(De-)constructing Rape Culture and Victim Blaming Online

Introduction

Rape culture is a well-studied social phenomenon that also has embedded within it the practice of victim blaming, and both of these phenomena are present in American and Polish societies, especially within certain discourses. This specific social dynamic includes the practice of normalizing sexual violence and blaming rape victims for the crimes committed against their persons, thus strongly affecting and influencing the attitudes towards actors involved (cf. Chapter 1 for a comprehensive definition of rape culture). I highlight the view that in the online discourses presented in the specific genre of digital comments—which either directly or indirectly blame the victim—the product that is discursive secondary victimization emerges. As a result, the focus tends to be on how the presentation of the role of the victim highlights her as an actor who is seen as at least partially at fault for the crime committed against her.

As a social problem, sexual aggression has received much media attention over recent years, including the rise of the #metoo movement on an international scale in 2017 and the public and social persecution of perpetrators of sexual crime making headlines in the media, from social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, to official news websites. This increase in the vocality of women around the globe on the subject of abuse and harassment has been attributed to the growth of platforms for digital communication (Guha, 2020). Feminist activism online has resulted in various campaigns in the US, such as the SlutWalk movement, the Hollaback social campaign, and the #metoo movement (ibid.; Alaggia & Wang, 2020). In Poland, feminist organizations, such as Dziewuchy Dziewuchom, FemFund, Federa, and Feminoteka have been active both on- and offline in battling the stigma that victims of rape face in the country (Korolczuk et al., 2017). Even more recently, 2024 saw a change made to the definition of rape in the Polish legal system (Krytyka Polityczna, 2024).1 Despite the efforts of such movements to eradicate ideas of victim blaming and its reproduction, however, the secondary victimization of those who have suffered rape still occurs, and stigmatization is still visible in various discourses, including in the media and regular talk and text.

The question of recognizing the problem and taking action against such forms of not only sexual, but also other highly gendered, aggression and crime has been manifested in many guises, ranging from public protest to a backlash of feminist groups against the legitimization of existing “normative views of female and male sexuality” (Ehrlich, 2001:1). Despite this fact, rape victims—or survivors—oftentimes do not find it an easy or feasible task to escape the social stigma attached to being the targets of sexual crime, and it is all the more alarming that women make up the majority of those affected (Wolitzky-Taylor et al., 2011; Yung, 2013, 2015). This has been previously investigated from a linguistic perspective in the literature concerning the discourse in legal language about rape, including the language of rape trials and the testimonies of victims and offenders (Ehrlich, 2001). This problem is also evident in the discourses of Internet users who make comments in publicly available discussions that may be found underneath articles about rape. This community has been found to draw on various linguistic strategies, namely that of implicitness in the evaluation of the social actors—namely the offender and the victim—involved in a sexual crime.

This work deals with the problem of sexual aggression in American and Polish cultures by looking at discourses of Internet users, namely those presented in digital comments. I aim to highlight where gender ideology is visible in discourse on sexual crime. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, my goal in this book is to point out that such discourses have a negative—even detrimental—effect on rape victims and the way that they are perceived overall, as the public nature of such comments entails that they are then read by different audiences.

By investigating the indirect evaluation of actors in such digital comments, it is possible to pinpoint more distinct mechanisms that lead to the claim implicit evaluation is used to express opinions both on the level of structure and socio-semantics in discourse. The nature of digital comments to be more conversational and informal in their register is reflected in the choice to investigate evaluation and the way that implicit evaluation can be seen in short comments, rather than in broader terms of evaluation in discourse (Martin & White, 2005; Hunston, 2011; Aijmer, 2015; Aijmer & Rühlemann, 2015; Millar & Hunston, 2015). By investigating the evaluative stance of authors’ comments, what may be made more clear is how, by a variety in the choice of expression, the appraisal of social actors is made all the more covert, since direct negative expression of attitudes is rare. Such an investigation of the meaning behind comments of Internet users can demonstrate that victim blaming is carried out indirectly rather than directly, and as such spreads beliefs that a rape victim is at least partially to blame for having been raped. The cultural aspect of the analysis aims to present that, although victim blaming is present in both American and Polish CMC, strategies of indirectness in comments differ between the two cultures, reflecting cultural tendencies in language when faced with a taboo subject such as that of sexual crime.

The widespread underreporting of rape may, thus, be dealt with from a perspective that takes language as the basis both for the construction and maintenance of beliefs and stereotypes regarding the actors involved. Such an approach takes victim blaming as central to the perpetuation of harmful beliefs regarding rape and the actors involved, where negative attention is placed on the victim of the crime, even if the perpetrator is found guilty. Victim blaming places a victim (or survivor) of a crime in a position of culpability (iterating that she was even partially at fault for the crime committed against her), rather than placing full responsibility on the perpetrator. The United States Department of Justice has provided the statistics on the number of reported sexual assaults, estimating in 2007 that only 2% of victims who were incapacitated at the time of the crime reported being raped and that an alarming 13% of those physically forced report being raped, which has been deemed to still be of relevance today (Gray, 2017). Even more alarming are the statistics that predict the prevalence of rape, revealing an startling disparity between the sexual crime that takes place in men’s and women’s cases.

The National Sexual Violence Resource Center (2015: 1) states that “one in five women and 71 men will be raped at some point in their lives” and that “nearly one in 10 women has been raped by an intimate partner in her lifetime, including completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration or alcohol/drug-facilitated completed penetration.” The present work looks only at rape cases in which women are the victims, due to this alarming disparity.

The Polish statistics do not speak much differently on the problem of rape in Poland, as well as about the approach of rape victims and their access to proper aid from authorities. The most recent reports concerning the statistics on sexual assault date from 2014 (Raport „Przemoc wobec kobiet: badanie przeprowadzone w skali UE”2) and 2011 (Fundacja Feminoteka) for the EU and Poland, respectively. The report from 2014 states that in the EU, 33% of women experienced either physical or sexual violence against her person after the age of 15, that 22% of women were victims of physical or sexual violence by their partner, and that 5% of the women who partook in the study had been raped. The Polish report carried out by Feminoteka in 2011 states that very little is known about the scale of sexual aggression in Poland (Turecka, 2005; Borkowska & Płatek, 2011: 11). The report provides information from the year 2007, stating that 3% of respondents of a study carried out by OBOP (Ośrodek Badań Opinii Publicznych3) had been the victim of some form of sexual assault, and that 1% had experienced being sexually assaulted by a family member. To my knowledge, more recent statistical research has not been carried out on the subject.

One reason for undertaking a study of the discursive representations of the motivations to view the victim as at fault for being raped is to underline the important role that public discourse plays in shaping and maintaining such beliefs, including attitudes towards actors in a rape case, especially where negative attitudes toward the victim are concerned. This perspective provides an opportunity to change the conversation on sexual assault, aggression, and rape, possibly creating space for a harsher approach within the criminal justice system towards those who commit such an insidious and criminal act. It has been argued that rape constitutes a type of social interaction with its scripts and that those scripts reflect or are seen in many cases as synonymous with normal cultural or sexual scripts, with the exception of sexual refusal (Ryan, 2011). The reason that I do not engage in an in-depth discuss on sexual aggression against men in this work, whether perpetrated by women or other men, is due to the above-stated information regarding the prevalence of sexual aggression against women by men (RAINN, online; Piotrowska & Synkiewicz, 2011: 117).4 That is not to say that the subject is not equally important, however, it is unfortunately out of the scope of this work.

Although this book does not attend strictly to the structural linguistic aspects of discourse, which are entailed in traditional linguistic study, it does attempt to investigate what Foucault (1972: 49) deemed the “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.” Thus, the work explores the linguistic representation of female rape victims in a cross-cultural analysis of the computer-mediated discourse (computer-mediated communication—CMC) on rape to demonstrate where gender and sexist ideologies are visible in discourse that maintains victim blaming present in rape case situations. In taking both American and Polish online discourses (CMC) as instances of attitude expressions, as made easier through the internet as a medium, i.e., via digital comments which can be found in the form of comments that often accompany articles on sites such as Facebook, tabloid sites and other fora, a window into the prevalence of victim blaming in discourse may be provided and the magnitude of such a social problem shown.

In the chapters that follow, I delineate how discourses can be unpacked to reveal where power structures and underlying ideologies shape stereotypical interpretations of social situations. The work comprises four theoretical chapters and two separate analytical chapters, each of which focuses on a different aspect of the critical discourse analysis of digital comments. In Chapter 1, I name and describe in depth how critical discourse analysis, as a framework for the analysis of discourse that spreads ideology, provides tools adequate for the investigation of the foundations upon which victim blaming occurs on a regular basis, its genesis being in talk and text. The methodologies of investigation described include the representation of social actors on both levels of structure and socio-semantics as well as the investigation of linguistic pragmatics in CDA and the categories of analysis in social actor representation, as well as the question of linguistic choice and modality. These key aspects are described in detail, with examples provided for illustration. The subjects of evaluation in discourse and the appraisal that occurs through implicit evaluation are addressed from a pragma-linguistic perspective to show that digital comments about rape and the actors involved may be described from such a perspective. It is important to note that the subject of implicit evaluation is the main point of departure for the study conducted in this work (Chapters 6 and 7).

Chapter 2 deals more in depth with questions of ideology, how ideology as a phenomenon to be studied is interconnected with gender, and the normalization of patriarchal structure in many institutional, public and private settings. Notions of masculinity and femininity, as well as what constitutes them, are introduced here, and the idea of hypermasculinity defined as reproducing harmful patriarchal norms. In this chapter, I highlight how cultural sexual scripts, as related to gender ideologies, act rather universally (i.e., they are similar in both American and Polish cultures) and play a large role in the way that rape victims are viewed, as these scripts are largely responsible for the dissemination of rape myths present in the discourse on rape cases. In addition to this, sexual crime is defined, and the various typologies of rape also provided in the chapter.

In Chapter 3, the question of gender and sexuality in language, including previous linguistic studies in both American and Polish contexts is also addressed in depth, so as to provide the background for what linguistic aspects are seen here as affecting the perpetuating victim-blaming attitudes. This includes how communication and miscommunication have defined a standpoint perspective regarding who is to blame in cases of sexual crime. The chapter discusses the gender and language theories that make up the canon, including deficit theory, muted group theory, the difference approach to gendered communication, and, finally, dynamic theory. Gender representations that reflect ideologies of masculinity and femininity are also discussed where they partake in the forming of discourses about men and women. This includes phraseologies that refer to men and women, as well as semantic derogation and asymmetry, subjects which reflect negative discourses towards women. Finally, Chapter 3 covers the topic of language and sexuality and also describes the ways that discursive representations of genitalia and sexual intercourse reflect the ideologies that are discussed in Chapter 2.

Chapter 4 delineates the analysis of the Internet in linguistic study, presenting the idea of computer-mediated communication and within it, that of digital comments. The questions of genre, register and style are discussed in their relation to digital comments as a genre. Such an aspect is important in introducing the subject of online comments, which in the case of rape, could not exist without the points of reference that are the news sources on the subject discussed. The subject of online comments is then introduced, as well as that of anonymity in digital comments and its importance in leading to freer expression of blame attribution within the context of rape. This being said, the impact that such public sources have on collective attitudes is contended, since its widespread availability in the online sphere is what I argue to reproduce the discursive secondary victimization that emerges.

In Chapter 5, the aims, research questions and materials and methods used to carry out the analysis are presented. This chapter is laid separate from the two practical chapters, rather than embedded within their content, as the same methods of coding were applied to both tiers of the analysis and the same corpora (the AEC and the PC) were used to highlight evaluation in both structural and socio-semantic levels of the digital comments analyzed. An explanation of the program MaxQDA and how exactly the materials were coded and statistically analyzed is also provided in the chapter on methods and materials.

The theoretical chapters described above lead to the analysis of the two corpora collected, which consists of two chapters on the critical discourse analysis of the ways that discursive strategies in American and Polish digital comments which accompany articles about rape reflect predominantly negative attitudes towards victims. The first part of the analysis in Chapter 6 focuses on the way that the evaluation of actors is expressed within the structural elements of discourse, including how discursive strategies, such as negation and deontic or epistemic modality express evaluative stances towards the actors involved in a rape crime. Here, I take from van Leeuwen (1996, 2008), as well, focusing on the activation and/or passivation of actors and the ways that such strategies foreground or background actors, thus leading to the implication (through implicit evaluation) that one actor is more at fault than another.

Chapter 7, the final aspect of the practical analysis for the work, also focuses on the evaluation that lies in digital comments written by Internet users on the subject of rape, however in the socio-semantic aspects of such discourse. The analysis looks at how evaluation in the lexical representations of the victim, the offender, and the rape itself can provide insight into the meaning communicated by the writer where his or her stance is concerned. The subject of the representations of actors according to the social actors model is discussed in depth (van Leeuwen, 1996), including a focus on appraisement where metaphorical references are found (Chilton, 1996; Charteris-Black, 2004). Where the rape is concerned, the investigation of euphemization of the rape itself is seen as providing examples of sociocultural attitudes towards the crime and its actors. These aspects are also investigated as to what they reflect in the cultural sense, i.e., whether or not American and Polish discourses demonstrate any differences in the way socio-semantic representations of actors and events in rape come about.

I would also like to note that throughout the work I use the term victim(s) to refer to a woman or women who have been raped, rather than the counterpart survivor(s). This is not because I disagree with the term, but rather, because both are problematic—not all victims want to be seen as survivors and not all survivors wish to be viewed as victims (Thompson 2000)—and the term survivor has as of late been deemed more objective and is used in contexts of the criminalization of sexual assault (SAKI 2015).

The purpose of such an analysis is to provide a full-bodied comparison of one kind of online discourse that is representative of the way that Internet users who make comments express evaluative attitudes (both positive and negative) towards actors in rape. The cultural aspect is of importance, as my main hypothesis purports that victim blaming is carried out through varying strategies in American online comments and Polish online comments. As the literature states that American culture is more indirect than Polish culture, where communication is concerned, it is of interest to seek out whether or not, given the nature of sexual crime, this remains the same for evaluation in anonymous online comments (Wierzbicka, 1985; Ogiermann, 2009). It is my hope that such an analysis will allow for conclusions to be made regarding the indirectness of the evaluation (as shown through the analysis of implicit evaluation) of actors involved in a rape and the link that such discourse has with taboo and what is considered unacceptable in American and Polish culture.

I have written this work with the hope of demonstrating the social weight of language, discourse, and cultural scripts and their reflection in the way that things are worded. These aspects of social expression in turn contribute to the construction of rape culture, as well as the reproduction of secondary victimization. The way that a community or society speaks on an issue shapes the values and what is upheld, illustrated and propagated by such societies. When examining the fact of persisting normalizations of the public persecution of victims of sexual crime, the discourse surrounding their role in the crime is pertinent in shaping the way that they are viewed. Although the situation of these victims is receiving increasingly more media attention, a highly embedded victim blaming is still present in both normal, everyday discourse, and in the discourse of the press. This work aims to describe the phenomenon, explaining where hegemony functions in maintaining the inferiority and lack of support towards victims of rape, and the fact that these phenomena are intrinsically linked with the linguistic representations of victims and perpetrators, distorting the perceptions regarding the actors involved and further victimizing those women who have been raped by men.

Chapter 1: Critical discourse analysis and the problem of rape

This chapter aims to explain the relevance of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to the linguistic investigation of crime, specifically rape, as well as to delineate the approaches to CDA that are suitable for the analysis of a topic of such social significance. To be discussed in the pages that follow are the methodologies currently used in connection with tackling social issues, especially those that relate to discourses on gendered subjects. What is of interest here are those discourses about sexual aggression towards women and how actors are portrayed in such a way so as to perpetuate the problem of victim blaming within discursive aspects of social life. The justification of a discourse analysis approach to the subject of rape is that in any general investigation of sexual violence as a gender-based crime, in which women have been the victim in over 90% of cases in the United States and Poland (Koss, 1988, 1990; Borkowska & Płatek, 2011; Dutka, 2014; Chmura-Rutkowska, 2016), such an analysis acts as an attempt to help its eradication.

It can be argued that stereotypes regarding female sexuality as a taboo subject, which are related to normalized sexual scripts that promote male sexual dominance, are also at work in the maintenance of the blaming of women who have been raped, and that post-seventeenth century ideas regarding sexuality still apply to women today (Foucault, 1976; Cameron & Kulick, 2003). These ideologies are visible in evaluative discourse about rape, as such evaluation presents stances and attitudes.