It was difficult to miss the headlines on January 24, 2024, citing the staggering number of reported rapes (519,981) that occurred in the US just 18 months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, as well as the number of women who were impregnated (64,565), as published in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA).
Even today, over one year later, if you were to type the words ‘rape’ ‘pregnancy’ and ‘Roe v. Wade’ alongside each other, a web search would reveal dozens of articles, podcasts and videos referring to the JAMA study. But what’s one word that won’t lead you there, no matter how many times you type it in? MEN. That’s right, while this study made headlines everywhere from national magazines like Scientific American (‘64,000 Pregnancies Caused by Rape Have Occurred in States with a Total Abortion Ban, New Study Estimates’), to online news stations like NBC (‘64K Women and Girls Became Pregnant Due to Rape in States with Abortion Bans, Study Estimates’), to international news sites like THE INDEPENDENT UK (‘Over 64k Rape Survivors Became Pregnant Across 14 US States After Roe Vs Wade Overturned, Study Finds), none of them mention the word ‘men’, not only in the headlines, but anywhere else in their coverage.
Even the study itself, which was published by the American Medical Association (AMA), considered to be the most widely circulated medical journal in the world, did not include any reference to men as the rapists. Instead, each publication chose to present these statistics in a passive rather than in an active voice.
This boggles the mind, really, since every budding journalist learns that writing in the active vs. the passive voice improves an article’s clarity. increases impact, and improves readers’ word rates, which have become increasingly harder to attract due to the rapidly decreasing attention spans of internet-based readers.
Yes, the proverbial journalism axiom warns: Thinking of writing in the passive voice? Squash It!!
Even the iconic feminist publication, Ms. Magazine, omitted ‘men’ in the title of its coverage, ‘Fourteen States Deny Abortions to Over 65,000 Rape Victims Since Dobbs,’ as well as in the 423-word article that followed. The same was true for reproductive rights historian and blogger, Jessica Valenti, who omitted using the word ‘men’ in any of the 564 words she wrote to describe the results of the study.
But these weren’t the only feminist media outlets that ignored this axiom. Neither did, I confess, Women’s eNews. Although Women’s eNews did not specifically cover this report, we, like too many others, had been regretfully unaware that the passive voice was being used when addressing men’s violence against women, That is, until a new essay submission about rape appeared in my inbox just one year later, which included this sentence: “A few years ago, I had the ability to take paid safe leave from my job after a man raped me.”
BOOM!
I was so taken by the writer’s honesty, directness and courage, in fact, that I not only included that sentence as the lede under the article’s title, ‘Pushing for Paid Safe Leave for Survivors’ published one day later, but I immediately wrote to the writer, Sara Rodriguez, who is an advocate for women, girls, and survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. After thanking her for her courage, I asked whether her decision to frame this sentence that way was purposeful. She replied, “Yes, that was absolutely intentional.”
Using the passive voice has a very specific purpose in journalism: It eliminates responsibility. In fact, previous research has shown that passive voice predominates in mass media reports describing male violence against women, suggesting that journalists specifically prefer it to describe male-on-female violence, rather than for other forms of violent or negative acts. Why? When all forms of media are competitively scrambling to attract the most eyeballs, they have taken note that both male and female readers show increased acceptance of rape and the battering of women after exposure to descriptions of sexual assault written primarily in the passive voice.
So, let’s stop for a moment to reflect on one thing, the one thing that we can all agree upon, regardless of our gender, political party affiliation, or abortion stance: Women cannot be raped, or become pregnant, by themselves.
This statement may have caused you to chuckle a bit over how obvious it is, but there is nothing funny about letting men off the hook, whether in the news media, in the courtroom, or in the bedroom. Actually, it succeeds in doing one very critical thing: It causes women to bear the entire responsibility for sex.
Such ideology is conveyed in big and small ways. Sometimes obvious. Sometimes not. For example, females are becoming increasingly criminalized for everything from not using contraception, to becoming pregnant, to having an abortion, to not being able to properly provide for the baby. Just consider the term ‘single mother’ which refers to a single woman who provides a home for at least one child, without a present father. What if we changed that narrative, and the responsibility, to a more accurate term such as a ’fatherless home’? But why stop there? What if we went straight to the very source, the JAMA study, and changed its title to the active voice? It could read something like this: ‘The 519,981 Men Who Raped Women Caused Over 64,000 Pregnancies in 14 US States with Total Abortion Bans’.
I do admit, after a more exhaustive search, I stumbled upon one article whose headline was written in the active voice when referring to this study: ‘When A Rapist’s Logic is the Law’ (New York Magazine). But upon further reading, one particular line suddenly put a halt to any momentary feeling of hope: “Women who are pregnant or recently gave birth are twice as likely to die by homicide than any other cause of maternal mortality, most often at the hands of an intimate partner.”
Unfortunately, it remains up to the reader to read between the lines!
