The following is a guest post by contributor Winnie M Li.
When I first considered writing my novel Complicit, it was Autumn 2017 and the Harvey Weinstein allegations had just erupted in Hollywood. As a former film professional myself, I couldn’t help but imagine: what would it be like to have experienced sexual violence at the hands of a powerful man, and then years later, to choose to share that story with a journalist, knowing full well that the world’s attention would be on you?
In some ways, this was a heightened version of my own real-life experience with the media, as the victim of a widely-reported 2008 stranger rape in Northern Ireland.
There were so many aspects of interacting with the media as a rape victim that I wanted to bring to life for readers: the anxiety of whom to trust, the fear of being misrepresented, the emotional labour of sharing one’s traumatic story, the niggling spectre of having our own suffering exploited for ‘content’ in the news cycle.
All these concerns I had lived through personally for the past decade or so, doing my best to navigate them as a survivor, an activist, and an individual. But to an outside party, all these internal struggles related to media engagement were likely invisible.
In writing Complicit, I wanted to render these struggles visible – and visceral. After all, there have long been so many uneducated, victim-blaming comments tied to any accusation of a powerful man – i.e. ‘she’s making it up, she just wants attention and money, why would someone wait so long to tell this kind of story?’
I wanted to systematically debunk these myths and convey the reality of publicly speaking out.
When I did a 12-minute interview with Sky News about my rape and the subject of my first novel Dark Chapter, someone wrote in the comments: ‘I think she made up the story of her rape to promote her book.’ Could anyone understand how incredibly hurtful that comment would be to a rape victim, to someone’s who’s actually lived through the destructiveness of sexual violence? A younger, greener version of me would have sunk into a well of anguish and fury – but by 2019, I had already become so ‘toughened up’ by media exposure, that I simply rolled my eyes and fumed.
Is that what it takes to engage with the media as a sexual violence victim? To become so weathered that we’ve learned to tamp down our own emotions, as we professionalise the telling of our story? The emotions are there for a reason, because they are reacting to an injustice and a harmful stereotype about rape victims who speak out – as opportunists, gold-diggers, attention-seekers. It is precisely this extreme managing of emotions in the service of conveying our message that leads to exhaustion and disillusionment – what I consider emotional labour.
‘We all our want our story to count’
It takes a huge amount of effort to overcome nerves and tell one’s story of trauma coherently, effectively for public consumption – and yet, this effort isn’t often compensated financially or emotionally. Often times as victims, we feel used by a content-hungry media industry: victimised once again.
These are issues I’ve thought a lot about, in my work with Heard and my related PhD research at the London School of Economics. There is a power structure inherent in any dealings with the media, whether we like it or not. By sharing our story with a journalist, we are giving them the opportunity to represent us and our experiences to a public audience – and in the process, giving up control of our own story.
‘All clever investigative journalism is a seduction, is it not? He, the journalist, must win over my confidence, cultivate my trust, so that I will surrender my darkest secrets – to do with as he wishes, before he moves onto his next quarry.’ — Complicit, Chapter 19
In my novel, the main character Sarah is quite rightly suspicious when she is approached by Thom Gallagher, a celebrated New York Times reporter hoping to break the story around a former boss of hers. Plenty of times I’ve been cajoled by a journalist, who has turned on the charm, only to vanish promptly once the article has run, with their byline on it.
In reality, there are a number of things journalists and media platforms can do to help victims feel less like prey, and more like humans in a more equal power dynamic:
- Offer to pay us a contributor’s or disturbance fee.
- Assure us that we don’t have answer any questions we aren’t comfortable with.
- Make sure your own questions don’t contain victim-blaming attitudes – and understand that often times, we are less interested in speaking about ‘the act’ of sexual violence than we are about the overall impact on our lives.
- Follow up with a heartfelt thank you for sharing a piece of ourselves.
- Run direct quotes past us for approval.
- Take the time to send us the link, PDF, and hard copy once the piece has gone out.
- Disable online comments underneath an article.
- Make sure the headlines, subheads, and social media copy aren’t too sensationalist.
All these small details make a huge difference – both to us and to other victims who will surely be in your audience. At the end of the day, we want to feel that ourselves and our stories are being valued – not simply used for content and then promptly forgotten.
This is journey that Sarah goes on in Complicit – and it’s a journey that each of us undertakes, every time we reply to a media query. Even though some of us may feel ‘weathered’ by the media industry, deep down we are all human. And we all our want our story to count.
