Thursday, September 13, 2012

Wilson was acquitted of raping an unconscious 17-year-old girl, but convicted of aggravated child molestation of a 15-year-old girl. The legal issues in the case and the ultimate appellate court decision that freed Wilson after serving two years of his 10-year sentence are posted here and here. [Tracie Powell, Poynter]



Be specific with language.



Cover all sides of the story.



1) Why did Delaurio and Carmichael accept this pitch? And why did Jefferson want to write this piece?

I never expected the pedophilia piece to be beloved by many people. When I touched on the topic last year, one of my coworkers told me directly that she wouldn’t be reading “that trash.” When I told my friends Amanda and Megan I was working on it, they both balked and warned me that I would probably have to live forever with the Google suggestion “cord jefferson pedophile.” …I knew the story would make some people loathe me, and others loathe me more. I knew other writers would fire off angry screeds about what I wrote. I knew people would unfollow me on Twitter and Tumblr. I knew there was a good chance I would hurt people’s feelings. If I’m being honest, I started to let all the fear around the whole thing goad me on—I wanted to be the kid who went into the haunted house while all my naysaying classmates stood and watched from the sidewalk. - Jefferson

2) Why was there so little consideration of sexual abuse survivors’ perspectives?

The blowback was mostly what I expected…I had anticipated people saying the doctors and I were wrong, and that all pedophiles should “go to the therapy of Smith & Wesson,” as one commenter put it. I had anticipated people telling me to kill myself. I had anticipated people writing off the studies I referenced as junk science. I had even anticipated molestation survivors writing me to tell me how insensitive the piece was.

When I looked at the lede of my pedophile piece…I never imagined how hard to read that would be for someone who’d lived through molestation…I’ll admit that I wrote and read [it[ the way a guy who was never molested would write and read [it].

It's not easy to listen to Terry talk about the time he had sex with a seven-year-old girl. But after his psychotherapist put us in touch, he agreed to lay it all out for me during a phone call and email, and I was enthralled the way one might stare at a man falling from a bridge.

The old adage is that the true mark of a society is how it treats the weakest in its ranks. Blacks, women, Latinos, gays and lesbians, and others are still in no way on wholly equal footing in America. But they're also not nearly as lowly and cursed as men attracted to children.

3) What research did they do to substantiate the comparisons of the marginalization of pedophiles to the racial, gender, and sexual oppression?

4) What did Jefferson and his editors hope to add to the conversation about CSA?

5) Did Jefferson and his editors make any effort to determine what best practices for writing about child sexual abuse are? Did they consider how their language and story choices fit with other reporting or the current climate re: sexual violence, and how that’s been commented on by survivors or advocacy groups?

“How you tell the story of exactly who is the harm-doer and what is the nature of the harm matters…Using a term that conveys pleasure when you’re describing a crime is always wrong, but particularly when there’s a child involved and especially when it’s highly erotic. It’s just the wrong descriptor.” [Poynter]

When a major news outlet describes a high-profile case of convicted rape and sexual assault as a “sex scandal,” that blurs the boundaries between the public perception of rape and sex and both glamorizes and sensationalizes the serious crime being described. When an internationally renowned paper describes a Ugandan rape survivor as “beautiful, sitting there with her scarred cinnamon brown skin,” or tells how “her lips shine with a natural gloss” and her legs look “polished,” it confuses sexuality and sexual assault, and encourages readers to objectify and sexualize her as a survivor of rape. [Women Under Siege]

My thinking was that no sex with a prepubescent child can be considered consensual, meaning if you’re talking about sex (read: intercourse) with a kid, you’re automatically talking about rape. - Cord Jefferson



“attempting to rape a minor” vs. “attempting to have sex with a minor.”



“decided to groom a 7 year old with the ultimate goal of raping her” vs “began a sexual relationship” with that 7 year old.



In conclusion: Privilege

“[The response] I didn’t expect was being branded a ‘rape apologist.’…I do not believe that I published 3,500 words of ‘rape apologia,’ and the claims that I did were what really kept me tossing and turning in bed last night. …Did I defend rape? Absolutely not, and many, many people, some of them survivors, have written to me or commented to say that, to them, my intended message was conspicuous.” - Jefferson (Emphasis mine)

I wish my editors and I had been more aware of all this beforehand, because I believe we would have changed a lot of that language. Alas. I think we handled the lede and the headline poorly, and for that I really do apologize…

If I had to write ‘Born This Way’ all over again, I think the ways in which I’d change my approach are pretty obvious. But I’d still write it and publish it…[I got an email] from a man who said that, after decades of being attracted to young boys and not acting on that attraction, he read my piece and is finally ready to talk to someone about his problem…maybe knowing there are people in this world who don’t think he’s a disgusting animal changed the course of his life and his unrealized victims’ lives forever. I just wish I hadn’t hurt people to possibly help others. - Jefferson (Emphasis mine)

Today I'm happy to welcome a long-time twitter friend @graceishuman to the blog with a reaction to a recent Gawker article on pedophiles. Given the immense power that the media has to shape our opinions and culture, I think it is incredibly important to question the way they report on things, as she has done in this article.In journalism we tell both sides of a story and the reader kind of gets the truth, which emanates from our storytelling. - Tracie PowellIn American culture we have this idea that people who aren’t personally affected by an issue are the most “objective” and therefore most “rational” about it. Besides the fact that objectivity as we define it is doesn’t exist , it’s often the case that the those who have direct experience of an issue are better able to see its full scope and implications than those with the fewest stakes in it. White people often have a limited and distorted perspective on racism, as straight people do on homophobia, cis people on transphobia, men on misogyny, etc. Cord Jefferson's Gawker piece on pedophilia as a “sexual orientation,” and his response to criticism of it, are a disturbing example of how wrong things can go when we confuse limited experience or knowledge of an issue for impartiality. Many of the problems with the piece seem to stem from a total obliviousness to his privilege and its implications. By his own admission, Jefferson didn’t (and doesn’t) know what he was talking about, but still believes he’s qualified to write about a complicated and extremely painful issue that’s widely misunderstood. This is the essence of casual privilege.Controversial media coverage of sexual violence cases is hardly uncommon. For example, this past July EBONY.com faced a huge backlash over what many saw as an overly laudatory profile of Genarlow Wilson:Journalist Tracie Powell reflected on the piece (now deleted) as a case study of how writers should and shouldn’t cover sexual assault. Two guidelines she suggests are particularly relevant to the Gawker piece:With these points in mind, I second Ta-Nehisi Coates : this article was a huge failure of journalistic ethics, by Jefferson as well as his editors, AJ Delaurio and Emma Carmichael. I have many questions about the choices they made on this piece.Cord Jefferson says this is the first time he’s ever written about rape. Frankly, it shows.All journalists have to start somewhere. But it should be obvious, especially given the sensitivity and complexity of an issue like sexual abuse, that a longform piece on pedophiles is not an appropriate story for someone who’s never written about rape before to pitch.I can’t imagine what Delaurio and Carmichael were thinking when they accepted this pitch. Perhaps they trusted that his general abilities as a writer would carry over to this piece, but being good at wordslinging isn’t a substitute for being thoughtful and conscientious. Whatever their thinking, it was their responsibility to ensure Jefferson did the topic justice.I’m quite curious to know how Jefferson got it into his head that this was a story he in particular needed to tell. He pursued it with a tenacity that’s inexplicable given that he’s never covered sexual violence (though he had interviewed one of the scientists he profiled before). Why was he so convinced of his ability to write this piece?Jefferson says his piece was about defending the “right [of pedophiles] to exist in a world that sees them as human beings deserving of life and support,” but there’s more than just deep seated concern for pedophiles’ rights in his comments. They suggest a personal investment in iconoclasm and taboo-breaking, a perception of himself as risking outrage (and horrors! being unfollowed on Twitter) to bravely tell inconvenient truths.Jefferson was convinced (dare I say determined?) that his piece would shock and infuriate people, including survivors. Why? Did he think it was impossible to write a piece about the human rights of pedophiles without people “loathing” him, or without coming across as “insensitive” to survivors?It sounds like Cord Jefferson got too attached to his narrative, and survivors’ experiences weren’t part of it. I’m not saying he had a conscious desire to be edgy, but his anticipation of backlash seems to have been a self-fulling prophecy. He was perhaps consumed with the idea of his argument’s originality and the controversy he expected to generate, and certainly overly focused on the ramifications for him personally.Put simply, this was a deeply irresponsible and self-absorbed approach.This much is obvious. The absence of any real consideration for survivors is pervasive.Jefferson and his editors published an account of the grooming and rape of a child (who would now be 25) from a perspective sympathetic to the man who raped her. Worse, they used language that implied this abuse was romantic and consensual.This woman is a real person, perhaps even a Gawker reader. She doesn’t appear to have entered Jefferson’s mind as a potential audience at all. She deserved better than to have her story told from the perspective of the person who raped her. Better still: to not have her story told without her informed consent, which I highly doubt Gawker had.Jefferson writes about childhood sexual abuse (CSA) from a remove - it seems almost abstract to him. Perpetrators are more real people in his piece than survivors. There’s a lack of inquisitiveness about the lives and experiences of victims, a lack of identification with them that’s viscerally horrifying when Jefferson goes to such lengths and lurid detail to get readers to identify with pedophiles, and equates them every oppressed group he can think of.I have a suspicion that listening to someone recount being raped as a child and its effects on their life would not “enthrall” Jefferson nearly as much. It’s a bit harder to indulge voyeurism when you have to sit with the real victims of child rape and deal with it from their perspective. Take survivors out of the picture and you can focus on treating perpetrators as a fascinating freak show and hypothesizing about whether you’d be willing to have them over to dinner.By any common sense reckoning, it is not men “attracted” to children who are the “weakest” in our society; it’s children who are sexually exploited and abused. I’m confident that Jefferson would agree if asked to speak directly to this point. But in this piece he seems to have gotten so caught up in hand-wringing over the plight of pedophiles that he lost sight of survivors of CSA.Without evidence to justify it, Jefferson’s claims that pedophiles are more “lowly” and “cursed” than “Blacks, women, Latinos, gays and lesbians, and others” is nothing more than lazy sensationalism. It’s particularly egregious given that children with these marginalized identities, especially girls of color and queer and/or trans youth of color , are at much higher risk of sexual abuse and exploitation than children outside these groups. Jefferson’s failure to consider victims in his reductive argument kept him ignorant of the intersectionality of identities and oppressions in CSA.Jefferson also co-opts “born this way,” a slogan that some LGBT people have claimed (problematic though it is) as a source of pride and resistance against bigotry, fraudulently applying it to people who rape children. It was incredibly irresponsible for him to do this in a culture where the idea that queer and trans people - especially gay men and trans women - are sexual predators by nature remains widespread . In fact, one prominent conservative Christian blogger has already used Jefferson’s piece to promote the argument that the “sexual liberationist logic” of queer people and our allies will lead to a future where “adult-child sex is no longer stigmatized.” Somatic Strength , a survivor of CSA and incest, has written that people frequently and without proof extrapolate from the idea that pedophiles can’t be rehabilitated to assuming they can’t control themselves around children, or that they really believe their actions are innocent and consensual.This comes from a mindset that treats the rape of children as somehow ontologically different from the rape of adults. A rapist who could only experience sexual arousal through coercing adults - such a condition does exist - wouldn’t elicit such sympathy. There’s also a failure here to connect CSA to the psychology of abusers in general. Abusers of any sort often lie and claim they were provoked, or not in control of their actions.Jefferson’s argument that pedophiles who abuse are not predators but rather tragic figures struggling mightily until they give in out of desperation is far from original. It’s conventional wisdom packaged in pseudo-intellectualism and a shallow theology of caring for perpetrators, rather than survivors, as the “least of these.”The real intervention of the piece is the argument about the human rights of pedophiles - a point I agree with. Its moral force is undermined, however, by Jefferson’s refusal to name the crimes he’s talking about honestly: rape, coercion, and molestation, not “sexual relationships,” or “sex.” If he couldn’t make this intervention without relying on a lie of omission, again, he wasn’t the right person to write the piece.Between Jerry Sandusky, the Catholic hierarchy, the GOP’s war on sexual and reproductive rights, and other stories, the media has been full of stories about sexual violence and the language different groups use to describe it. Just in the past month there’s been furor over Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” comments and Father Benedict Groeschel’s assertion that children can be “seducer[s]” in cases of sexual abuse. Advocates for survivors have decried the unfortunate decision of many media outlets to call rape and sexual abuse scandals “ sex scandals ,” as though unfaithful politicians are on the same level of offense as a Jerry Sandusky.If Jefferson and his editors tackled this lengthy and controversial story in ignorance of the ongoing discussions about media depictions of sexual violence, it was despite abundant resources, easily available from their peers’ work, or failing that, a simple Google search.Question: if you’re “automatically talking about rape,” how is that a reason to not use the word rape? Rape is the accurate and honest term.It’s hard not to notice, though, that “sex” softens the impact of the violence described in way that’s more congenial to Jefferson’s argument about the great sympathy we should feel for child abusers. These choices may not have been conscious, but they were also not accidental. I’m sure Jefferson and his editors see the difference in impact between the following phrases:They can’t really believe there’s no material difference between using these words because lack of consent is implied.Speaking of sexualizing rape…can anyone honestly imagine the lede for such a piece focusing on the rape of a boy? If it had, it’s extremely unlikely that it would have been written like the actual lede, which reads more like erotica than an account of the deliberate grooming and rape of a child. It’s a highly sexualized account with eroticizing details about the victim “taking off her shorts” and “straddling” the rapist. If you think such an account would have been written about a boy victim, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.Again, I don’t assume this was a conscious choice. But it was a choice made in the context of a culture that routinely sexualizes the rape of girls and women in a way it doesn’t do with the rape of boys or men.And then there’s the sheer sloppiness and inconsistency of distinguishing between “real pedophiles” who never harm a child, “real pedophiles” who become sexual abusers, and sexual abusers who are not “real pedophiles, but nevertheless using these categories interchangeably throughout the piece (Ta-Nehisi Coates notes some examples of this). This confusion of language and categories - paired with Jefferson’s failure to comment on the 80% of sexual abusers who, according to the research he cites, aren’t “real” pedophiles - may give some readers the misleading impression that every adult who sexually abuses a child is “struggling” with of a “sexual orientation” that they can never disclose to anyone. The lack of clarity in his use of these categories is incredibly irresponsible given the nature of what he’s writing about. (Jefferson was naive and uncritical about the research he touted on pedophilia, but I’ll leave that for a separate post in the interest of length.)Jefferson has made a partial apology. I don’t question its sincerity. I also don’t believe he intended to write rape apologism (I mean really, how many people would?). It’s nevertheless what he did. I’d put it to him that if he’s fully committed to his intention to avoid rape apologism, he’d do well to try to understand why people are calling his piece that and work to do better in the future.As it is, Jefferson seems to say that he, not survivors, gets to decide what’s rape apologism, and which survivors’ evaluations of his writing are most valid (conveniently, the ones who didn’t call it apologism). He decides whether the “help” offered to pedophiles by this argument is worth the pain could cause survivors, or any false impressions of CSA it might give to the public. He decides that he’s qualified to write such a piece again, despite all he’s conceded about what he didn’t know and didn’t even consider for the first piece.Privilege is a helluva drug.Jefferson’s self-pity party is a bit contradictory given his apparent bravado about how much anger he was willing to risk to write this piece. Really, he was tossing and turning at night because people called his article rape apologism? Tell that to people for whom being a survivor means they routinely can’t sleep at night, who always sleep facing the door, who are afraid to even take a shower because it might trigger a flashback or worse. Tell that to survivors who can be triggered at any moment, just living their everyday lives like anyone else.I’m sorry Cord Jefferson lost a few nights of sleep because people were mad about his article. But I’m mindful of the fact that he can take peaceful sleep for granted.The bottom line is those of us who aren’t survivors of CSA have to recognize our positionality. Our voices are privileged over those who have survived it, even when (perhaps especially when) we write in ways that decenter survivors or misrepresent CSA. We have the loudest voices and stand to lose the least. If our work doesn’t make survivors more visible; if it doesn’t make their voices more audible; if it doesn’t center their accounts of their experiences and reliable knowledge about the psychology of abuse, we are using our privilege to do survivors further harm.Some resources (far from exhaustive, please make additional suggestions!) for supporting survivors and working against sexual violence:T.F. Charlton is a former evangelical Christian, recovering academic, spouse to a pink-haired musician, and mama to a wise-cracking (almost) 4-year old. She's the founder of the religion and gender blog Are Women Human? , where she blogs as "Grace," and a writer and commentator on media and culture from a black, Nigerian American, queer feminist perspective. Say hi to her on Twitter at @graceishuman.Image credit: Justin Baeder on flickr