The many things wrong with the visual representation of rape
Rape is not real — at least, that’s what the visual language used by the Indian news media suggest
This is the first of a two-part series on the imagery accompanying the news media reportage on sexual violence in India.
Rape is unreal, or, at best, an abstraction. That is the impression you get if you consider the visual language in the Indian news media. Sexual violence affects a disproportionately large number of women, cutting across religion, caste, and language. So it is important it is represented in a manner that acknowledges the severity of the crime. How can we do that? How can we change the current visual language? There are examples we can consider to help us rethink how we use imagery in the news coverage of sexual assaults.
Search and destroy
To begin with, most visuals accompanying reportage on sexual assault in most Indian newspapers and websites seem to be from online stock image collections. These stock images are sometimes generic photographs but graphic art, cartoon images and other non-photographic illustrations predominate. If you are among the majority who skim through images and headlines when reading news, then gender-based violence in India would appear to you as happening mostly to vaguely female shapes, shadows and silhouettes. Not to real women. Never to real women. I would go so far as to say that images that accompany most reportage on gender-based violence serve to destroy all meaning from the very words they are meant to draw attention to.
It is possible to deflect this criticism by pointing out that news organisations are required to adhere to the legal protection of the identity of victims of sexual violence. Most do. But because in some cases they did not, the legal protection against revealing the identity of victims was reiterated in 2018, to include a ban on publishing all identifiable information about sexual assault victims. Long-established journalistic visual conventions surrounding this publication ban has coalesced around using generic stock photographs, digital graphic art visuals, cartoon images and other non-photographic illustrations.
An insightful analysis of the types of images used in Indian news media’s visual narration of rape and sexual assault has recently been done by Neha Mann. When going through the typology of the various rape-related visuals she has constructed, if one focuses on the ultimate impact of the meaning generated by such visuals, it makes for scary reading. As Mann points out, stock imagery — photographic or non-photographic — showing women under threat is often used. An identifiably female body, even if not always visibly Indian-looking, writes Mann, is the staple of such stock imagery, with the bodies in question signified as under threat through various symbolic postures and gestures.
THE PERSONHOOD OF INDIAN WOMEN IS POINTLESS SINCE THEIR BODIES ARE POWERLESS IN FRONT OF THE FORCE OF THE LUSTFUL GAZES AND GROPES OF INDIAN MALES, SUCH IMAGERY INDICATES
However easy it might be to search and download such stock imagery from internet sources, the question we must ask is this: does a generic cowering female body, with lusty fingers reaching out towards her, helps us in any way grasp the events or social impact surrounding a sexual assault? I would argue that it destroys all meaning associated with the rape or assault for the readers by reinforcing the female body as abstract, unreal, and, at best, an object. The personhood of Indian women is pointless since their bodies are powerless in front of the force of the lustful gazes and gropes of Indian males, such imagery indicates.
The representative image
The type of images described above, which mostly accompany immediate reports of incidents, are slowly replaced by other types in the aftermath of sexual violence. Some digital graphic art used for these reports have judicial undertones: a judge’s gavel, handcuffs, cartoon policemen or prison bars. When photographic images are used to show the actual place or people involved, long shots of court buildings, policemen (stress on men), and suspects with their faces covered start to dominate the visual space.
Sometimes, these justice-themed photographs are too abstract to mean much about real life to an Indian audience; also, this type of visual narration often serves to brush the discomfort of such acts taking place in a society you live in under the blanket-narrative of justice taking its due course. It allows us to carry on with our day because it is easy to imagine the judiciary as a safe space. It is easier to forget that judicial narratives of rape in general, and particularly in India, can be highly traumatising for victims of sexual violence too.
In short, these images visually signify a disembodied process to illustrate crimes committed against real bodies, allowing us to not dwell on the real, physical horror. This is an unnecessary effect we have allowed the legal protection of victims’ identities to have on how we visualise rape and sexual assault. ‘Nothing to see here, move on,’ these images seem to say, ‘it’s all sub judice now.’
Another type of popular photographic image that appears in Indian news reportage on aftermaths of sexual assaults and rape is that of marauding male rioters protesting a particular sexual assault incident, or scenes showing the destruction they have left in their wake. These help visually reinforce another type of legal discourse for audiences. No matter how many words might describe the social implications of sexual violence, the images inscribe the impact of sexual violence on society as fuelling further acts of criminal aberration. By placing a social problem that is around us every day, and one in which we are all implicated into a socially anomalous event precipitating abnormal inversion of law and order in the public, the news media create a visual narrative that allows the wider public to distance itself and maintain their respectability in their own eyes.
The images that rarely become a visual part of the narrative are that of real Indian women affected by not the particular incident being reported on but more generally by the ‘rape culture’ and ‘shame culture’ that India, and Bharat, reserves for women. The ludicrousness of the absence of women from much of the visual space surrounding representations of rape and sexual assault is compounded by unconscious irony when some news organisations add the words ‘representational’ or ‘representative image’ or ‘picture used for representational purposes only’ under the stock photos or digital illustrations they publish. The images, whatever their purpose, are not representative of anything other than all of us — journalists and the public alike — taking the laziest visual option available when dealing with a well-meaning legal directive to not reveal information about victims of sexual assaults.
THE IMAGES, WHATEVER THEIR PURPOSE, ARE NOT REPRESENTATIVE OF ANYTHING OTHER THAN ALL OF US — JOURNALISTS AND THE PUBLIC ALIKE — TAKING THE LAZIEST VISUAL OPTION AVAILABLE WHEN DEALING WITH A WELL-MEANT LEGAL DIRECTIVE TO NOT REVEAL INFORMATION ABOUT VICTIMS OF SEXUAL ASSAULTS
To cover for the ease with which we click and download stock images from online sources to provide visuals as journalists, and consume them unquestioningly as the public, we talk about rape and sexual assault in commercial legalese. ‘Picture used for representational purposes only’ is a phrase directly inspired by the fine print legal disclaimers used in TV and online advertisements. Scholars have pointed out before that neo-liberal discourses shape the language used to report on rape incidents in Indian news media, and that such discourses decide which incidents will cause public outrage and which will not. Our visual language for rape is no exception. Unfortunately, this is not the only way that our neoliberal zeitgeist, scripted in commercial phraseology, shape visual narratives of rape. Particularly, it insinuates itself into our digital news platforms in ways that undercut all meaning from the very real horror and pain being reported on.
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Not only have we collectively decided it is fine to relegate visuals accompanying sexual violence-related news to the realm of the abstract and the unreal, but on digital platforms on which we increasingly consume news, we have let digital advertising algorithms run visual riot on the meaning being conveyed.
Visit the website of your favourite newspaper and look at some recent news reportage on rape. It won’t be long before your eyes wander over to the images of the algorithm-generated advertisements shown to you. And studies show that you would not be alone. Research done on news-reading habits on both print and online news media have shown that humans are drawn to ‘para-texts’ — for instance, breaks in the text such as headlines, images and captions — when reading a newspaper or a webpage. While going through the website of a venerable Indian English-language newspaper, the visual suggestions from ‘Around the web’ took my eyes away from the news items on marital rape verdicts and gang-rape incidents. These ranged from ‘Tips for dark men to increase their style quotient’ to the contextually ominous ‘Perfect date ninght gift for your partner’.
Similar reportage on another venerable English language newspaper was accompanied by the clickbait photograph of a woman, face cropped out, wearing a dress with a high hemline and plunging neckline. On two of the leading Hindi news dailies in India, the suggested links displayed to me were for remedies that can stop men from being disappointing in bed, and another that promised to ‘help’ women fight wrinkly skin, hair loss, and weight gain.
Arguably there is no ‘right’ digital ad to display next to a news story about rape and sexual assault. But the digitally dictated visual para-texts offered by the ‘You may also like’ sections embedded in digital news can, by drawing attention away from the actual events, reinforce visual discourses that are not neutral in their affective meaning — at least not as displayed for the heterosexual male portion of the readership.
To take the first example from above, the clickbait image I described helps negate a woman’s personhood — and rights of control over her own body — most effectively. Objectification of this female body goes beyond the usual means of a woman’s averted-gaze-while-being-gazed-upon that has long been the patriarchal norm in representing female bodies. The cropped absence of her face in the image does away with even the need for her to look away as she is being looked at. Simultaneously, the permission granted to the user to digitally ‘touch’ this thoroughly objectified body of a woman mimics the self-accorded male impunity for the unwanted touching of female bodies in offline spaces. What meaning, then, is left for readers in the news about transgressions on women’s bodies when simultaneously they have the invitation and option to digitally transgress the same boundary?
Read part 2: Making rape ‘real’
Saumava Mitra is Assistant Professor at the School of Communications of Dublin City University in Ireland. He researches and writes about news-images of crisis and conflicts.
