Interpreting Media Representations of a “Night of Madness”: Law and Culture in the Construction of Rape Identities

Abstract

This article compares U.S. and Kenyan media representations of an incident at a Kenyan boarding school during which many young women were raped and several killed by their male schoolmates. The author's analysis of print media accounts reveals that how the press constructed the identities of “rapists” and “victims” relied on nationally specific stereotypes, myths, and scripts of rape and its relation to differences of culture, race, and rationality. U.S. accounts simultaneously explain the rapes by emphasizing difference and foreground legal constructions of rape identities that meat experiences of rape as essentially similar. The tension over difference and law in the U.S. accounts parallels the highly visible, though largely unproductive, debate among feminists pitting cultural relativism against legal universalism, and such dichotomized approaches preclude the development of politically useful conceptions of rape and rape identities. The analysis suggests that issues raised in the Kenyan press-the relation between sexual practices and rape and the state's role in furthering sexual violence-directed attention to complexities of rape and power elided by the m o w legal models pervasive in U. S . media and scholarly representations of rape. She concludes that fighting rape more effectively entails exposing limited representational practices and also attending to a broader range of understandings of rape and rape identities in various contexts