Protestors outside the Steubenville courthouse. Photo by marsmet523 via Flickr.

Steubenville High School football players Trent Mays, 17, and Ma’lik Richmond, 16, were recently found guilty of raping an intoxicated 16-year-old girl at a number of parties in August. Disturbing video evidence includes a gleeful commentary from a drunken friend of the rapists, still available on Youtube. “She’s deader than OJ’s wife!” he giggles. A photo of the naked, unconscious victim being dragged away was quickly circulated around the internet; the boys urinated on her body afterwards. The case received a great deal of attention mainly because of the way in which social media provided crucial evidence.

Newscaster Candy Crowley, correspondent Poppy Harlow, and legal expert Paul Callan of CNN in America prompted global outrage by focusing solely on the consequences for the two rapists of being convicted and on their emotional anguish, rather than on the impact their actions had on the victim.

Harlow: I’ve never experienced anything like it, Candy. It was incredibly emotional, incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures – star football players, very good students – literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart…when that sentence came down, [Ma’lik] collapsed in the arms of his attorney…He said to him, “My life is over. No one is going to want me now”.

Crowley: You know, Paul, a sixteen-year-old now just sobbing in court, regardless of what big football players they are, the other one just seventeen, a sixteen year old victim, they still sound like sixteen-year-olds…The thing is, what’s the lasting effect, though, on two young men being found guilty in juvenile court of rape, essentially?

Callan: Well, you know, Candy, we’ve seen here a courtroom drenched in tears and tragedy….The most severe thing with these young men is being labeled as registered sex offenders. That label is now placed on them by Ohio law…That will haunt them for the rest of their lives. Employers, when looking up their background, will see that they’re registered sex offenders. When they move into a new neighbourhood and somebody goes on the Internet, where these things are posted, neighbours will know that they are registered sex offenders.

As if CNN couldn’t stoop any lower, they later named the victim, whose identity had been kept secret up until that point. The entire coverage was eerily similar to a 2011 parody video from spoof site ‘The Onion’ about college athlete rapists being portrayed as heroes, with no regards to the victim. It prompted an online petition on Change.org demanding an apology from CNN, which has garnered almost 300,000 signatures to date. But the channel was not the only one to blame: ABC News, NBC News, Yahoo News and others joined in lamenting the boys’ crushed hopes and damaged prospects.

The problem with CNN’s coverage is not that there was mention of the emotion in the courtroom. It’s not that the rapists weren’t treated as monsters. It’s that the focus was placed squarely on the tragic effects of the conviction on the rapists, despite the fact that this was a result of a crime which they chose to commit. There was no focus on the shortness of their sentences, a minimum of one or two years in a juvenile detention facility. Instead we heard of the personal implications of them being classed as registered sex offenders: “What’s the lasting effect, though, on two young men being found guilty in juvenile court of rape, essentially?” There was no real sympathy expressed for the victim. There was no discussion of the lasting effect of being raped and of having a photo of the lowest point of your life circulated across the globe, before being named on a national news network. This is rape culture. The media coverage of the verdict was just the tip of the iceberg.

I still feel sorry for these rapists. Not because their futures are destroyed but because they thought it was justifiable to rape someone while their friends encouraged them from the sidelines, circulating photos and recording video commentaries. Because they live in a culture where rape is normalised and even trivialised: as the case garnered more attention, defensive internet users argued that because both sexes were drinking at the party, the victim was to blame for her rape. Rape is laughed about on TV, on the internet and in everyday conversation. And a 2009 US study concluded that only about 2% of rapes reported to police in the US resulted in a prison sentence (the attrition rate is around 7% in the UK). It is estimated that the vast majority of victims do not report their rape in the first place.

An official investigation of a potential cover-up in the Steubenville case is ongoing. It wouldn’t be the first example of athletic clubs in America – and even entire towns – sweeping allegations of sexual violence under the carpet. In Michigan in 2010 two basketball players accused of sexually assaulting a woman in her dorm were found not guilty, despite one of the accused admitting that he had sex with her when he knew she didn’t want to. In 2007 a student-athlete at Iowa State University claimed that she was sexually assaulted by two football players; according to the victim’s mother the athletic director, head football coach, associate athletic director and a faculty member encouraged her to accept an on-campus investigation instead of reporting it to the authorities; for weeks she was harassed by the alleged perpetrators before any action was taken. And then there was the Texas student who was kicked off her school’s cheerleading squad for refusing to cheer for an athlete, whom she had accused of rape (he was not convicted; his lawyer suggested that she had been “asking for it”). These are just a few of the numerous disturbing manifestations of an insidious and infectious rape culture, which can thrive in high schools when athletes are put on a pedestal and realise that the adults surrounding their team will rally around them, even if they’ve committed a serious crime.

Rape culture is when universities actively discourage victims from reporting their rape to the police. It’s when the University of North Carolina threatens to expel a student for talking about her rape because it is “disruptive or intimidating” (she didn’t even identify her attacker). It’s when the Steubenville judge said during the sentencing that the case highlighted the need for caution in “how you record things on social media that are so prevalent today”; without the evidence circulated across social media, which pales into insignificance compared to the ghastly crime itself, it might never have ended in a conviction. It’s when Facebook censors photos of mastectomies and women breastfeeding but refuses to take down images promoting rape and domestic violence, such as the picture of a woman tied up and gagged next to the caption: “It’s not rape. If she really didn’t want to, she’d have said something.” And it’s when victims are told to bear partial or total responsibility for their rape because they’d been drinking or wearing a short skirt, or because they’re a “slut”. Because they were “asking for it”.

If anything I’m sorry that these rapists will become part of the American prison system, which only serves to reaffirm rape culture: sexual assault and rape are commonplace amongst inmates and prison staff, with a 2012 study revealing that 9.6% of former inmates at state prisons across the US reported at least one incident of sexual victimisation during their most recent period of incarceration. And I’m sorry that people can’t make the connection between the actions of the rapists and the culture they were brought up in. What will happen in the wake of the Steubenville conviction? What about the thousands of rape and sexual assault victims each year who continue to be silenced, their experiences erased? When will we finally accept that we are all complicit in this culture?

I wonder if coaches will start to discuss consent with their athletes. I wonder if American schools will stop attempting to cover up rape allegations. I wonder if internet users will think twice about laughing at rape jokes or participating in ‘casual’ victim blaming. Because collectively we could have prevented Steubenville. And, until we accept that, it will happen over and over again.