its historical failures in responding adequately to sexual violence. However, despite benefits of social media in mobilizing urgency to prosecute in Steubenville, we also see that these technologies provided an additional dimension of victimization through nonconsensual circulation of these images and online abuse and harassment. In and through new forms of digital media, survivors of sexual violence may be revictimized at a speed and across vast spaces that prior to the advent of social media was unseen.

These audiences are increased exponentially when a sexual assault is particularly newsworthy or anticipated to attract much public attention, such as those stories involving high-profile athletes or other celebrity figures. The historical lack of scrutiny and willingness to officially sanction sexual and domestic violence perpetrated by athletic heroes means that this violence often remains hidden or is downplayed within masculinist sport culture. However, this may be shifting in recent years. In addition to the events of Steubenville, high-profile incidents of domestic violence perpetrated by professional athletes have raised questions about other aspects of sports culture, and backlash to this violence (expressed predominantly through social media) has played a key role in this process. For example, the 2012 murder–suicide of Kasandra Perkins by National Football League (NFL) linebacker husband Jovan Belcher raised questions about the relationship between concussions and violence (Bandini, 2012). Furthermore, the NFL’s release and suspension of athlete Ray Rice when video footage surfaced of him knocking his partner unconscious in February 2014 has sparked debate about professional sports franchises’ responsibilities to address domestic violence (Belson, 2014). What both of these cases have in common is the presence of absolute evidence (images) of violence in the form of a homicide and video footage, respectively. As with Steubenville, the video footage, as a compact, easily sharable representation of violence means that the virtualized jury does not need to subject the victim to the level of interrogation and scrutiny as the criminal justice system typically does. While this does not stop victim blaming from occurring, there has been, at minimum, the start of a conversation about the role of sports culture and professional sports organizations in preventing and responding to violence against women, catalyzed in part by the refusal of social media audiences to look the other way.

Conclusion

Social media can provide an experience of speed that the criminal justice system, and even the mainstream news media, cannot. Its ability to hail witnesses to be active bystanders stems from this speed, as well as social media features such as interconnected social networks, the ability to screenshot ephemeral content as evidence and to create and share user-generated content, and the privileging of visual content. The phenomenology of this dromoscopy involves not only swift transmission of information, but of emotional reactions operationalized through likes, shares, views, tweets, and retweets. The events in Steubenville were shocking in part because they displayed graphic evidence of misogyny and sexual violence that are generally more insidiously embedded. This misogyny and violence was witnessed through the digital evidence of the actual assaults of August 11, 2012, but also through the ongoing social media commentary that featured attitudes and sexual assault myths that allowed such events to take place. Through social media, we see our societal failures at multiple levels. We also see some of the possibilities and challenges brought about by the intersection of old problems with new technologies. Feminist criminologists must therefore reconsider sexual violence in light of social media. In this discussion, we have focused on two possibilities for reconsidering sexual assault: the speed at which “local” sexual assault can be exposed and be taken up globally, and how broader publics can be interpellated as active bystanders in garnering attention and action surrounding these cases, often through expressions of online solidarity. In both phenomena, speed is central to our understanding the harms of digital perpetration of violence as well as the need for rapid social responses and supports to these events.

This analysis of the Steubenville rape case shows how local events of sexual violence can become virtualized and images can be transmitted across vast spaces instantaneously. This phenomenon concomitantly reveals the new possibilities for justice for survivors of sexual violence, but also the ever-present possibility for revictimization beyond the initial sexual assault. Although this article contributes to understandings regarding sexual violence, future empirical research could offer more systematic comparisons across different cases of sexual assault to illuminate how and why some cases are circulated widely (and others are not) and to identify the broader implications of the virtualization of sexual assault. From a strategic standpoint, such analysis would bring more focused attention on ways to intervene on cases of sexual assault that become virtualized and ways to facilitate justice for survivors while curbing revictimization.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that greatly contributed to this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, grant number 895-2015-1025.

Notes

Author Biographies

Jordan Fairbairn is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Research & Education on Violence Against Women & Children (CREVAWC), Western University. Her research focuses on the intersections of digital technologies and sexual and gender-based violence.

Dale Spencer is a critical criminologist and sociolegal studies scholar and is an assistant professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at the Carleton University. His main interests are violence, victimization, and the criminalization of marginalized populations.

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