Abstract
This paper is concerned with the impact of online technologies on public representations of sexual violence. Drawing on Habermas’s theories of the public sphere and Fraser’s associated critiques, it argues that the Internet has become host to ‘counter-publics’ in which allegations of sexual violence are being received, discussed and acted upon in ways contrary to established social and legal norms. The potentialities of online technology (and social media in particular) to foster and disseminate counter-hegemonic discourses are examined through three case studies in which girls and women have used various online platforms to make extrajudicial allegations of sexual violence and abuse. Where alleged perpetrators of sexual violence are publicly named, it has been argued that such action represents an invasion of their privacy and a subversion of their right to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial. In online contexts such allegations can be received and understood very differently, and these understandings are then circulated in ways that can directly influence ‘old media’ coverage and court outcomes. However, as the paper notes, the principles upon which online counter-publics operate are not radically discontinuous with those of the hegemonic public sphere and not all girls and women have equal access to the support of online networks and activists.
In liberal democracies, the ‘public sphere’ has been identified as a deliberative space between the state and society in which social actors come together as citizens in order to debate common affairs on mutually agreed grounds (Habermas, 1989). Historically, women’s participation in this sphere has been heavily prescribed (Fraser, 1990) while sexual violence against girls and women has been veiled as a ‘private’ matter without public or political significance (Pateman, 1988). The press, typically understood as one of the main organs of the public sphere, harbours an entrenched masculinist bias that is antagonistic to feminist concerns (North, 2009) and frames allegations of sexual violence in ways that focus on victim credibility and motive (Franiuk et al., 2008; Kitzinger, 1998; O’Hara, 2012). 1 Such exclusions have been heavily contested by women’s advocates (Lloyd, 1979; Rendall, 1999) who Fraser (1990: 61) identifies have generated ‘counter-publics’, or subaltern discursive networks and sites, in order to elaborate ‘alternative styles of political behaviour and alternative norms of public speech’. However, the influence of such counter-publics has been limited by the one-directional nature of ‘old media’ technologies, such as television, newspaper and radio. These media forms have been criticised for perpetuating the ‘monopoly of speech’ enjoyed by social elites at the expense of genuine democratic deliberation (Baudrillard, 1981).
This paper is concerned with the impact of online technologies on public representations of sexual violence. It argues that the Internet, and social media in particular, has provided girls and women with unparalleled opportunities to form and participate in counter-publics in which allegations of sexual violence are being received, discussed and acted upon in ways contrary to established social and legal norms. The paper begins by summarising Habermas’s (1989) theories of communicative action in the public sphere as well as the critiques provided by Fraser (1990) who has emphasised the marginalisation of women in public debate, and their capacity to develop alternative routes to representation and participation in the public sphere. The potentialities of online technology to serve as a medium for counter-publics, and to disseminate counter-hegemonic discourses, are examined through three case studies in which girls and women have used various online platforms to make extrajudicial allegations of sexual violence and abuse. In ‘old media’ or legal contexts, such speech actions can be interpreted as a violation of established social and legal norms. In online contexts such allegations can be received and understood very differently, and these understandings are then circulated in ways that can directly influence ‘old media’ coverage and court outcomes. However, as the paper notes, the principles upon which online counter-publics operate are not radically discontinuous with those of the hegemonic public sphere and not all girls and women have equal access to the support of online networks and activists.
The homosocial monopoly of speech
Normative theories of liberal democracy have assigned the press a critical role in articulating issues of public concern and creating a vehicle through which citizens can scrutinise the operations of the state (Habermas, 1989). While the ‘ideal speech situation’ of rational unencumbered dialogue signifies the potential of communication, actual dialogue falls short of this ideal and Habermas (1989) recognised that the entry of social actors into public debate is vitiated by social structures and inequality. The exclusion of women from the public sphere has been identified as one of its most long-standing and foundational features (Eley, 1994; Fraser, 2002; Landes, 1988). The codes of appropriate conduct and speech that developed in the public sphere are implicitly masculine although legitimised as gender-neutral and universalist, while the concerns and experiences of women are characterised as partial or private matters that can be marginalised or overlooked in public life (Fraser, 1990; Naffine, 1990; Pateman, 1988).
This remains the case today in the mass media which harbours an entrenched masculinist bias (Elmore, 2007; North, 2009; Ross and Carter, 2011). The most recent report of the Global Media Monitoring Project (2010), which has tracked women’s representation in the media as news sources, subjects and journalists since 1995, has highlighted the glacial pace of positive change. Reporting of women’s issues continues to be trivialised, while many allegations of sexual violence and abuse are treated with a high degree of suspicion (Benedict, 1992; Kitzinger, 2004). This reflects and legitimises the gender biases within other democratic institutions such as the criminal justice system, in which cultural mythologies around gender and sexuality have proven to be particularly durable, blunting the impacts of feminist-inspired law reform (Stubbs, 2003). The law is legitimised as a collective response to the common concerns identified through public dialogue (Habermas, 1996) but girls and women continue to occupy constrained enunciative positions within dialogical processes that identify social problems and generate responses to them (Salter, 2012).
Fraser (1990) expands on Habermas’s (1989) notion of a singular ‘public sphere’ to posit a multiplicity of ‘publics’ representing the parallel discourses of subaltern groups, including women and the working class. She has highlighted women’s histories of generating counter-publics to contest their exclusion and find new routes to representation and participation in the public sphere. Counter-publics serve as ‘parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, so as to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs’ (Fraser, 1990: 67). Feminist media researchers have described how girls and women have used a range of means in order to create female publics or counter-publics, including community radio (Mitchell, 1998), publishing houses (Murray, 1998) and ‘zines’ or self-published magazines (Zobl, 2004). Counter-publics use a range of contexts and mediums to circulate alternative discourses that act as a form of ‘poetic world-making’, constructing an view of social reality that addresses, and contests, the subordination of participants in the dominant public (Warner, 2002).
However the ability of counter-publics to circulate non-hegemonic modes of speech, understanding and action has been hindered by the available means of cultural (re)production. Such speech can only ‘circulate up to a point, at which it is certain to meet intense resistance. It might therefore circulate in special, protected venues, in limited publications’ (Warner, 2002: 87). A tension emerges between the nature of public speech, which seeks to address as many people as possible, and the power relations that exclude such speech from the dominant public sphere. Habermas (1989) argued that the expense associated with the infrastructure of radio, television and film has centralised media control in private hands, generating a one-directional and non-participatory form of publicity directed at opinion management rather than formation. Baudrillard (1981) defined authentic communication in terms of the possibility of mutual exchange and the right of reply, which he noted was foreclosed by media technologies such as television or radio. This was media that positioned individuals as consumers rather than citizens and did not enable any meaningful kind of reply or protest, generating what Baudrillard (1981) called a ‘monopoly of speech’ held by social elites, typically bourgeois white men.
From old to new media: Restoring the possibility of response
For Baudrillard (1981: 170), the only possibility for social change in a world colonised by monological media ‘lies in restoring this possibility of response. But such a simple possibility presupposes an upheaval in the entire existing structure of the media’. Three decades after its publication in English, this statement appears extraordinarily prescient in light of the development of new media technologies such as the Internet that restore (indeed, are based upon) the ‘possibility of response’ denied by ‘old media’ platforms. The rise of the Internet has transformed media ‘consumers’ into ‘consumer-producers’, reviving hopes for a re-democratised public sphere (Dahlberg, 2001; Papacharissi, 2002; Poster, 1997) and decentring the role of ‘old media’ to the point of imperilling its economic viability (Starr, 2012). Comparisons between online practices and Habermas’s description of the public sphere suggests that Internet-facilitated communication ‘approximates the requirements of the public sphere’ (Dahlberg, 2001) although questions have been raised about the quality of online discourse, the threat of commodification and persistent inequalities in access, content and interaction (Cooper, 2006; Norris, 2001; Wajcman, 2010).
Nonetheless there is a strong argument that the global proliferation of online networks has resulted in a re-democratisation of information production, dissemination and exchange. Whereas old media platforms connected ‘one to many’ (that is, they connected the content producer to a mass audience) digital and online technology connects ‘many to many’ through a multi-modal exercise in ‘mass self-communication’ characterised by extraordinarily dense networks between individuals and groups that bypasses ‘old media’ and often operates beyond legal regulation (Castells et al., 2007). Cheap mobile phones and wireless Internet access enables the formation of social movements that have become prominent features of protests and civil disobedience movements in emerging economies (Castells et al., 2007; Shirky, 2011). The influence of counter-hegemonic voices has been considerably amplified by the availability of online and digital technology, although the incorporation of such views into ‘old media’ has at times been somewhat cynical. In an era of shrinking profits and increased competition, anti-authoritarian perspectives can be attractive to ‘old media’ outlets searching for an ‘edge’ and therefore a commercial advantage (Greer and McLaughlin, 2011).
The potential for online technology to create forums for female counter-publics has been capitalised upon by women from developing and developed countries (Matar, 2007; Travers, 2003). For English-speaking readers, blogs 2 and websites focused on women’s issues and feminist commentary, such as Jezebel, Feministe and Feministing, serve as nodal points within dense networks of communication facilitated by social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. The circulation of news and commentary through these networks exerts considerable influence over the wider ‘blogosphere’ and ‘online’ and ‘offline’ news coverage.
As girls and women capitalise upon the new dialogical opportunities offered by online technologies, they are generating and disseminating alternative modes of understanding and responding to gender-based violence. Some notable online responses to sexual violence are illustrative. For example, in 2007, female students at Lewis & Clark College in the United States set up a Facebook site naming a male student as a ‘piece of shit rapist’ (Slovic, 2008). The campus newspaper subsequently covered the story and one of the alleged victims made a formal complaint to the school, resulting in a hearing and the suspension of the male student. In a more high-profile incident, blogger Alexandria Goddard (http://prinniefied.com) used social media to gather evidence implicating a number of boys in the gang rape of a girl in Steubenville, Ohio. Her decision to post this material to her blog, along with the names of the boys involved, brought new evidence to police attention and garnered international media coverage (not to mention a lawsuit for defamation that has since been dismissed) (Baker, 2012a). Emerging online responses to sexual violence include the use of social media to proactively collate and publish evidence and punish offenders. In 2012, the Tumblr 3 blog ‘Predditors’ was set up with the aim of identifying and naming men who post photos online of women and girls taken without their consent (Jeltson, 2012). In September 2012, information gathered by Predditor activists was passed to police about a high school teacher who was taking surreptitious photos of his underage female students in class and posting them online. He was fired from his position and police are pursing charges after finding evidence that he had been sending sexual texts and images to teenaged girls (Baker, 2012b).
It would seem that women’s counter-publics are no longer restricted to small publishing houses, ‘zines’ and community gatherings but rather that online technology has provided an expansive global platform for counter-public speech and, indeed, action. For Warner (2002), counter-publics serve not only to create a forum for alternative viewpoints but rather to modify existing principles and values, and to challenge (and even disrupt or transform) the normative structures of the public sphere. Where alleged perpetrators of sexual violence are publicly named, such action appears on one level to be an invasion of their privacy and a subversion of their right to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial. Nonetheless the apparent willingness of some girls and women to seek out alternative modes of discourse and redress suggests a perceived shortfall in the adequacy of institutional responsiveness to sexual violence and gender justice. In the cases outlined above, this perception forms the basis of collective speech and action. However, there is little available research on the ways in which victims of sexual violence and their supporters are developing online strategies for assessing and acting upon allegations of sexual violence.
The case studies
Three case studies have been selected to examine this phenomenon in more detail. The first case involves Savannah Dietrich, who in 2012 made international headlines when she defied a gag order by tweeting the names of two boys convicted of sexually abusing her in Kentucky. Dietrich’s case illustrates the influence of online counter-publics, who articulated a powerful reinterpretation of Dietrich’s defiance of the suppression order and bought pressure to bear on the court to deliver an outcome that was more satisfactory to Dietrich and her supporters. The paper will then examine two cases in which online allegations of sexual violence have had a more troubled reception: Kim Duthie who in 2010 began circulating naked photos of footballers after her complaint of sexual misconduct by a footballer was dismissed by Australian police, and Georgia Grimes, the pseudonym of an American woman in her 70s who, until recently, ran a blog where she names the men that she alleged raped her in 1962. These two cases suggest that some voices are privileged over others in online counter-publics, and hence online technologies may rebalance but not solve ongoing inequalities in public representation.
Savannah Dietrich
In August 2011, Savannah Dietrich was seventeen when she was sexually assaulted by two sixteen-year-old boys at a party in Kentucky. She was drunk and unconscious when the boys removed her clothes, digitally raped her and took photos of the abuse using their mobile phones. She pieced the events of the night together after she discovered that digital photos of her abuse were circulating among teenagers in her town. Dietrich initially confronted the offenders, who claimed the encounter was consensual (Pesta, 2012). She asked the boys for an apology and a list of people who had seen the photos which they had made of the assault, and when this was not forthcoming she went to the police (Barrouguere, 2012).
In June 2012, the two boys plead guilty to felony sexual abuse and misdemeanour voyeurism, but since they were tried as juveniles the court records were sealed. As part of the plea deal, the boys avoided jail time and were sentenced to 50 hours’ community service. State law required prosecutors to consult with victims in regard to plea deals; however, Dietrich and her family have claimed that the deal was reached ‘behind our backs’ (Riley and Wolfson, 2012). Furthermore, the judge ruled that, when the boys were aged nineteen and a half, they could apply to have the case dismissed and their records expunged (Pesta, 2012). When she objected to the perceived leniency of the deal, Dietrich reported that she was told by the prosecutor to ‘get over it and see a therapist’ and that ‘jail was for “real” rapists, murderers and robbers’ (Gye, 2012). Dietrich’s legal team subsequently argued that the prosecutor in the case may have been unduly sympathetic to the accused boys due to his own affiliations with their all-boys school where they were prominent athletes (Pesta, 2012). The prosecutor has denied this account (Riley and Wolfson, 2012).
At the close of the court proceedings, Dietrich was informed by the presiding judge that juvenile court proceedings were confidential and it would be a criminal act if she discussed the court proceedings or the crime with others. Furious at her treatment by the court, Dietrich immediately tweeted
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the names of the boys in defiance of the judge’s instructions. Follow-up texts included: There you go, lock me up. I’m not protecting anyone that made my life a living Hell. Protect rapist is more important than getting justice for the victim in Louisville. They said I can’t talk about it or I’ll be locked up. So I’m waiting for them to read this and lock me up. F--k justice. (Pesta, 2012)
The day after Dietrich sent the tweets, defence attorneys requested that the judge consider a contempt charge for Dietrich, which involved a possible fine and/or three months in jail. However, Dietrich’s tweets had alerted a range of popular websites and blogs to the case, and they adopted her cause with enthusiasm. While some consideration was given to the lawfulness and ethics of violating the gag order, the predominant view expressed online was that the gag order was unjust and an imposition on Dietrich’s freedom of speech (e.g. Huffington Post, 2012). Online debate was not categorically in support of Dietrich but comments about her ‘heroism’ and ‘courage’ were common. The fact that Dietrich faced a potential custodial sentence for breaking the gag order while the boys who assaulted her were facing community service was a particular focus of online ire, fed by statements from Dietrich that ‘I’m at the point that if I have to go to jail for my rights, I will do it’ (Huffington Post, 2012). News of Dietrich’s case spread rapidly through social media and online blogs and ‘old media’ platforms such as television and newspapers also began to provide sympathetic coverage. A petition on Change.org called ‘No charges against Savannah Dietrich for naming her rapists’ received over 100,000 votes within two days. 5
After intense media attention and criticism, the contempt of court motion was rescinded. Jefferson District Court chief judge Angela McCormick Bisig subsequently ruled that the court files would be open to the public and that Dietrich was free to talk about her experiences, while the offenders were required to undertake 50 hours of community service at a women’s service and to undergo a sex offender treatment programme. If they completed the programme and demonstrate good behaviour they could apply to have the felony conviction downgraded to a misdemeanour but it could not be expunged. The judge said in her ruling: The very idea that a young victim of sexual assault would find the courage to tell her story and come to court, only to have no one listen to her, explain to her what is happening and then have the parties reach some type of deal without her input is abhorrent. The public would and should cry foul. (Bartkewicz, 2012)
Dietrich’s case can be seen as an example of the ways in which individual acts of protest against gender injustice can take on a counter-hegemonic dimension where it reaches sympathetic online counter-publics and generates what Castells et al. (2007) called ‘instant communities of practice’: networks of individuals and organisations that form very quickly and mobilise for a common purpose. In Dietrich’s case, routine aspects of juvenile court proceedings in Kentucky, such as a suppression order and the sealing of court records, were reinterpreted by online networks as a fundamental injustice against abuse victims. Dietrich’s act was understood not as contemptuous (the dominant legal interpretation) but rather as courageous, and ultimately this was a view that influenced the final arbitration of her case.
Furthermore, in their own protest against the perceived leniency of the courts, online counter-publics imposed additional sanctions against the two boys. When the publicly available names of the offenders are ‘googled’ (or entered in a search engine), the result is a series of web articles and blog posts naming them as ‘rapists’. This is likely to cause ongoing reputational damage to the boys for many years. When choosing to name the boys and label them as sex offenders, online activists state that they consider this a form of extrajudicial punishment. A typical comment is ‘Because the boys didn’t receive harsh enough punishment, I think their names and faces should be known to the world.’ 6 Other people have suggested that publicising their names will protect other girls and women since the publicity might hinder the boys’ ‘rapist potential’. 7 Such extrajudicial punishment and its lifelong consequences for the offenders are justified by commonsense reasoning: ‘Do the judges and DA really believe these young molestors will grow out of victimizing young girls?’ 8
There is an undeniable irony to the fact that two boys who used the reach and speed of new technology to manufacture and distribute images of their abuse of Dietrich now find they are unable to control or prevent the global distribution of private and humiliating material about themselves. These online responses parallel the ‘trials by media’ engaged in by ‘old media’ outlets which can seek to mimic the functions of the justice system by airing accusations and evidence of wrongdoing and mobilising negative publicity as a form of sanction against the accused (Greer and McLaughlin, 2011, 2012). Indeed, an established interest in ‘naming and shaming’ offenders may have contributed to the support that Dietrich found in online and offline media. It is an important point of debate as to whether this ‘secondary punishment’ of the two boys is just or not and the criteria of justice that should be used in such an assessment.
However, this is an intriguing inversion of the more common pattern whereby sexual misconduct by young ‘star athletes’ is excused while the girl or woman is accused of being drunk and provocative (Philadelphoff-Puren, 2004; Waterhouse-Watson, 2009). Instead, Dietrich’s courage is extolled online while her attackers remain the subject of widespread opprobrium. This underscores how online technology can fundamentally alter the way that sexual assault allegations are received, understood and responded to. Furthermore, just as counter-publics can provide the opportunity for the establishment of relations and identities that might otherwise be inhibited or prescribed by the dominant voices within the public sphere (Warner, 2002), Dietrich maintains an active presence in debates about the injustices experienced by sexual assault victims. She manages public Twitter and Facebook accounts in which she initiates and participates in dialogue about sexual violence and she continues to speak to television and news media. The empowered enunciative position offered to Dietrich by social media and online counter-publics has proven to be enduring and in sharp contrast to her treatment in the legal system.
Kim Duthie
Dietrich’s case illustrates the power of the Internet as a ‘many-to-many’ mode of communication that can circumvent the former ‘gatekeepers’ of public discourse (such as journalists and judges) and in doing so recontextualise speech acts within counter-publics that provide meaningful reinterpretations of them. However, it could be argued that Dietrich’s capacity to maximise the power of social media, and online support, was linked to factors beyond the particular characteristics of Internet technology. In some respects Dietrich does not conform to the stereotype of the ‘ideal victim’ in a rape case, since she was drunk at the time of the assault and this is often held against rape victims (Young, 1998). However, she is middle-class, well-educated and articulate. Where she spoke directly to the media or engaged with her supporters online, she presented a consistent and coherent account of her experiences that has been viewed as credible and sympathetic. This was due, at least in part, to the emotional and financial support of her family who were able to pay for legal advice so that her engagement with ‘new’ as well as ‘old’ media was highly strategic in advancing her case.
The case of Kim Duthie suggests that the ability of a girl or woman to appeal to online counter-publics is not equal. Duthie was a sixteen-year-old Australian high school athletics champion who, in her own words, went ‘off the rails’ in 2010 with multiple arrests for shoplifting, drug use, assault and trespass (Munro, 2010). During this period, she met members of the St Kilda Australian Football League (AFL) team at an athletics workshop at her school. A few weeks afterwards, she had sex with two of the players after meeting them again at a football game. It appears that a brief relationship ensued with one of the players, including an incident in which Duthie described being waylaid by multiple players who attempted to coerce her into group sexual activity while she was intoxicated (Martin, 2011). Shortly afterwards Duthie found herself excluded by the players and she reported to her school that she was pregnant as a result of the relationship (Cover, 2012). When she informed the player of the pregnancy, she found herself shunned and insulted by the team, reportedly being called a ‘slag’, a ‘slut’ and told to ‘die’ (Krien, 2011).
Duthie’s school informed police of Duthie’s alleged pregnancy. After a short investigation, the police cleared the players of potential sexual abuse charges (Cannold, 2011). 9 This decision would subsequently be framed in the media as evidence of Duthie’s lack of credibility. It was not widely reported that the AFL offered to provide Duthie with accommodation during a period in which her parents apparently refused to let her live with them, in exchange for favourable statements from her that effectively cleared the players of criminal charges (Pierik and Gannon, 2011). Prior investigations into complaints of rape by AFL footballers have been marred by possible police misconduct and collusion with AFL teams (Krien, 2011). There was evidence of such collusion in Duthie’s case, with serving police officers and St Kilda players circulating an email in early 2010 sharing confidential information about Duthie and her complaint while it was still being investigated (Levy, 2010). The email included photos of Duthie and referred to her pejoratively as the ‘Saint’s girl’.
Once her complaint had been dismissed, Duthie returned fire, using her Facebook profile to distribute naked photos of three St Kilda football players alongside the message ‘Merry Christmas courtesy of the St Kilda Schoolgirl’. A media furore ensued, and Duthie’s allegations of sexual misconduct became headline news for a number of months. She was interviewed on prime time news television shows and gave a number of interviews in the print media (Cover, 2012). The AFL sought and received court orders to force Duthie to remove the images and desist from circulating any more, while Duthie ignored the subpoenas, all the while using social media to make a series of explosive claims about abuse by AFL players and the AFL as an organisation. The St Kilda football team publicly threatened to financially destroy Duthie through multiple law suits (le Grand, 2010) although this was broadly condemned as draconian. The club adopted a more conciliatory tone and pursued mediation with Duthie.
Her Twitter feed and blogs were read by thousands of followers, providing Duthie with the opportunity to explain her decision to circulate the images, and to publicise her complaints against the players and the AFL as an organisation. Although her stated motivation was revenge, she contextualised her actions within the misogyny of AFL and routine player abuse of girls and women (Cover, 2012). Her complaint was the latest of several allegations of rape and sexual misconduct by elite Australian football players (Waterhouse-Watson, 2011). Media coverage of Duthie was largely sympathetic until a number of inconsistencies emerged in her story, including the possibility that she ‘faked’ her pregnancy. Her public presentation became increasingly manic and erratic. This culminated in an episode in early 2011 when Duthie tweeted an image of herself in bed with 47-year-old player manager Ricky Nixon, claiming to be in a relationship with him. Duthie then retracted this claim and Nixon angrily denied any contact with the teenager. However, Duthie then released a digital video that she had secretly taken of Nixon in his underpants in her bedroom, apparently snorting cocaine. Nixon admitted to having ‘improper dealings’ with the teenager and checked himself into rehab, and became the target of considerable public opprobrium and ridicule (Cover, 2012).
This incident was also interpreted as evidence of Duthie’s instability and her willingness to use social media to destroy the lives of the men that she consented to have sex with. Unlike Dietrich, Duthie did not have a middle-class background and presentation, nor did she have the emotional or financial support of her family, having been thrown out of home by her parents (in a media interview, her mother suggested it could be ‘true’ that her daughter was a ‘slut’; Shepherd, 2011). It appears that Duthie’s mental wellbeing suffered considerably as a result of the investigation and media attention, with one journalist reporting scars on her wrists (Munro, 2010). Without adequate support or advice, Duthie struggled to provide a coherent or sympathetic account of her actions.
On the face of it, Duthie would appear to be a potentially sympathetic figure for the counter-publics that mobilised in support of Dietrich. She was a teenaged girl who had been sexually used and then emotionally abused by football players several years her senior (Cover, 2012). She initially pursued her complaint privately, only to find the St Kilda football club and police circulating a humiliating email about her while publicly claiming to conduct an ‘objective’ investigation of her allegations. This was the background context to her decision to air compromising photos of AFL players, and any subsequent erratic behaviour could be understood as the conduct of a teenaged girl under extraordinary pressure. However, her case was largely ignored by the women’s blogs and activist networks that generated publicity for Dietrich. To the contrary, online conversation and social media generally articulated a blatantly misogynist view of her character and behaviour. Countless entries and comments on blogs, websites, Twitter and YouTube excoriate Duthie as a ‘slut’, ‘whore’ and ‘skank’. Facebook currently hosts a number of Duthie ‘hate groups’, including two called ‘Closing your legs after a hard day of being Kim Duthie’ 10 with over 12,000 ‘likes’ and ‘On a scale of 1 to Kim Duthie how good are you at ruining people’s lives?’ 11 with over 6,000 ‘likes’. Duthie came from Frankston, a socioeconomically disadvantaged area of Melbourne, and the misogyny directed at her was intensified by the perception that she embodied a promiscuous ‘lower class’ femininity. One tweet stated ‘Kim Duthie. Frankston girl. Says a lot’ 12 while other online entries referred to her as a ‘Frankston slappa’ 13 and claimed ‘skanks like her are all over Frankston’ 14 and ‘Shes really just a dumb frankston mole, and a hottie to look at, but low in the brain dept’. 15
Without the ‘status shield’ (Hochschild, 1983) of respectability offered by a middle-class manner and family support, it seems that Duthie was differentially vulnerable to the stigma that affixes to girls and women who allege sexual maltreatment by famous men and sports ‘stars’. The reproduction of sexist interaction and speech is common in online forums (Poster, 1997) and indicative of the masculine ethos that predominates in online content and interaction (Haraway, 1997; Wajcman, 2010). While counter-publics may demarcate discursive sites in which such an ethos can be challenged and reversed, not all girls and women can find representation and support in such forums. The media frame that coalesced around Duthie tended to trivialise her as childish, unstable and sexually provocative in accordance with established stereotypes and rape motifs, which were invoked even more ferociously in online contexts. In this regard, the unregulated nature of online forums enables not only the formation and circulation of counter-discourses but also ferocious backlash. While online counter-publics may challenge the construction of what Christie (1986) identified as ‘ideal victims’, it may be that the complexity of Duthie’s behaviour, which spoke to the specifics of her circumstances and family background, delegitimised her as an object of sympathy not only in the dominant public sphere but in online counter-publics as well.
Georgia Grimes
It would seem that Duthie was less successful than Dietrich in garnering online sympathy for perceived injustices, and this could be attributed to their differences in financial resources, family support and representations of femininity. Stories about the two young women were almost invariably accompanied by photos of them taken from their Facebook pages: young, white, slender, long hair, smiling and pretty. However, photos of Dietrich are demure while Duthie actively capitalised upon the media appetite for images of attractive teenage girls, circulating a provocative shot of herself in a bikini, on all fours, posing suggestively at the camera. Such a strategy garnered additional media attention although it supported characterisations of her as promiscuous and unbalanced.
Nonetheless, it would seem that their youthful femininity provided Dietrich and Duthie with particular advantages: first, a familiarity with social media platforms, and second, an appealing visual dimension to their story in a cultural landscape in which images of pretty teenage girls have particular currency. Importantly, their complaints pertained to recent events. From the point of view of ‘newsworthiness’, recent events are considered eminently more relevant than past events, and particularly so when they involve young people, sexuality and crime (Jewkes, 2011).
However, delayed or no disclosure is very common among girls and women who experience sexual violence. Delayed disclosure is associated with more severe post-traumatic symptoms (Ullman, 1996; Ullman et al., 2007), suggesting that the most severely impacted women are more likely to delay disclosure. As this case study illustrates, there exists a tier of online testimony of sexual violence involving older complainants and delayed disclosure that are unlikely to draw the same kinds of attention as Duthie and Dietrich. Plummer (1995) observed that the stability of a narrative is imperilled in the absence of a receptive or supportive audience. In this example, the lack of online interest in the efforts of an older woman to use the Internet to give voice to a traumatic experience in her past places her at a serious disadvantage when the men she accuses of raping her drew on their collective legal and financial resources to silence her claims.
Theta Chi Rape 1962 (http://www.thetachirape1962.blogspot.com.au/) was a website hosted on the blogging platform Blogspot until it was deleted in 2013. The blog was first established in 2005 by a woman who calls herself ‘Georgia Grimes’ (or sometimes ‘Georgia Girl’) claiming to have been gang raped by the ‘brothers’ of the Theta Chi fraternity at Georgia Tech University in 1962. The attack was allegedly orchestrated by Georgia’s then-boyfriend (referred to in this paper by his initials, ‘JD’) as part of his initiation into the fraternity. The page of Georgia’s blog opened with the black-and-white photo of JD taken while he was at university. Underneath this photo, which was captioned ‘gang rape leader’, Georgia provided JD’s full name, nicknames, graduation details from university and high school, and the suburb where he currently lives. The blog went on to describe a sadistic group assault arranged by JD in which Georgia was ‘set up’, drugged and raped by multiple members of JD’s fraternity. The assault was premeditated and sadistic, and Georgia recalls photos and video being made throughout. Her account is supported by research on fraternity gang rape which suggests that some fraternities have fostered traditions of group sexual violence over many years (O’Sullivan, 1998; Sanday, 1996, 2007). After the incident, the blog stated that she told nobody what had happened to her, since ‘I knew I didn’t deserve what happened, but who would believe me? I felt invisible against a dozen or more “gentlemen” with power and status.’
Georgia set up the blog in 2005 when she began to acknowledge the severity of the rape and its consequences for her life (personal communication, 2012).
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The blog acted as a digital testament, first, to the trauma of the rape and its aftermath, and second, to the doubled victimisation of finding that she is prevented by the statute of limitations from pursuing redress through the criminal or civil courts. On the blog, Georgia stated: How is justice served when a degenerate like [JD] is protected by state law? First he hides behind the organization of Theta Chi and the Institute of Georgia Tech, and now the Georgia Statute of Limitations! I am alive to tell the horrors he inflicted, but penalized because of the Statutes.
In this regard, the blog operated as a form of digital ‘testimonio’, a testimonial narrative provided by those ‘excluded from authorized representation’ (Beverley, 1989: 13). In offering testimonio, a person excluded from traditional means of seeking redress offers eyewitness evidence of the serious harms committed against her. Just as the author of testimonio positions the reader in a way that is ‘akin to that of a jury member in a courtroom’ (p. 14), Georgia asked the readers of her website to assess her claims of victimisation in light of a highly detailed and compelling narrative and a description of ongoing impacts to the present day. However, ‘the situation of the narrator in testimonio is one that must be representative of a social class or group’ (p.15) and Georgia spoke not only for herself but on behalf of the many women of her generation who have been denied public acknowledgement of the impact of rape and violence upon their lives. After setting up the site, Georgia was contacted by a number of women who also claim to have been victimised by fraternity ‘brothers’, and the blog publicised some of these accounts in some detail.
For a number of years, Georgia was active online, commenting on stories about rape, engaging in debate with others (including a robust engagement with the men of the ‘False Rape Society’ blog), and alerting people to her blog. She used online legal discussion boards in order to garner advice on her case and the statute of limitations. Her blog was posted twice to Twitter in 2011 by two anti-rape activists but it was only ‘retweeted’ once. 17 It seems that Georgia’s account lacked the particular qualities of ‘newsworthiness’ that generated publicity for Dietrich and Duthie. While older women have created their own spaces and online opportunities for public dialogue (the 2013 ‘Silver Action’ workshops in London being one example 18 ) it seems that online counter-publics tend to privilege younger users with greater familiarity with new technology and this may marginalise the concerns of older demographics.
The lack of public or counter-public interest in her account left Georgia differentially vulnerable to the enforcement of the dominant legal view of her speech as libel. For some years, Georgia received legal threats from JD and the blog provided an extract of a ‘cease and desist’ letter sent to Georgia in 2011 from a lawyer acting for JD and four of the fraternity ‘brothers’ named on the blog. In private communication with the author in 2012, Georgia stated that she had recently received a summons for libel and punitive damages. She has been told by her attorneys that the plaintiffs will drop the civil action if she permanently removes the blog. Her initial response to this request was available on her blog, where she states: So here we are again in the same situation we were in 50 years ago, except this time I’m not going anywhere. They are using the same tactics – intimidation in numbers –
In early 2013, Georgia’s blog was deleted from Blogspot and she ceased responding to emails. It is likely that the legal pressure applied by JD and the fraternity ‘brothers’ proved to be persuasive. Clearly, this was not the outcome that Georgia sought by establishing the blog. Nonetheless it would not be accurate to suggest that, during the seven or eight years that the blog was online, Georgia did not achieve at least some partial satisfaction of her aims. The quote above suggests that the power differentials of the alleged sexual assault have been reproduced in the collective financial and legal power wielded by the ‘brothers’ in the present day. However, it also illustrates the urgency of Georgia’s need to find a public forum for her complaint, and to provoke some response from the alleged offenders, even if that response was a legal threat. In many regards, what she was contesting was the invalidation that attends silence and inaction in the aftermath of sexual violence, particularly from the perpetrator(s) but also from the justice system and the community. From this perspective, Georgia achieved her aims insofar as she was able to force the men she accused of harming her to confront her allegations directly. On the other hand, neither the personal nor political dimensions of Georgia’s complaint found a foothold in online counter-publics. The final result was that the view of social reality offered by her testimony – of a silent mass of older women living with the unacknowledged consequences of sexual violence – could be eclipsed by the resources of the men she confronted and their mobilisation of established and authoritative accounts of her actions as defamatory.
Conclusion
The three case studies presented in this paper show how girls and women, in the aftermath of sexual violence, are using online technology in order to generate new and more authoritative enunciative positions for themselves and to find a more sympathetic audience for their claims. The paper suggests that the Internet and social media can sustain counter-publics in which truth value can cohere to female claims of victimisation and render such claims intelligible and meaningful even where they breach social and legal norms. In the example of Dietrich, these counter-publics distributed information about her plight, engaged in political and ethical debate, bought considerable pressure to bear upon the court and promulgated an interpretation of her actions as heroic rather than criminal. However, Dietrich also benefited from the support of her family, in contrast to Duthie, whose incoherent narrative and erratic behaviour not only discredited her claims but left her vulnerable to misogynist attacks and stereotyping. Both Duthie and Dietrich exhibited an understanding of social media and online interaction that Georgia does not, suggesting a generational ‘digital divide’ in access to, and participation in, online counter-publics. This appears to have left Georgia differentially vulnerable to the legal consequences of publicly airing allegations of sexual violence while media attention and community pressure were more supportive of Duthie and Dietrich.
Critics of the online ‘public sphere’ have argued that there is limited intersection between the diversity of views available online, and this includes Habermas (2006), for whom the Internet heralded the fragmentation of public discourse rather than genuine debate. However, such critiques do not acknowledge the ‘integrating function’ served by the dense networking and interactivity of social media which enable the rapid transfer of views and information (Milioni, 2009). In the case of Dietrich and Duthie, there have been a multitude of online interpretations of the ethics of their actions and their implications for victims, alleged perpetrators and legal processes, which suggests that online counter-publics can host genuine debate and discussion about sexual violence. However, they can also enable the expression of entrenched prejudices against girls and women reporting sexual violence and promote the claims of victims who meet dubious criteria of ‘newsworthiness’ based on age and appearance.
In this regard, it would seem that a multitude of ‘publics’ are active online although the boundaries between counter-publics and hegemonic discourse are somewhat permeable, disseminating alternative discourses which in turn can reproduce the structures and norms they are ostensibly critiquing. It may be that the criteria of credibility and rationality applied in counter-public spheres mirror those implicitly gendered constructions that circulate in the public sphere and reflect the viewpoints of established and powerful institutions. This raises questions about the effect that disempowered women can have through an online medium. It is clear that acts of online revenge and justice-seeking can effect a disruption of once taken-for-granted legal and media processes, although the rise of ‘media justice’ and ‘trials by media’ represents potential points of co-option and commercialisation (see Greer and McLaughlin, 2011, 2012).
Historically and to the present day, it has been common for women and girls who accuse men of sexual violence to be viewed as vindictive and vengeful. The association of revenge with irrationality or emotionality is constructed in opposition to the ‘reasonable’, public discourses about crime and justice. For Lloyd (1993), the Western conceptualisation of rationality is associated with masculinity in ways that can render women’s speech and conduct as unintelligible and irrational. However, the three case studies documented here challenge the simplistic gendered binaries of emotionality/rationality, revenge/justice, private/public and illegitimate/legitimate. In each case, the girl or woman reflexively located a subjective response to perceived injustice within a social and political context: Dietrich, Duthie and Georgia all articulated an awareness that their experiences were not unique but rather reflected gendered patterns of abuse and inequity. By airing their grievances online they were registering a protest that was at once highly personal but also public and political, since the very act of utilising online technology to circulate testimony of sexual violence suggests a lack of access to, or faith in, the mechanisms of the public sphere and the criminal justice system. This highlights the rational and potentially constructive dimensions of ‘revenge’ and recasts their frustrations as reasonable responses to the obstacles they experienced in seeking redress for the harms of sexual violence.
The established discursive contexts in which the veracity of allegations of sexual violence have been debated, such as the criminal justice system and ‘old media’, are underpinned by homosocial cultures and relations that can marginalise and disrupt the truth claims of girls and women. These influences are entrenched not only in institutional values and practices but also in the ‘associational life’ of civil society (Fraser, 1990). That is to say, male privilege is embedded within networks and linkages based on affiliations with a diverse range of homosocial institutions (such as sports teams, fraternities and male-dominated professions) that are informal and therefore their influence is difficult to establish definitively (Acker, 1988; Donaldson, 1993; Donaldson and Poynting, 2007). In Dietrich’s case, it emerged that the prosecutor was an active alumnus of the prestigious all-boys high school where her abusers were star athletes. While Duthie’s complaint was being investigated by the police, close links emerged between serving police officers and the AFL club she had complained about. Georgia’s testimonio speaks to a period of male hegemony when middle-class young men could rely on their privileged status to shield them from the legal consequences of sexual assault. It seems that the social capital that accrues to men through the homosociality of the public sphere can weaken the position of girls and women who make allegations of sexual violence. The clear potential of online counter-publics is that they may offer girls and women the support and validation that can elude them in off-line contexts and perhaps offset the advantages that the public sphere affords men accused of sexual violence.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.