ASKING TO BE RAPED
The media:
Paul Johnson on the duty
to discourage violence
THIS week it is Budget week. Last week it was rape week. The media's attitude to rape is, of course, ambivalent. Officially, the media are against it — indignantly so. Professionally, a spate of sensational rapes, justifying a sanctimonious but titil- lating discussion of the subject, is excellent for sales and ratings. Having said that, it seems to me two media issues arise. The first is the rights and wrongs of naming names. Under the present law not merely the victim but the accused enjoys legal anonymity unless convicted. Parliament seems likely to alter this rule and put the accused in the same position as any other adult facing a serious charge. But it has not Yet done so and until then the media must abide by the law. And if anonymity is observed when a suspect has been charged, it is still more undesirable to name him When a prosecution has been abandoned for lack of evidence. Last week the name of a man in this position was made public by Geoffrey Dickens MP. MPs who make use of par- liamentary privilege to publicise allega- tions of this sort are widely and and rightly criticised, and constitute the worst possible example for newspaper editors. It is lament- able, for instance, that the media give Publicity to Brian Sedgemore MP, who systematically uses or abuses this privilege. When Dickens made his allegation, most Papers reported it but refused to print the name he used. The Mail on Sunday did so, oit said in an editorial, 'without hesita- n. If that is true — if the editor took the decision without hesitating to consider the ethical consequences of his act — it is a deplorable admission. Unfortunately, in the media sin nearly always pays. The Mail on Sunday had a powerful splash: 'Rape case doctor assaulted me too, says girl's ,annt, 20: WHY WAS HE NOT CHARGED?' ,,11 The front page of its most immediate rival, Sunday day Today, looked obscure by com- parison: 'CITY ROW: NICK THE GREEK'S Wellington TO THIRD mAN'.As the Duke of wellington said: 'Who? Who?' ,The other far more important issue, is nether behaviour of the media contri- butes to such crimes as rape. Of course it does, and they know it. Hence their defensive sneers at Clare Short MP and her admittedly naïve Bill to ban page-three nudes. I would happily support her, believ- ing, as I do, that banning nudity and all forms of explicit sexual activity from news- papers and television would reduce the country's sexual temperature a bit and make rape less likely. The loss of freedom of speech and expression would be negligi- ble and any who claim otherwise are humbugs. The notion that art is damaged by legislation to protect public morals, put forward in the most extravagant fashion by opponents of Winston Churchill's Bill, is nonsense: true artists always perform bet- ter under reasonable social restraints.
However, it does not seem to me that Clare Short is tackling the problem of media incitement at its root. Rape, in its essence, is not primarily a sexual activity but a gross and cruel act of violence. It is in the spread of violence that we should seek the causes of its increase. Titillation in the media helps to arouse sexual desires, but the media presentation of violence is more likely to persuade the potential rapist that he can satisfy these desires by force. The great lesson of our age, hammered home in the media day after day, is that violence usually gains its ends — and is always worth a try. Almost every day the media report a victory for violence or display people in senior positions giving moral support to those who practise it.
A case in point is Clare Short's party leader, Neil Kinnock, who made a speech last Thursday in support of the thousands of demonstrators who have been trying to prevent by force the distribution of four newspapers from Wapping. Kinnock de- nounced 'Schloss Murdoch' and its `muscle-bound mentality'. But News Inter- national did not go to the enormous trouble and expense of installing security defences for the hell of it. They did so because they knew from experience — Grunwick, the Shah battle with the NGA and, not least, the miners' strike — that it was the only way of getting their newspap- ers to their readers. The company negoti- ated with the unions for many years before Wapping was fortified. The truth is that the unions had forgotten how to negotiate seriously, because they had always been able to impose their will by sheer industrial muscle. How often has one heard the cry at TUC and Labour Party conferences in recent years: 'Use your muscle, lads'? It might be the slogan of the National Union of Rapists, too. Building a fortress is an act not of aggression but of self-defence. No one likes the formidable array of locks we now have to put on the doors of our homes in big cities. They are not evidence of a `macho style of management', or any other of the offensive epithets Kinnock used about Rupert Murdoch. They are simply a despairing response to the brute force of crime. By an ironical coincidence the Labour Party demanded last week that the state should pay for such devices on private homes.
The truth is the Labour Party now condones the use of political violence in a wide variety of cases. There was no protest from its leaders when violence was used to force a Bradford headmaster out of his job, simply for putting a perfectly arguable point of view in a small-circulation, serious magazine. Nor have Labour leaders con- demned the recent spate of student violence in universities, much of it organised by Labour student activists, whose avowed object is to prevent public debate. In these cases, everyone in the country can observe violence getting its way, with the benign approval, or cowardly silence, of the Labour establishment. Labour is the chief sinner but by no means the only one. The Anglican Church in its policy on the inner cities, the Government itself in its policy on Northern Ireland — these are only two of countless examples which show violence pays these days. The media relay the message and rub it in because the reporting of violence sells newspapers and raises ratings. Personally I have no doubt that the media display of violence should be sharply reduced, by internal codes if possible, by la* if need be. But the ultimate encourage- ment to violence is provided not by those who record it but by those in authority who condone or submit to it. It seems to be the nature of a liberal, permissive society like ours to adopt the posture of the rape- victim.
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