Defining Sexual Misconduct

Power, Media, and #MeToo

Stacey Hannem, Christopher J. Schneider

• Publisher: University of Regina Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780889778696
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Defining Sexual Misconduct investigates shifts in media coverage of sexual violence and details significant changes in public discourse about sexual harm.

In 2015, the New York Times ran just a single headline with the term “sexual misconduct.” Three years later, it ran scores of such headlines, averaging more than one per week, and expanded coverage across other media organizations followed. This shift in coverage is reflective of significant changes in public discourse about sexual harm helping to hold some perpetrators accountable for their behaviour and paved the path for #MeToo and related movements against sexual abuse and harm to receive national and global attention.
 
In Defining  Sexual Misconduct, Stacey Hannem and Christopher Schneider trace contemporary shifts in power in relation to the increased recognition and censure of sexual misconduct and the ways in which the shifting social landscape is communicated in the coverage of sexual misconduct in media.
 
Hannem and Schneider also examine the contemporary dynamics of public accusations and their relationship to more formal criminal justice processes, as well as the implications for the stigmatization of alleged abusers and public response to alleged victims. Since behaviours categorized as sexual misconduct may not all be defined as crimes, or punishable through legal means, social censure and cancel culture often stand as proxy forms of punishment, and the authors reflect on what the pursuit of justice might look like in this extra-legal context.

Chapter 1

The Discourse of Sexual Misconduct

Headlines declared 2018 the “Year of #MeToo”—the international movement of women publicly naming and shaming the perpetrators of inappropriate sexual conduct. #MeToo gained significant traction on social media in October 2017 following the revelation of numerous allegations levelled against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein (discussed in chapter 3). While the language of “sexual misconduct” first emerged much earlier, in the 1980s, alongside its related counterpart “sexual harassment,” it is only more recently that the discourse of sexual misconduct has materialized into a significant public conversation through which an array of bad behaviours are identified, spotlighted, and condemned widely across the public milieu. This observation will surely come as no surprise to readers of this book.

When and how did the discourse of sexual misconduct emerge in mass media? Drawing on North American print news coverage across the 1980s and ’90s, this chapter asserts that the ambiguous nature of sexual misconduct was integral to promoting the more recent cultural shift in the broader recognition of sexual harm as a pervasive social problem. Discourse, it must be understood, is more than simply speaking or writing about a certain topic or issue like sexual misconduct; it is a manner of speaking and writing. In other words, discourse represents a particular orientation to the world and, as Dorothy Smith argued, discourse is too often hegemonic and male-centric in its orientation to the world, excluding women’s experiences and knowledges. Bianca Fileborn and Rachel Loney-Howes remind us of the importance of that discourse in our ability to define our own experiences:

While sexual violence involves very tangible things happening to our bodies, how we understand or make sense of these experiences, and whether we recognize and label our experiences as “counting” as sexual violence, is deeply implicated in the language available to us.1

We suggest that the expansion of a discourse of sexual misconduct in public language provided a foundational way for people, particularly women, to identify and speak of harm at both the individual (e.g., social media) and institutional levels (e.g., conventional media). In other words, the language of sexual misconduct gave individuals a way to speak about their experiences that may not have been encapsulated in other terms. However, the imprecise and often contested nature of sexual misconduct has simultaneously raised concerns about the minimization of sexual violence.2 That is, the discourse of sexual misconduct, as it emerged across the mass media landscape, has had both positive and negative consequences for anti-sexual-violence activism. As discussed in detail in the ensuing chapters, the discourse of sexual misconduct has also had a profound impact on our collective ability to identify, conceptualize, and respond to sexualized harm, its perpetrators, victims, and survivors. One basic aim of this chapter is to illustrate how sexual misconduct is adapted as a perspective with repetition in news media and how the discourse evolves to more fully incorporate the diversity of women’s experiences.

Since the 1980s, the use of the term “sexual misconduct” across the mass media landscape has increased in both frequency and duration. The expansive range of coverage includes a vast array of sex-related subjects, which, we suggest, has given rise to a contemporary common public discourse of sexual misconduct. The discourse of sexual misconduct may be defined as broader public awareness of women’s lived experiences of unwanted and uninvited sexual conduct, ranging widely in scope in terms of harm and effect (e.g., from catcalls to sexual assault), accompanied by the widespread cultural recognition that such experiences are, in fact, commonplace. Figures 1.1 and 1.2 illustrate the appearance of “sexual misconduct” in headlines and main text of news reports in the New York Times (the Times) over nearly four decades.

Figure 1.1 “Sexual Misconduct” in Headlines, New York Times, 1980–2018

Figure 1.2 “Sexual Misconduct” in Text, New York Times, 1980–2018

Increased discussion and use of the term “sexual misconduct” across North American news media is largely attributable to coverage of three sequential watershed events: the 2016 US presidential election, the 2017 allegations against Harvey Weinstein, and the 2018 #MeToo movement, events and dates that correspond with a subsequent rise in coverage, as evidenced in figures 1.1 and 1.2. Later chapters in this book explore in detail the nuances and implications of each of these landmark moments.

In this chapter, we investigate the emergence of the term “sexual misconduct” and track its use as it evolved in North American print news coverage across the 1980s and ’90s. What is presented in this chapter is not intended to serve as a comprehensive history of feminist activism and consciousness-raising vis-à-vis sexual harms—a series of movements that have been ongoing since the 1970s and that have been written about extensively elsewhere.3 Rather, our intention here is to provide the reader with a broad overview of news media coverage to contextualize some of the conditions that allowed conversations around sexual misconduct to materialize into a common and contemporary public discourse. Most of the subsequent chapters focus on key post-2016 moments and events that helped to facilitate the expansion and contemporary awareness of sexual misconduct.

Conceptual issues

Headlines and proclamations concerning sexual misconduct abound. The more contemporary use of the term is said to have developed around 2011 when universities and colleges began to reform their campus sexual misconduct policies.4 In 2018, Alexia Campbell, a politics and policy reporter for Vox Media, suggested that “sexual misconduct” had become the most commonly used term in mass media reports to identify and describe the wide array of forms of inappropriate sexual conduct, criminal and not.5 While her assertion is certainly a bold one, and difficult to know with empirical certainty, this claim nevertheless merits further attention.

In 2018, the year #MeToo went global,6 the Times ran more headline stories featuring “sexual misconduct” than its conceptually related counterpart “sexual harassment” (although each was included in dozens of 2018 headlines and saw a similar upward trend in use across news coverage). This observation provides some initial preliminary evidence in support of Campbell’s unsub...