Today, rape and sexual violations are front-page news across the globe. The media's newly awakened focus has been interestingly sustained but also politically complex. We should not assume that the new public focus on sexual violations will necessarily bring about transformative and lasting social change. A wave of reports can produce fatalism as easily as it can produce determination, lending support to the idea that sexual violence is a natural, inevitable, and universal feature of human behavior. Public outrage can be channeled toward critical and ungenerous judgments about the women who come forward, or toward the sexism of other cultures, or toward the actions and attitudes of a few individual perpetrators represented as pathological, or toward the “need” to close borders and shut out asylum seekers, as easily as it can become fuel for serious reflection and social criticism about the conventions of normalcy in one's own society, or campus, or religious community. So, productive political analysis and resistance is far from an inevitable result of heightened media attention.
Yet it is unquestionably significant that the enforcement of silence around this topic has receded. When I was growing up, sexual violation was rarely ever mentioned in public or private except as a part of comedy. Legal prosecutions were also rare and covered an extremely narrow range of cases, usually ones that could serve some racist agenda. Today, the topic is becoming more visible but it is entering into a market-driven media and a public domain of massive sexism and prejudices of all sorts, as well as serious ignorance about the nature of this problem.
The new resistance in new social movements around the world has been galvanized by survivors speaking out as perhaps never before in history. How can we take advantage of the new focus on rape and sexual violence and push toward more understanding and more effective resistance? I believe this question should set the agenda for theorists.
In this chapter I will seek to develop our understanding of the conditions in which survivors are speaking, including the ways in which this speech is reported, packaged, and interpreted.
I argue that we need a careful attention to the specificities of the contexts in which increased coverage is occurring, and I will make use, with some modifications, of three concepts from José Medina's work on the epistemology of resistance to help chart the current challenges and opportunities this new attention affords us: the concepts of meta-lucidity, epistemic friction, and echoing. I will argue that we need a program that focuses not simply on getting the word out, but on reforming and transforming the conditions of reception in the public domains in which our words emerge.
To understand how the current visibility has come about, we need to recall some of the earlier discussions that made this possible. Surely an important moment that helped to transform the global coverage of sexual violence occurred in the early 1990s with the extensive focus on the so-called “rape camps” that were part of the war in the former Yugoslavia (Stiglmayer 1994; Zarkov 2007). What became clear from the testimony of the women who came forward was that these camps were set up, organized, and maintained by military institutions and leaders, and this helped to diminish the commonly held view prior to this that rape is a happenstance aspect of war, occurring in an arbitrary way as the product of social anarchy. What riveted (at least Western) public attention in the Yugoslavia case was the fact that the rapes were organized as part of a strategic campaign. They were key elements of a psychological operation to demoralize and weaken opposing communities and decimate the kinship ties of the next generation. They were not the result of social chaos but part of a calculated campaign to produce a kind of political chaos in the targeted communities.
Rape camps have been features of numerous wars, including in many parts of Central America, in Japan, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo; the systematic licensing of rape by US forces was also a well-known aspect of the war in Vietnam. The sexual atrocities that German girls and women experienced at the hands of Soviet troops after World War II has received a lot of attention, but more recent scholarship has unearthed widespread rapes committed by US troops during this war, the very troops often characterized as the “greatest generation” (Roberts 2013). If wartime rapes are widespread among a variety of diverse societies, one might want to draw universalist, even determinist, conclusions, but the analysis advanced in reports such as that by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) actually suggests the opposite (Cohen et al. 2013). Comparative study indicates that wartime rape is not, in fact, a universal feature but widely variable: for example, in an extensive study of 48 armed conflicts in Africa, 64% – almost two-thirds – were found not to involve any form of sexual violence. The USIP report summarizes the existing data to show that rape is not a ubiquitous feature of ethnic-based struggles, nor is it more common within rebel or insurgent groups than state-sponsored forces, which would follow if the “social anarchy” idea were valid. In fact, the evidence suggests that rape is more common in state-orchestrated conflicts (Cohen et al. 2013). Hence, existing research counters the idea that rape is a “natural” byproduct of war or even of militarism and suggests instead that sexual violence is orchestrated, occurring widely only under certain kinds of conditions, commanders, and commandment structures. Hence, resistance and efforts at reform are far from hopeless. Denaturalizing the incidence of rape in war is an important step in making it possible to hold military institutions and commanders responsible, and to study the specific conditions under which rape becomes a systematic, sanctioned practice.
After the stories of rape camps in Bosnia were reported, advocates successfully organized around the idea that rape is a specific and actionable war crime and a violation of human rights. Subsequently, in both Yugoslavia and the aftermath of civil war in Sierra Leone, international institutions leveled charges of “slavery,” and in Sierra Leone the International Criminal Court (ICC) accepted charges of “sexual slavery,” further developing the idea that sexual violence was a war crime (Grewal 2016a). This helped to craft the rules of combat, setting out the domain of actionable criminal behavior. However, every such legal and discursive reform that enters an international community riven by racism, Islamophobia, and colonialisms of all kinds produces complex outcomes that bear close analysis; the outcomes of this reform are still under debate (Kapur 2002; Razack 2004).
For example, critics argue that prejudgments in the global North about arranged marriages caused the ICC to collapse the distinction between arranged and forced marriages. Arranged marriages actually occur under a variety of conditions, not all of which constitute coercion (e.g. when either partner can opt out, the arrangement is not necessarily coercive). In other cases, international agencies sought to replace bad wartime arrangements with bad conventional arrangements, so that the operable definition of “sexual slavery” was simply that bride price had not been paid and that the patriarchal elders had not been consulted (Grewal 2016a).
Nonetheless, by conceptualizing rape as an orchestrated practice rather than the result of individual deviance, rape began to be thought about in the 1990s in its relation to certain institutional contexts and political systems. Although in the beginning the institutions examined were mainly military, this new approach opened the door for considering other kinds of institutions, such as prisons, in which rape had long been taken as a kind of collateral damage rather than the intended effect of institutional choices. Once rape was defined as a violation of human rights, it could be more effectively condemned even when it occurred in prisons, in combat, or in peacetime army barracks.
Certainly, well before the 1990s, many Latin Americans knew about the systematic use of rape under military dictatorships as well as by US-sponsored campaigns against indigenous and guerrilla groups, and many in Asia knew about the use of rape by the Japanese army. But in this chapter I want to explore the global reverberations that have helped bring about a qualitative turn, helping even the victims of these earlier atrocities to gain larger public support for their demands for justice. Today it is more routine for well-publicized rape cases in one part of the world to echo in other places, emboldening victims and their allies. The increased decibels of outrage appear to indicate that, at least for some, rape is no longer viewed as inevitable.
Thus, the reports from Sarajevo arguably instigated a global discourse about the nature and cause of sexual violations that is still being echoed around the world concerning how these crimes may be encouraged and even orchestrated by state institutions, how they should be named and legally addressed, and how this is a global problem and not simply a feature of certain kinds of societies (e.g. those outside of “the West”). The growing testimonies of rape victims have also made visible to the public the lasting psychological, physical, and social effects of rape not only on victims, but also on their relationships, families, and communities, diminishing the idea that “some” women are strong enough to take it. A commonality of responses and effects across wide differences of cultural context has become visible. Today, the field of “trauma studies” helpfully charts the common experiences of combat veterans, the survivors of natural disasters, and survivors of rape, incest, and sexual violence, and we now have the concept of “post-traumatic stress disorder” to unite these varied groups (Herman 1997). This helps dispel the isolation of rape survivors, as well as old ideas about women's heightened emotional states as the cause of our long-lasting trauma.
Yet, despite the interesting and important developments that might be charted over this period in the public understanding of rape, the reality is that the new visibility of sexual violence is a complex phenomenon with contradictory political repercussions. Public coverage has demonstrably variable outcomes. Here are five examples that showcase some of these complexities:
As these examples show, the public visibility of rape and sexual violence is today a complex phenomenon. There continues to be old-style lurid sensationalism and the “second rape” of public humiliation and harassment against victims, and a highly selective outrage dependent on identity, but intentional and public declarations of victimization and the determination to resist have taken a new form. In some cases, victims speak for themselves; in others they are spoken for or about from a variety of political, or pecuniary, motivations. It is clear that in this era of global media each new public case reverberates with the echoes of others, as victims and their advocates, as well as their enemies, take note of the ways in which the issue of rape is being taken up globally, from Pakistan to India, Egypt, Congo, Guatemala, Mexico, England, France, and the United States. There have also been echoes across powerful institutions, from the Catholic Church to the US military, the BBC and Fox News, Ivy League universities, the Boy Scouts, and Hollywood studios, as well as in the Hasidic communities in Brooklyn, New York. Victims inside these institutions and communities have taken courage, and ideas, from others facing similar silencing by organizations operating a policy of closed-door self-protection.
What we are witnessing, I would suggest, is not simply the emergence of a hidden discourse that is now coming into the light of day. Rather, this is a contestation over the epistemic and discursive terms in which sexual violations can enter the larger public domain. To paraphrase Foucault (1972), what we are witnessing is a resistance to the conventional modalities of public speech: that is, the conventions about who can speak, what they may speak about, who will be accorded the title of expert, or credible witness, how the circulation of the speech occurs, and what the subsequent effects of the speech will be in both discursive and extra-discursive, as well as legal and extra-legal, arenas. Victims are speaking out and gaining, in some cases, a public platform, but this speech is often packaged, interpreted, given a “spin,” and highly circumscribed. When victims speak out publicly, they put themselves at risk of being discredited, blamed, threatened, and physically harmed, and this too is echoed globally, exacerbating fatalism and providing rape cultures with new ideas about how to stifle the rebelliousness of victims.
Yet in this contestation over the speech of survivors, I want to argue that there are not simply good and bad players but there is a complicated debate about varying modes of speech from legal and media theorists, psychologists, activist-advocates, and victims. There is debate over whether the focus should be on legal or extra-legal redress and on whether the anonymity of victims, or those who are accused, should be protected. There is debate over what the role of non-victim advocates should be, and about whether the probable incitement of xenophobia, racism, or heterosexism should temper public condemnations. Numerous groups, such as communications media, courts at all levels, governments, and institutions like the military and the Church, are making decisions about what can be said, who can speak, how the speech can be circulated, and who will be given presumptive credibility.
Without doubt, the main push, the main instigating force, behind this new public terrain of discourse is the speech of those survivors who have been able and willing to speak publicly, from New Delhi to New York. It is their speech that has instigated public discussion and action. Victims have also come forward to corroborate the accusations of some high-profile public figures, at great cost to themselves, including Trump as well as Jimmy Savile of the BBC, Bill Cosby, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. And yet survivors are rarely if ever in control of the ways in which their speech is edited, processed, packaged, publicized, globally transmitted, interpreted, understood, or taken up as a cause for action, or of the kinds of action that ensue.
Both global and local streams of communication are, without doubt, distorted by a combination of financial interests and imbalances of power rooted in colonialism. There are clear structural patterns to the selectivity of stories, and economic interests behind sensationalized reporting. But these realities should not obscure from us the fact that communication also has a decentralized and anarchic character. The vicious social media responses to events such as those that occurred in Steubenville were not orchestrated by media moguls, nor can corporate media outlets and executives control which stories, videos, tweets, or posts go viral, much as they might try.
This means that even under the best of circumstances it is not realistic to aim for control over how our speech is used or circulated. That is not a winnable demand. We can and should agitate for better routine practices in the selection and the framing of stories, and demand that major media outlets institute policies to cover stories in a responsible way without allowing accusers to be vilified, judged on their appearance, or presumptively discredited for other illegitimate reasons. But such reforms can only target institutions, not individuals or decentralized networks of communication and social media. Improvements in this sphere require interventions in the way diverse publics interpret our speech and how they assess those who are attempting to discredit and silence us. We need intervention at the meta-level of reception, in the amorphous ether of discourses among diverse publics. This is not a utopian or hopeless project. Just as most everyone is a little more sophisticated these days about how advertising works to prey on our insecurities and portray in fantastical terms the benefits of commodities, how news outlets edit and spin their coverage, and how the delivery of news is packaged as carefully, and as beautifully, as Hollywood movies, we may be able to reach a little more sophistication about how the topic of sexual violation is presented, and how speaking about rape is controlled and curtailed.
Thus, I want to argue that we may realistically aim for a world in which the patterns in which our speech circulates can become more perspicuous as well as subject to critical analysis. We need to uncover the behind-the-scenes orchestrations of media coverage and circulation. This will involve not simply a critique of big media corporations, but also a critical analysis of the ways in which accounts of sexual violation are interpreted and judged by the routine conventions in our societies.
This would require publics to become more meta-lucid, in José Medina's terms. In The Epistemology of Resistance (2013), Medina offers a detailed analysis of epistemic injustice and epistemic resistance, or the ways in which oppression affects the realm of knowledge as well as the practices of knowing. In addition to meta-lucidity, Medina develops two other concepts that I want to use below: the concept of echoing (and echoability), and the concept of epistemic friction. I will give a quick gloss of these three concepts here, and go into further detail in what follows. The concept of echoing and echoability concerns the way a claim or idea can become mobile across contexts. The concept of epistemic friction concerns the way in which conflicting knowledge claims can motivate change in our conventional norms and practices of knowing. And the concept of meta-lucidity describes the process of becoming more aware of how we go about making judgments. Together, these concepts can help us reflect on the real, non-ideal world of knowing practices in wide public domains, and the ways in which these can be reformed and improved.
I have already been making use of the concept of “echoing,” so let me turn here to the concept of “meta-lucidity.” This idea refers to a second-order capacity for reflection on the conditions of our lucidity itself: more than knowing, it is a reflection about how we come to know, and how we may be impeded in knowing. The concept is intended to provide a solution for what Medina calls meta-blindness or meta-insensitivity: when we are insensitive or ignorant about our own insensitivities. Sometimes we are consciously committed to the preemptive dismissal of claims based on the identity of claimants, as, for example, when we ignore the interjections from religious proselytizers or panhandlers on the street. These kinds of choices operate at a meta-level to organize our attention and our perceptual attunements. This can produce habits that preempt our conscious cognitive activity and act automatically to shun certain people or sources of information. Of course, these habits are often affected by the social structures of inequality in which we all live and work, preemptively dismissing types of claimants for reasons that are not epistemically sound. Hence, Medina advocates that we cultivate a meta-lucidity or reflection on the “limitations of dominant ways of seeing,” in order to ensure that our habits of attentiveness are not unjustified (2013: 47). He explains further: meta-lucidity constitutes a crucial cognitive achievement that can become indispensable for retaining the status of a responsible epistemic agent living under conditions of oppression. Meta-lucid subjects are those who are aware of the effects of oppression in our cognitive structures and of the limitations in the epistemic practices (of seeing, talking, hearing, reasoning, etc.) grounded in relations of oppression (2013: 192).
We may become motivated to change our epistemic habits through the experience of what Medina terms “epistemic friction.” By this he means to refer to the conflict that occurs not just between beliefs but also between the frameworks of interpretation and understanding that generate our beliefs, rendering some claims intelligible and others off the map of consideration. Conflict between frameworks engenders a friction that can motivate us to become more meta-lucid when it leads to reflection about how and why the conflict occurred. Potentially, at least, we may become more reflective about our own cognitive practices as well as the dominant conventions concerning, for example, how presumptive credibility is differentially allocated across identity and status groups. Those who believe that their religious leaders are incapable of conspiring to cover up the sexual abuse of children may be led via the epistemic friction caused by an avalanche of reports not only to reconsider that specific belief but also to reflect on their own prior recalcitrance to adjust their beliefs. In this way, epistemic friction can lead to a period of reflection that may improve our practices of knowing and reduce epistemic injustice.
I suggest that the emerging visibility of sexual violations across the world is producing just such epistemic friction. Even when it occurs under less than ideal conditions, such as sensationalized reportage, the public visibility of sexual violations is exposing a harsh reality about our communities and institutions. The epistemic friction thus produced puts a demand on the public, a call which has the potential to be productive of enhanced meta-lucidity.
It is always possible to minimize the friction we experience in ways that simply shore up our favored view and excuse avoidance. For example, we might focus exclusively on the problem of false accusations, or emphasize the financial benefits for survivors who write memoirs, or attribute all accusers with having concealed desires for attention. But the mounting quantity, consistency, and varied sources of accusations can wear down these defenses and motivate reflection on the way in which the credibility of women, children, teenagers, political activists, poor people, women and men of color, LGBT persons, religious minorities, and other specific groups are too often preemptively dismissed (cf. Fricker 2007; see also Shapin 1995).
Medina's enthusiasm for the potential of “epistemic friction” takes him in certain directions that I can't follow. He likes the idea of a sort of permanent revolution on the epistemic front, where disparate frameworks create a kaleidoscopic utopia of divergent understandings (see especially chapter 6 of his 2013 book). Medina wants just such a conflict-laden epistemic kaleidoscope to be a positively normed steady state. Differences are to be encouraged to flourish and multiply as a way to protect minoritized views and enhance critique and creativity. It is indeed plausible that kaleidoscopic outcomes can be a spur for creativity and a guard against epistemic oppression. Yet I would argue that the potential benefits of epistemic friction in encouraging more meta-lucidity occur because we strive for coherence in our lives, some basic consistency. Incessant and intense amounts of friction can be uncomfortable, off-putting, disturbing, and it is this that motivates us to think anew in ways that may reduce the conflict. Kaleidoscopic effects can be maintained by policing the silos of separate epistemic communities, which have distinct frames of interpretation, but the epistemic pay-off of friction occurs when there is communication across the silos and a motivation to rethink practices in each domain in light of others. In other words, the pay-off of epistemic friction in enhanced meta-lucidity comes about because we are trying to reduce the friction.
I worry that accepting the epistemic kaleidoscope as a steady state circumvents our motivation to engage seriously with others who are outside of our communities of like-minded family and friends (see Alcoff 1996: chap. 6). As indigenous and other theorists today continually insist, the ongoing problem of epistemic injustice is not offset by a tolerance based on non-engagement, or the acquiescence to radical relativism, but by the difficult work of serious dialogue and the attempt to understand across differences of privilege and oppression (Moreton-Robinson 2000; Moya 2002).
Medina's account is correct on the descriptive level: surely differences in belief and epistemic practice will always exist, and the conflict between multiply different practices of belief formation will remain a generative fountain of creativity, helping to offset dogmatism and inertia. Yet for me, the prescription to embrace the kaleidoscope doesn't work. Friction generates positive results because of our desire to hold a coherent set of views. It is this desire for coherence that can motivate us to reconsider even cherished beliefs and habitual practices. A prescription of maximum diversity suggests the goal of peaceful coexistence among significant differences, in which case there is no need to trouble the serenity of our own preferred beliefs and practices. But this has no pay-off in potentially enhanced meta-lucidity. We don't take the challenge conflict poses to us; we simply ignore it.
So although the image of a kaleidoscope is surely a good description of the inevitabilities of any epistemic landscape, it is insufficient as an epistemic norm. Still, the concept of epistemic friction is a good way to understand the current moment of public attention to sexual violence. This increased attention has not brought about an immediate redress, but has instigated the sort of uncertainty and conflict that create an opening for productive discussion and transformations of conventional framing assumptions and knowing practices.
The third concept of Medina's that I want to apply here, after incorporating the concept of meta-lucidity and epistemic friction, is that of “echoing.” Medina actually develops two related concepts here, “echoing” and “echoability,” to look at how social change occurs, and, in particular, as a way to refute overly simplified accounts that focus too much on individuals engaging in dramatic and courageous acts. As Medina explains, “the transformative impact of performance that we consider heroic is crucially dependent on social networks and daily practices that echo that performance.” Without understanding this, we can fall into a “dangerous trap that the dominant individualism in Western cultures sets up for social movements of resistance” (Medina 2013: 187) .
Medina develops this argument through the example of the civil rights heroine Rosa Parks. Primarily, he is interested in the ways in which her act of resistance to Jim Crow segregation was echoed in the context of a wider social ferment of hopeful and collective determination to make change. As readers may recall, on one now famous December evening in 1955, Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, and was subsequently arrested. In ensuing news reports she was portrayed as simply too “tired” after work to get up, and thus as without political motivation, though her arrest sparked a boycott that played a key role in ending segregation in public transport throughout the South. As the new biography by Jeanne Theoharis (2013) details, Parks is continually interpreted through popular Western ideas about heroic individualism. She has also been subject to sexist and racist stereotypes about humble black working-class women whose moral strength lies in their simplicity, a framing in conflict with self-conscious, intentional, and militant political activity. In reality, Rosa Parks’ act on that evening was quite intentional: she was an officer in her local chapter of the NAACP with a long record of activism. The NAACP made a strategic decision to make her case as public as possible because they knew she fit a profile that would strike sympathy with many members of the public, even some whites. They knew that Parks’ persona would resonate with conventional frames about “good” black women, showcasing the fact that opposition to Jim Crow did not come only from “troublemakers” or otherwise unruly types. Hence, because of her looks, demeanor, and age, Parks’ act would be echoable in a way that would help the movement.
Parks’ action was part of a series of interconnected events that reverberated with one another. In this way a context was established for interpreting the meaning of each particular, discrete event. Without such a context, the meaningful content of any act or event, no matter how heroic, can be lost, misunderstood, or interpreted quite differently than its agent intended. Disobeying the rules of segregation was not all that rare, but had been interpreted by many whites as simply lawlessness rather than a form of collective political protest. Parks’ action was able to break through this interpretation, not just because of her own persona, but also because of the social movement in the midst of which it occurred: the increasingly well-publicized collective non-violent resistance to segregation.
Certainly, Parks was an individual heroine: she braved terrorist violence to advance a larger cause. As Theoharis recounts, the many recurring acts of resistance to segregation resulted not just in arrests but also in beatings, and Parks knew this quite well. And she had no reason to believe that she herself would benefit in any way. In fact, for years after her arrest she remained an unobtrusive background to the public face of the civil rights movement, included only sometimes at public events and almost as an afterthought, still performing office work for her local chapter of the NAACP. It was many years before she became honored as the icon of the movement, and even that late recognition was ambiguous, since she was misrepresented. She was generally portrayed even by movement leaders not as a long-term militant activist involved in a well-calculated strategic movement but as an older woman motivated simply by fatigue. Although she was given effusive appreciation, the fact that she was a long-term militant activist could not be echoable, even by the movement. In reality, Parks had grown up sitting on her porch in the evenings with her father with a rifle across his lap, sharing his determination to keep the KKK at bay. As an adult, she became a field investigator for the NAACP, traveling to rural areas to gather evidence about racist rape cases, as I will discuss below (see McGuire 2010; Theoharis 2013).
Medina's discussion of echoing and echoability generally portrays these phenomena as positive and politically productive, but, clearly, echoing can happen in a complex variety of ways, not all of which are productive for transforming the social relations of power. Parks’ action was echoed in ways that were misleading, in part, and confirming of problematic stereotypes. This deserves more exploration. In a fascinating study of the US civil rights movement, the young historian Danielle L. McGuire (2010) reveals a previously unknown dimension to a movement that many of us believe we know so much about. As it turns out, resistance to sexual violence was a key component of the civil rights struggle, from Reconstruction through the 1960s. We have long known about the role that accusations of sexual violence played in creating alibis for lynching: false claims about rape, or even mildly flirtatious advances, were used as a justification for white mob violence, including many public tortures and murders. As an early leading sociologist of US racial formations, Gunnar Myrdal, observed in 1944, “Sex is the principle around which the whole structure of segregation … is organized” (cited in McGuire 2010: 1). White racists argued that the maintenance of stringent Jim Crow laws, whether constitutional or not, was necessary to protect white women from rape.
At the same time, sexual relations between black women and white men, including assault and rape, were nowhere policed. White men had a right of access in one way or another. Reading about these persistent, numerous, and brutally routine rapes brings to mind the practice of droit du seigneur, which ensured that European feudal lords had sanctioned access to the bodies of peasant women. But in the South, white men did not necessarily have to be landowners to partake of the privilege of rape. The Klan enforced the black community's powerlessness to intervene, no matter how outrageous the assault.
This only began to change during the upsurge of activism in the 1940s. In 1944 the Alabama NAACP took up the case of Recy Taylor, who was out walking with her family in the small town of Abbeville when she was forced into a car by a gang of white men and subsequently raped. Taylor's family appealed for help, and the NAACP sent out one of their seasoned lead investigators, a young woman by the name of Rosa Parks, to travel to Abbeville. In the next fifteen years more cases followed in Tallahassee, Florida; Montgomery, Alabama; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Burton, South Carolina. African American newspapers across the country covered these stories, and the white press occasionally picked them up. Black women and their families were courageously pressing charges, demanding arrests, and testifying in court. The publicity these cases received ensured that, even when the white perpetrators were exonerated, the evidence of routine sexual violence was coming out into a larger public domain, making clear that the problem African Americans faced in the South was not simply a segregation of facilities, but the wantonly brutal treatment of a population rendered powerless to object.
Thus, the fact that sexual violation was an institutionalized aspect of Jim Crow was becoming clear to a wider set of publics, including non-black publics. Reading the historical record that McGuire has unearthed makes it clear that these rapes were not crimes of pathological individuals, nor were their effects relegated to individuals and their families. Rape in the Jim Crow South was, as in institutionalized wartime atrocities, a key element of social terror used to demoralize, demobilize, and weaken the subjugated communities. It involved the humiliation and torment of individual women, but it also profoundly affected, both emotionally and politically, all who knew about the unpunished crimes. There was never a total silence around these rapes: even before the NAACP chapters began to take these cases to court, black communities often knew what had happened, and even who had done the deed. In some instances, they knew because, as in the Abbeville case, women were snatched in brazen displays of white supremacy from groups of family or friends they were with, and victims survived to tell the tale and name the perpetrators. In other cases the community knew because white men bragged. Far from a crime born in silence, the sexual violations of black women under conditions of segregation were known about both by the subjugated communities and by at least parts of the white communities, and had been since the era of slavery.
This confirms another point that Medina emphasizes: that the field of discourse is variegated. Even if there is an official silence in the majority community concerning a given issue – whether inter-racial rape or the prevalence of homosexual activity – this does not mean the silence is total. Despite the fact that gay relationships were until recently invisibilized in the straight mainstream, Medina argues that many gay people had ways of communicating, to share information about what places and people to avoid as well as where one might find a likely partner. He suggests further that they had ways of naming homophobia before that term was invented, as well as safe and sometimes subversive ways of expressing their sexuality. The need for safety and knowledge sharing created methods of communication, even if these were not echoable in dominant discursive spaces. For the most part, this minoritized domain of discourse stood apart without contesting the mainstream, protecting its invisibility. Though its mere existence constituted risk-taking and resistance, it could not effectively alter the hermeneutics of the larger community.
What becomes clear from this discussion of actual cases is that it is not speaking in and of itself that produces the productive echoes leading to social change, but the specific circumstances of speech: where it originates, where it is transmitted, how it is taken up, how it is understood, and by whom. This context will determine whether speech can lead to action or whether the facts revealed must be borne with a fatalist resignation. As I stated earlier, an avalanche of news reports can exacerbate the already existing tendency to be fatalistic about the possibility of improving social conditions for disempowered groups; it is not necessarily going to lead to collective resistance. It can also trigger forms of counter-action that serve other purposes, such as shoring up state power, racism, anti-immigrant hysteria, or the ideology of a protective patriarchy. Bringing sexual violence into the public domain can even lead to a worsening of the problem, such as when the actual causes are obscured, blame is misdirected, and solutions are put forward that reinforce the subordination of victims. As Kiran Kaur Grewal (2016a, 2016b) shows, public attention to sexual violence even today can be used to shore up dominant power relations and normative gender conventions by misdirecting blame onto essentialized representations of a religion or culture. And as Lucia Sorbera (2014) shows in her analysis of the resistance to sexual violence in the Arab Spring, even progressive anti-rape activism can be coopted by tyrannical states and support imperialist agendas. I will discuss this in more detail in this book's conclusion.
Thus, it is critical to analyze the visibility of sexual violence in the context of the specific discursive and political domains in which such visibility emerges. Social movements against systemic oppression of all sorts are bound to consider the existing state of the diverse public domains of discourse. This is what the question of “echoability” addresses. The civil rights movement created the conditions for productive resistance against the sexual violations of black women by white men for the first time in the history of the United States, and yet the echoability of this resistance was compromised by the dominant ways that the US framed its racial history. Sometimes civil rights activists themselves, as McGuire's history shows, sidelined the reportage of sexual violations in anticipation of how these charges would most likely be echoed in the white mainstream. Although the sexual torments of black women were initially useful in garnering public attention about the real nature of Jim Crow, leaders worried that the focus on rape would ignite old frameworks in which African Americans were demonized as hyper-sexual. Civil rights was presented as a moral campaign above all else, and stories about rape raised the specter of sex, which many movement leaders wanted to avoid. White Citizens’ Councils were vigorously agitating against what they called “amalgamation,” the code word for miscegenation, and civil rights leaders did not want a public campaign that brought attention to sex across the color line, no matter how it occurred. Hence, by the 1950s, the campaign against sexual violence was set aside and the struggles of black men became the focus. Although sexual violation was an integral part of the grassroots mobilizing that started the movement, the topic was subsequently so marginalized that few today know of its central importance.
In general, sexual violations pose specific issues in regard to echoing, and the real-world conditions of echoability in many contexts can skew the interpretations of reported events to create counterproductive outcomes. Today we may be tempted to be harsh in our judgments of those who backpedalled on the campaign against the sexual victimization of black women by white men, but their decisions were cognizant of the fact that the discursive context, especially but not exclusively in the South, was dominated by a specter of sexual taboos and misinformation that created an echo chamber of distortion. Similarly today we must grapple with a global context that echoes the problem of sexual violation in non-Western and particularly Muslim countries in a very problematic way when reports reach the global North. News reports in every country tend to echo the violations of middle-class young women over others, and focus on stranger rape over more common forms. Understanding the real-world echoability of sexual violence is part of developing an understanding of “the limitations of dominant ways of seeing” in our time (Medina 2013: 47).
Yet we must continue to open up more venues for more speech. Given the distortions in the mainstream, we should develop alternative platforms. Although activists must recognize the existing echo chamber that affects the way our speech will be heard and assessed, we also need a strategy for altering the existing conditions of echoability. For this, more speech from a more diverse group of survivors is vital. This will undoubtedly complicate and enrich the narrative frameworks for understanding this problem, providing resistance to neat imperial, racial, or gender narratives that portray those with the most power as the least likely to be culpable. A general policy to avoid the topic by any movement or organization is not warranted. That said, there should never be pressure applied to survivors to speak out publicly or make charges; individuals can assess their own situation to determine how best to carry out self-protection and self-regard, and those with whom they have shared their story should support them in their decision.
Even when one's speech is likely to be distorted and misinterpreted by the mainstream, there is still a possibility for speaking in a more restricted way that reduces the danger of harm. Faye Bellamy, one of the most important leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Campaign during the 1960s, led an internal sit-in by female SNCC members to protest sexism within the organization (Robnett 2000).1 These were days when SNCC was under regular threat: offices were firebombed, leaders were routinely arrested and beaten, and the white press was often hostile. Bellamy and the other women of SNCC did not want to air their grievances in a way that would aid the organization's enemies, but they continued to press against the gender-based division of labor, which left them cleaning and filing and answering phones. They engineered a sit-in within the organization's Atlanta offices behind closed doors, away from the media, refusing to continue the assigned workload. This internal action garnered results, and perhaps would have been less successful if it had become a public fight. By staging their protest internally, the women of SNCC showed solidarity over protecting the organization's ability to exist, and were then in a good position to argue that SNCC's survival was not in contradiction to the struggle to enlarge black women's political agency. To use speech politically, then, requires more than simply the courage to confront, but also the ability to analyze likely real-world effects, and to manage one's speech toward producing the outcomes one wants.
Analyzing the likely outcomes of speech requires attending simultaneously to two levels: not only the ground level, in which one is trying to gather immediate attention, but also a meta-level, in which the circulation of speech and credibility in regard to a particular topic is being policed and circumscribed and sometimes made to serve extraneous, even nefarious, agendas. The struggle against sexual violations in Tahrir Square has made these complications very evident. Western imperialists are willing to give accusers plenty of airtime because doing so will coincide with their own agendas, such as supporting the authoritarianism of the Egyptian state, encouraging Islamophobia, or providing cover for unilateral Western military actions. Western publicity might continue to marginalize non-Western media sources and contribute to the fatalism about the possibilities of democracy in Muslim-dominant countries. Allying with such forces, as, for example, Mona Eltahawy has done, may disable the struggle of Egyptians to create conditions in which victims of sexual violence in Egypt have the ability to speak within outlets that will not distort their message or use it as an alibi for other agendas (see Eltahawy 2012; Serageldin 2012). And without alternative outlets that don't give aid to Western imperialists or right-wing Islamists, many may decide to remain silent.
I well remember a more personal scenario of this sort in December 1989, right before my home country, Panama, was invaded by the United States. A report of sexual harassment by Panamanian Defense Forces on the wives of two US soldiers was endlessly repeated in mainstream US news outlets. The image of female citizens of the United States at the sexual mercy of thuggish Latin American military men played well in the North American media, echoing a long history of stereotyped portrayals. Incredibly, this small incident was used by President George H. W. Bush as a sort of “last straw” to legitimate the military invasion. General Manuel Noriega had come to power through a military coup after the previous General, Omar Torrijos, a more populist dictator, had been killed under mysterious circumstances. Noriega quickly proved unfaithful to his US allies – trading arms with Nicaragua and East Germany. When the incident involving the soldiers’ wives occurred, President Bush had a press conference (!) to describe the event, denounce Noriega, and declare that this would not be tolerated by the United States. Within a week, over 27,000 US troops were dispatched to Panama City, leveling low-income apartment buildings and killing more people than were to die on 9/11. The bodies were buried in mass graves or burned in piles on the street. It took 12 hours before I was able to reach my family by phone. Finally, I got through to my brother Rafael, who was crouched under his dining-room table watching MIG helicopters shooting into the buildings on his street. I was incensed then as I still am that sexual violation was used as an ideological tool of war for purposes that had nothing to do with the reduction of sexual crimes. Given the ideological climate in that heated period, it is difficult to say whether any report of sexual violence perpetrated by Panamanian troops could have been reported without exacerbating imperialist military hubris.
A young student of mine I'll call Sofia from a religious community with some socially conservative traditions recently faced a similarly complex situation, but she found a productive solution that avoided silencing. In this case, though, only livelihoods, and not lives, were at stake. Sofia discovered that the marriage manuals circulated to young women in her community were counseling wifely submission in sexual matters. If your husband wants sex but you don't, they advised, lie back and ruminate on your grocery list. Bad advice, but my student was in a quandary about what to do. Criticism from outsiders to this community would no doubt be rebuffed: their immigrant and marginal status kept them skeptical of the judgments from outsiders, making them resistant both to criticism and to change. My student worried that if she launched a feminist criticism as a member of the community, she would then be tarnished as a woman with outsider thinking, considered unmarriageable. Yet her greatest concern was that her family would suffer serious economic consequences if their small business were to be boycotted because their daughter was considered disloyal. So she decided to start an anonymous blog and found a way to circulate it to the community. She wrote movingly and straightforwardly about her disagreement with the marriage manual's advice, arguing that the promotion of wifely sexual submission does not serve the community's own goals to support strong families and happy marriages. Her blog engendered a predictable slew of intense responses, some defensive ones from religious leaders, some from women community members who blamed other women such as herself for sowing discord. But there was also an avalanche of community members – including many young women – who agreed with her critique. She had found a way to promote and circulate a resistant speech with positive effects that would not harm her or her family's future. I suspect this blog will productively echo in the minds of the community for some time to come, hopefully in ways that call into question conventions of epistemic practice that silence young women and preemptively discredit their views as disloyal.
As I will argue in later chapters, speaking publicly as a survivor still carries significant risks in many parts of the world, including the West. The risks include social disapproval, relationship strain, even one's safety. One risks one's emotional equilibrium when people respond with ignorant, idiotic, and painful comments. If one has a job that requires some credence as an objective analyst, one may be adversely affected in one's professional life. One also risks being tarred for life with an identity that can affect how one is interpreted henceforth on all manner of issues, from feminism in general to legal issues to political orientation. We remember who tells us they were raped.
Survivors have to negotiate these multiple considerations to decide whether to speak, how, where, and to whom. As I said before, there should never be outside pressure: the considerations are too personal and complex, and surviving can be enough of a full-time task. But speaking as a survivor is not always a choice, especially now that the media routinely breaks the anonymity of victims. Even if one's name stays out of the paper, there may be some smaller circle that knows and spreads the information without one's consent.
It would be optimal if speaking publicly as a survivor would be up to the survivor. The negative response to speaking publicly or making a report to the local authorities can be so damaging that we have come to call this the “second rape.” Survivors are in the best position to determine whether they have the resources and the support system in place to withstand this. We can weigh the negatives against the fact that, at least in some cases, speaking can be a powerful act of reclaiming and remaking one's life, making common cause with allies, and taking action against our perpetrators or the systemic forces that enable them.
Well-meaning (and some not so well-meaning) outsiders may pull us in different directions: many think we should protect ourselves by not speaking, mistakenly assuming this is always a safer stance, while others may think we are politically or even morally at fault if we choose not to report. But this is to take agency from the victim, once again. No one quite understands as well as we do what the effects of speaking will cost us: the flashbacks, the relationship fall-out, the panic attacks, the loss of credibility, and the danger to our safety. Thus the best thing our loved ones and allies can do is remove the pressure in both directions.
It is critical to understand that the speech surrounding sexual violation raises unique issues. Rape is a very particular kind of crime, even across widely divergent contexts, depending on whether it occurs in wartime, or in internecine struggles between communities, or within communities, or under conditions of anonymity. In the vast majority of cases (80% of the time by rough estimate), victims and assailants know one another: they are neighbors, friends, co-workers, family (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre 2013). Assaults, and knowledge about them, profoundly affects the fabric of one's relationships and communities, and victims may have sensible, rational reasons to want to protect the relationships they need and benefit from, even when this affects their ability to gain justice in regard to sexual violation. We need to accord victims the capacity to make reasonable decisions about reporting or coming forward that may take into account the relative intensity of the crime and the vulnerability of the perpetrators without collapsing all such reasoning into the category of denial and internalized oppression (see, e.g., Leo 2011). The latter are significant phenomena, without a doubt, but there are many individual variables that impact the effects of assault (such as age, the particular conditions of the event, and the existence of a support network). Some high-profile women have recently written memoirs in which they assert that a rape experience they had was not, in fact, a defining event in their lives. I find this plausible, but it does not set a normative standard for others to emulate or to be judged by. We need to learn to hear the variability in responses to rape without making one account override or disprove others.
Too often, however, the ability of victims to make reasoned assessments about their experience or reasoned choices about acceptable risks and repercussions of speaking out is preempted by a coercive silencing. Still today, most cultures project some form of taint onto victims in a way that may permanently alter their social standing and potential for future relationships or employment. That taint can be a sexual one – as in the old idea of carnal knowledge – or it can be a psychological one – as in the projection onto victims of a permanent psychological damage so severe that their judgments are considered forever impaired, affecting their employability for certain kinds of professions. This psychological taint that has surfaced in Western societies looks very similar to the earlier taint we think of as pre-modern; the only real difference is that, today, the taint has been given a putatively psychological, hence “scientific and rational,” characterization. Victims are viewed as scarred beyond redemption, and treated as hysterics-in-waiting (Hengehold 1994). This is a very old practice simply dressed up in new guise, and provides a powerful disincentive against speaking about what happened even to close friends. This is also why it can feel safest to speak only or mainly to other survivors about this part of one's life.
There are further issues unique to speech in this arena. The possibility that a pregnancy may result from a rape means that future generations can be negatively affected in profound ways if they learn the nature of their conception. The physical and emotional safety of victims is often at stake, since perpetrators commonly make threats during assaults and are sometimes able to continue these threats afterward. Achieving meta-lucidity in the arena of sexual violation requires gaining knowledge about the very specific particularities of silencing in this domain, or what Kristie Dotson (2011b) has called “testimonial quieting.” Karyn L. Freedman (2014) has argued that the costs of speaking are so high that the credibility of victims who choose to speak out despite these costs should be adjusted upward.
I have been writing on this topic for nearly three decades, and have myself spoken as a survivor in a number of academic as well as journalistic and activist venues. So I have learned first hand about how TV news will selectively edit interviews to cut one's analysis but keep in the details one gives of an assault, about how our colleagues and friends react, sometimes with support, sometimes with concern and the sincerely given advice that we should stop speaking, sometimes with incomprehensible confessions of titillation on their part. I have found that no venue is really safe from untoward, unpredictable responses. This is true even within the domain of feminist theory, where the drumbeat of criticism against focusing on women's victimization has also reverberated in my head, making me reticent at times. But I continue to believe that speaking out is a powerful and subversive tactic.
Although increasing the circulations of survivor speech is our best tactic of resistance, the discursive conditions that interpret and circulate our speech require a political resistance as well. As the feminist activists using social media have learned, even advocacy in regard to what should be unambiguous cases can backfire, and the circulation of a video on social media dangerously preempts the survivor's own choices. Even when we create our own venues – or become newspaper editors or TV news producers or write books on rape – we cannot entirely control the further circulations and interpretations. Thus, we must work to increase the public's sophistication in understanding how power, male dominance, racism, heterosexism, imperialism, media financial interests, institutional self-protection, and other dynamics can seriously distort how we are interpreted and judged.
How, then, do we enhance the public's critical awareness about the conditions of this speech, and enable its greatest transformative political impact? Toward these ends, I develop here six points critical for creating a meta-lucidity around the topic of sexual violation.
Courts have immense power to limit what may be said, charged, judged, or decided (Estrich 1987). They set strict limits on the rules of testimony, including who can testify, under what conditions, and about what topics. In most situations the supportive testimony from the other victims of a perpetrator is disallowed even if it helps to confirm a modus operandi or pattern of behavior. Statutes of limitations are set in many places in such a way as to make cases of childhood rape almost impossible to prosecute. As Smart shows, rules of testimony can place the victims on trial more than the perpetrator.
The officialdom of the legal arena is made up of institutions, such as District Attorney offices in the United States, with a need to protect and justify themselves by boosting the rates of success their offices can boast. The success these rates quantify has little to do with the success of reducing sexual violence: they only measure the percentages of cases that result in conviction from those chosen to be taken up for prosecution. Hence, prosecutors have a strong interest in choosing only those cases they think they can win. Further, they are motivated to play to existing prejudices among jurors, rather than challenging them in a way that raising the level of understanding of these crimes generally requires. Prosecutors who must convince jurors, and judges, in order to obtain a conviction may well exacerbate bad ideas if this helps their case. The public needs to become more aware about the limitations these kinds of influences place on an open and fair airing of cases in court, and the fact that failure in court may indicate little about the grounds of a case. This is also true, of course, about cases that succeed in court.
So-called “successful” cases of sexual harassment often result in financial settlements that may help to pay for therapy or legal expenses but muzzle accusers through non-disclosure agreements. This common practice protects institutional brands (a university's reputation, or a corporation's) and allows perpetrators to seek other positions with no record. And non-disclosure agreements allow perpetrators to continue unabated, multiplying their victims, as the case of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein revealed. It is a bit of capitalist ideology to assume that money can solve the problem.
Most importantly, courts are aiming to establish individual culpability without attending to complexity or social and structural conditions more germane to a real understanding and prevention of sexual violence (May and Strikwerda 1994). Activists, advocates, and survivors are often motivated by much larger aims than that of establishing the sort of individual culpability that can merit prosecution. Understanding that there is a more diffuse and complex system of culpability involved in the social problem of sexual violation, beyond one that can be remedied through legal measures, may be more pertinent to real and lasting change.
The mistake, then, is not the use that is made of the legal domain to enact change, but to view this as the only game in town, the only place where the truth of a case can be determined and the best way to pursue justice. Truth is circumscribed by the court's focus on individual culpability as well as a host of regulations contorting the gathering of evidence, and justice is construed too narrowly as conviction and punishment, or sometimes rehabilitation. Convictions may create a deterrence that reduces incidents of violence, but recent research shows that imprisonment, even execution, has negligible deterrence effects. And if race, class, and sexuality narrowly circumscribe the kinds of cases that result in conviction, this hardly produces the scale of change we are aiming for. The fact is, legal systems around the world have winnowed the mass of actionable cases to a slow drip, spreading fatalism and often exacerbating faulty narratives about the crime and the accusers.
So in sum, although it can provide a powerful and publicly visible lesson, and secure some perpetrators away from committing further violence, the legal arena is not the only place in which to uncover the truth or make social change. Nor is it necessarily the best.
Reverse empiricism is justified by the psychological taint projected onto victims of sexual violation, as I discussed earlier, and a taint that follows in the wake of a long cross-cultural history in which victims more than perpetrators are viewed as damaged, morally compromised, incapable of objectivity or rationality. Too often such projections are associated with “pre-modern” cultures, letting the West off the hook. But reverse empiricism produces a taint with a putatively more rational basis in assuming that traumatized victims have lost their ability to make careful and measured judgments in regard to any issue that might in some way connect to rape. Popular films and TV shows persistently portray victims as likely hysterics, possibly violent, permanently damaged in a psychological sense, and incapable of “normal” relationships. Incest victims and rape survivors become either crazed serial murderers or pitiable incompetents.
The result is a reversal of the usual empiricist orientation that privileges the role of experience in knowledge. We generally accord empirical credibility to those with direct, first-person experience, but in the case of sexual violence, those with direct experience of the problem are given a credibility deficit. Many would refrain from consulting a victim of childhood sexual abuse about whether their suspicions about a neighbor are worth pursuing. Interestingly, reverse empiricism commonly operates in certain other kinds of cases as well: claims about racism made by persons of color are often judged skeptically by whites who assume that non-whites are oversensitive or excessively ungenerous in interpreting white behavior. Miranda Fricker (2007) argues that imputing diminished epistemic capacity undermines respect for a person's ability to interpret her or his surroundings and act judiciously, hence for her very personhood.
The core assumption behind reverse empiricism is not wholly unsound. Of course our personal experience, social location, background, and so on, may have epistemic effects on our judgment, and it can be legitimate to take such considerations into account in certain circumstances. But the assumption that victims of sexual violation have clouded judgment in this area, or that people of color identifying instances of racism are probably jumping to conclusions, overlooks competing considerations: that those who have not been victims of sexual violence or of racism may be affected by denial, avoidance, a vested interest to downplay issues that demand they take action, or that they are simply uninformed about the nature and subtle signs of the problem. Victims of sexual violation or of racism may in fact be especially loath to find another instance of the problem that has affected them so deeply, to be forced to confront evidence that their family, workplace, school, or neighborhood is once again an untrustworthy place, or their friend or neighbor's child is a possible victim.
Hence, reverse empiricism in regard to these specific issues is unwarranted. Though all of us have a point of view, set of interests, and experiences which may adversely affect our judgment in some respects, survivors have an experience that may productively inform their judgment, improving its reliability in assessing likely perpetrators, understanding the after-effects of assault, the signs of trauma, and so on. Those who have experienced a manipulative perpetrator's advances may be more capable of discerning the pattern. They may also be familiar with the typical denials of family and friends and co-workers who dismiss signs and trivialize dangers. And they may know that survivors have varied rather than uniform affective responses, and that the absence of tears on the witness stand cannot be taken to mean anything.
My argument here would not be that victims of sexual violation are uniformly reliable judges, but that we have direct experience germane to judgment and there should be no preemptive disauthorization or assumption that we are incapable of measured and thoughtful analysis. As Laura Gray-Rosendale and I argue in chapter 6, the media too often represents a bifurcation between victims as naïve informants and experts who can offer more complex analytic frames. To address the credibility deficits that survivors experience, we need to redress the bifurcation. Many excellent theorists and counselors in this area have some experience of sexual violation, yet feel the need to keep this hidden so as to retain their capacity to function. This may well be necessary, yet it results in a distortion of the epistemic conditions of public discourse, allowing larger publics to continue to project an epistemic taint on victims. Let me underscore again that I am not arguing for everyone to break their silence, but that we need to take note of the pattern of reverse empiricism at work and critique the assumptions that keep it in place.
Rather than attempting to settle on a uniform set of terms and definitions, it may be more useful to use broader, less precise terms, such as sexual violation, within which survivors can have the flexibility to name their own experiences in their own way. We also need to remain open to new terms and concepts, whether or not these will assist legal cases or build public sympathy in the richer countries of the global North or cities in the global South.
Meanings are in some measure always local. We can impose uniform definitions across contexts, but the operable meanings will vary in light of context-specific connotations and associations that exist in local spaces. We will see this in chapter 5 with regard to controversial concepts such as “honor crime,” “victim,” and even “consent.” Besides meaning variance, the contextually specific connotations of terms can produce politically worrisome effects (such as feeding cultural or other sorts of prejudices).
While we should not pursue a universal, global meta-language, this does not counsel a formulaic or dogmatic localism, or doom us to linguistic relativism. The alternative to universalism (imposed by the global North) is dialogic approaches that foster understanding across specific contexts in order to develop collaborative projects around, for example, the conditions of migrant sex work or transitional justice involving multiple ethnic or national communities. If the flows of money and power are lopsided, however, such dialogic collaborations are likely to be a sham.
We need a methodological practice based on contextualism. This would recognize that (1) operable meanings are always subject to contextual effects, yet (2) contexts are internally complex, (3) there are causal connections and influences between contexts, and (4) despite the contextual nature of meanings, we need to remain open to the possibility of common outcomes across wide varieties of contexts.
Most local contexts are in fact pluritopic rather than monotopic: containing multiple cultural reference systems and constellations of meaning rather than a single one. Medina stresses that our discursive arenas today contain multiple sexualities, cultures, religions, and ethnicities, with multiple and conflicting linguistic reference points. Therefore, though it may sound contradictory, the local is not bounded to the local, given that there are connotations and meanings that cross cultural boundaries even if they are not universal. The value placed on female virginity may not be universal, but it can be found in a diversity of religiously conservative communities, and even in liberal cultures the value accorded to hairlessness, thinness, and extreme youth suggests a resonance with the virgin ideal. Another example is that men who kill unfaithful wives receive reduced punishments in many religious communities as well as in some secular contexts. Bad ideas are echoed to produce naturalistic alibis for oppression. A contextualist approach needs to remain attuned to these sorts of connections.
So a central requirement of becoming meta-lucid about the ways in which sexual violence emerges in public discourse is to be aware of contextual conditions that may change the connotation and hence the meaning of terms, and forgo the demand for universal terms with precise definitions that can be imposed on survivors. Although contextualism about meaning no doubt complicates the development of empirical work in this area, it will enhance the likelihood of more accurate fact gathering, as social scientists have recently discovered (Gavey 2005). When we let survivors describe their own experiences, we can gather more and better data.
What I call here “legitimate venues” refers to officially recognized and sanctioned sites in which authorities determine both the content and structure of the communication, such as courts, campus judiciary committees, internal review boards within many sorts of institutions, and most of the media. It is striking that in the midst of an epidemic the hegemony of such venues is so vigorously defended: survivors are sanctioned, fined, suspended, or expelled from school and heavily criticized if they venture out to unofficial, unmanaged avenues, such as social media, anonymous graffiti, or art activism.
As more survivors are speaking, the terrain of struggle has become the speech itself and the attempt to confine it within venues and modes that authorities find palatable. Resisting this hegemony is motivated by the recognition that the system is not working. Both theorists and activists need to consider not simply the content of speech but also its manner of circulation, distribution, editing, and the attempt to sanction those of us who step outside the communications officialdom. Beyond the work of critique, we need also to explore how we might want to construct unofficial venues of communication that would maximize political effectiveness as well as be governed by norms of our own choosing. The next two items address this further.
The famous judgment of the seventeenth-century English jurist Matthew Hale put forward the idea that, while rape was “a most detestable crime,” it was also “an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused,” no matter how innocent they were. For this reason he argued that there need to be unique testimonial practices used in crimes of rape, an idea that continues to have influence (Freedman 2013: 17, 153–4). Following Hale, as Igor Primoratz explains, “the standards of proof were made higher than those relating to other crimes” (1999: 157), requiring evidence of force and the corroboration of further witnesses beyond the victim. Hale's statement might be taken as applicable to accusers and accused of whatever identity, but as Estelle Freedman (2013) shows, it resonated then (as it still does now) with ideas about the gendered, racial, and class-related associations of honesty. What Hale ignored were the social structures that can make it far from “easy” to make an accusation, especially for certain groups. In 1793 a wealthy New Yorker was accused of raping a 17-year-old seamstress. His lawyer cited Hale when he argued that accusations of rape place “the life of a citizen in the hands of a woman” (Freedman 2013: 17). The all-male jury delivered an acquittal after deliberating for just 15 minutes.
Steven Shapin's (1995) excellent history of modern European ideas about truth showcases the reasoning behind these judgments. Women, children, and peasants were considered too irrational by nature, while Jews were thought too cunning. Interestingly, high-status members of the royal courts were also given low credibility on the grounds that they were likely involved in some court intrigue and thus guided more by strategic considerations than pure epistemic virtues. As it turned out, only men of independent means were thought to be likely truth tellers. This idea, as I said, remains evident today, to wit, that wealth confers epistemic reliability, an idea that Donald Trump has put into good service. Clearly, the distribution of presumptive epistemic credibility by identity categories – one's gender, class, ethnicity, age, and so on – is a very old practice that we have not yet overcome. When a case is characterized as “he said, she said,” this may not be a dispute between equal parties, but overdetermined by identity prejudices.
More recently, there have been subtle and not so subtle attempts to disauthorize or discredit the claims by queer people, women of color, leftist activists, and poor people in general on the grounds of their political agendas, intellectual unreliability, economic aspirations, or some combination thereof. The corollary of the idea that wealth confers epistemic reliability because the speaker is economically self-sufficient is the idea that those who are vulnerable in one way or another – economic or social – have motivations to lie, and that it is therefore justifiable to downgrade their presumptive credibility and require the extra evidence that Hale called for. We need to unpack this history of ideas about knowledge and justification, both professional and popular, and the ways it continues to inform and infect contemporary responses to survivors who make charges. In particular, we need to correct the assumption that those most well off in a community are most likely to be able to face the truth and speak it.
According a presumptive credence to accusations is not the same as granting an automatic acceptance. We must find ways to overcome the legacy of identity-based prejudices that can generate skepticism toward an accuser for illegitimate reasons. Hearers must be exceptionally cautious and reflective about their initial judgments. Attributing them with an initial credibility is just a means to start the process of further assessment.
Of course, in everyday life, we are not always in a position to judge all the claims we hear, and in most cases we should withhold a final judgment. We may not have the ability to gather more evidence, and we certainly don't have the justification to grill the person who has made the claim. To treat claims about sexual violence with a presumptive credibility is just to bring this sphere into accord with other kinds of testimonial claims we take every day at face value: that our office mate is telling the truth when they claim to have had a bad night's sleep, or that our neighbor is telling us truthfully that they didn't see our cat. Unless we have specific reasons, and good reasons, to doubt such everyday testimony, it is reasonable to accept it at least on a provisional basis.
But, of course, in some cases a claim may address us more specifically: for example, if it is about someone we know, or calls for action on our part. In such cases it requires a higher level of assessment. For these kinds of claims, we need more than just presumptive credibility, although this still does not necessarily give us the right to grill the accuser or to be made privy to all the evidence.
The legitimate venues for adjudicating claims and for communicating them to the public are untrustworthy. However, the solution to these problems cannot be to forgo all concern with truth, but must be to fashion new truth-related norms and practices.
This chapter has argued that the global echoes of sexual violation are reverberating today in both productive and unproductive ways. Movements for change need to work to improve the wider public's understanding of how survivor speech circulates and is interpreted and treated in the mainstream, and to help us all become better at assessing and critiquing the strategies by which our speech is muted. The critical content of speech in this domain, however, concerns a claim about our experience. This will be the topic of the next chapter.