New York Times was posted announcing that two male high
school students were found guilty of raping a sixteen-year old girl. Almost all
of the incriminating evidence came from YouTube videos and Facebook pictures
taken by the perpetrators of the victim naked and passed out from too much
alcohol. The evidence also included the boys’ text messages exclaiming that having
sex with her was “like [having sex with] a dead body.” The word “dead” certainly
destroys any argument that this was consensual sex.
YouTube
and Facebook sealed the boys’ fates in 2013.
In 1983, without the benefit of social media, the trial would have been
the boys’ word against the girl’s and would have contained some flavor of the
boys claiming the girl was looking for it.
Today, social media essentially prevented any use of the age-old defense
that “the victim is to blame.”
While
social media helped get justice, on the one hand, it also glamorized these boys
and their victim, on the other. Once the incident went viral on YouTube and
Facebook, a heinous crime became (at least temporarily) an alluring event with
the parties to the act becoming reverse celebrities. Why does social media have
the ability to glamorize awful events that if seen in person would cause us to
look away?
Alex, This is an important topic, of course, but you don't analyze the coverage of the event, even when you say the boys were glamorized. How? To what extent? What of backlash? Is this part of a larger pattern in which women are preyed upon, in which the media blame the victim?
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