Take Back the News believes that people’s attitudes toward sexual assault and its victims and survivors are largely driven by the manner in which the crime is reported by mainstream media. Many news articles that report a sexual assault focus on the actions of the victim or infer that an assault did not occur. For example, an article in the New York Post, “’Rape’ in St. John’s Dormitory” by Erika Martinez and Angelina Cappiello (October 1, 2005), reported on the alleged rape of a female college student by an acquaintance. In writing about the crime, the reporters stated that the rape occurred after the student, age 18, returned from a night out drinking, and then stated that the woman “fell asleep in the suite she shares with seven other women and woke up around 1 a.m. to find a youth from the crowd raping her, the source said. The student screamed, prompting friends to burst into her room. The suspected rapist ran out of the dorm, police sources said. The girl then fell back to sleep, and called cops after waking up at around 2 p.m. yesterday.” We believe that this article insinuates that the woman was partially responsible for the rape because she had been drinking. It also insinuates that the woman may not have been that traumatized, or perhaps that a rape did not even occur, since she did not wake up the next morning until after 2:00. A person reading this article may subconsciously form the conclusion that the woman had been drinking, had sex with one of the men she was drinking with, and then woke up the next day regretting her decision so she falsely claimed she was raped. Another example of an article on rape that points the finger at the victim instead of the perpetrator was in the New York Post on November 21, 2005, “2 Cops in Sex Rap- Busted After Traffic Stop; B’klyn Cops Arrested on Sex Rap,” by Erika Martinez and Larry Celona. In this article describing the alleged rape of a woman by two on-duty police officers who stopped her in the middle of the night for not wearing a seat belt, the reporters cite several unknown sources’ accounts of what happened. The article contains the following version of what happened: the woman recognized one of the cops and invited both back to her apartment, one of the officers stayed downstairs and never went inside the apartment, and the woman’s alleged sexual encounter with the other police officer was consensual. The article also notes that the woman refused medical attention. It concludes by stating that one of the officers was married with a child, and it is not known if the other is married. The reader may subconsciously form the conclusion that the police officers, as husbands and fathers, could not have raped this woman, but instead she invited them to her apartment in the middle of the night and had sex with them. After all, she refused medical attention. The sources claiming that the sex was consensual were not identified, and could have been anyone, including friends of the perpetrators. News articles such as these help shape societal attitudes toward sexual assault, where the victim is blamed and doubts are raised as to whether an assault even occurred. Take Back the News intends to put a stop to irresponsible news reporting through our Media Response Project. EXAMPLES OF MEDIA MISREPRESENTATION OF RAPE AND SEXUAL ASSAULT include, but are not limited to: 1)  an insinuation that the victim is lying, often made by the defense attorney or the perpetrator, that is not countered by the victim or an advocate for the victim. 2)   the use of sexual or romantic, rather than violent or criminal, language to describe the crime. Words such as “sex,” “affair,” or “seduction” are often used to describe the crime, particularly if the victim is a woman or a child. The language used to describe male-on-male rape is often more reflective of the violence that it is.   3)  victim blaming, based on the victim’s profession, personal life, social status, behaviors, etc.   4)  biased discussion of the victim’s history, but not the perpetrator’s.   5)  description of the details of the crime in a pseudo-pornographic or titillating manner.   6)  media outlets that provide greater coverage to cases in which the accuser’s credibility is questionable, which both discourages real victims from coming forward and hurts the accused if they are in fact innocent.   7)  lack of perspective from the victim’s side, for example by a lack of interviews with victim’s advocates; similarly in most cases the victim is not interviewed by the press (often by choice or to protect the victim’s privacy).   8)  reporters who publish the defense attorney’s quotations without putting them into perspective by providing context about rape/sexual assault;   9)  in cases with homosexual or racial overtones, a focus on the issues of homosexuality and race instead of the rape or gender issues.   10)  the location in the newspaper of an article on rape that affects public perception of the case; for example, including an article about rape in the sports section plays up the heroic attributes of the athletes being accused. 11) when the accused is a member of the military, the use of a tone of shock and anomaly, sometimes resulting in the accused being portrayed as patriots and neighborhood boys rather than criminals. 12) newspapers that tend to highlight and publish instances in which someone has been wrongly convicted and imprisoned for rape.  In those cases they neglect to address whether the accuser was lying about being raped or if the wrong person was captured by police. As a result, these articles imply innocent men are very likely to be accused of rape and women often lie about rape.   EXAMPLES OF MEDIA UNDERREPRESENTATION include, but are not limited to:   1)  a lack of coverage of cases involving acquaintance rape.  Newspapers tend to focus on rapes perpetrated by a stranger with a weapon; rapes perpetrated by famous athletes, entertainers, etc.; or rapes involving children.   2)  little media coverage of the work done by rape crisis advocates (greater coverage of their work could help the public better understand the issues and perhaps encourage victims to disclose).   3)  little coverage of the number of rapes publicly reported on college campuses and similar institutions.   4)  little coverage of updates on the technology involved with using and detecting date rape drugs.   5)  little coverage of how rape is used as a weapon of war.   6)  little coverage of rape in prison, contextualized with victim advocacy. Police Reporting Take Back the News also confronts the underrepresentation of sexual assault in mainstream media. The underreporting of sexual assault by the media is directly related to the underreporting of sexual assault to the police. The majority of rapes are not reported to the police. Is it any wonder that rape victims are hesitant to report a rape when the general public's initial reaction is to blame them for the rape or to doubt the occurrence of the rape? Perhaps more victims would report a sexual assault if they were ensured that people would believe them and they did not have to defend their own actions and behavior. Our goal is to change attitudes about sexual assault, starting with the media, so that in the future nobody blames the victim for being raped, but instead places the blame where it belongs: on the rapist. For more information on reporting a sexual assault to the police, click here.