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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

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

Type
Symposium: Women, Law, and Violence
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1994 

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References

1 See, e.g., Helen Benedict, Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) (“Benedict, Virgin or Vamp”); Kristen Bumiller, “Fallen Angels: The Representation of Violence against Women in Legal Culture,” in M. Fineman & N. Thomadsen, ed. At the Boundaries of the Law: Feminism and Legal Theory (New York: Rout-ledge, 1991) (“Bumiller, ‘Fallen Angels’”).Google Scholar

2 Sharon Marcus, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,” in J. Butler & J. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992) (“Marcus. ‘Fighting Bodies’“).Google Scholar

3 Id. at 391 & 386.Google Scholar

4 Marcus, id. at 401, argues further: [B]oth feminist and poststructuralist theories have persuasively contended that we only come to exist through our emergence into a preexistent lanuage, into a social set of meanings which scripts us but does not exhaustively determine our selves. In this sense the term “rape script” also suggests that social structures inscribe on men's and women's embodied selves and psyches the misogynist inequalities which enable rape to occur. These generalized inequalities are not simply prescribed by a totalized oppressive language, nor fully inscribed before the rape occurs–-rape itself is one of the specific techniques which continually scripts these inequalities anew.Google Scholar

5 I distinguish here between Marcus's efforts to shift the discourse and politics surrounding rape and those of other authors who have challenged the emphasis on victims in antirape activism. Specifically, 1 want to credit Marcus with offering a detailed consideration of feminist politics. By contrast, Katie Roiphe's recent volume, while gaining national media attention, fails to represent the academic and political work on rape accurately. Katie Roiphe, The Morning After: Fear and Feminism on Campus (New York: Little, Brown, 1993). For criticism of Roiphe's volume, see, e.g., “The Morning After: A Debate,”In These Times, 13 Dec. 1993.Google Scholar

6 See, e.g., Benedict, Virgin or Vamp; Kristen Bumiller, “Rape as a Legal Symbol: An Essay on Sexual Violence and Racism,” 42 U. Miami L. Rev. 75 (1987), and her “Fallen Angels”; Alison Young, Femininity in Dissent (New York: Routledge, 1990) (“Young, Femininity in Dissent')Google Scholar

7 Several controversies in contemporary feminism focus on media representations of women (e.g., the pornography debates; the commercial equation of beauty and excessive thinness). Critics of media representations decry the objectification of women's bodies, sexualized or submitted to various “disciplines,” and the disempowering effacement of women's subjectivity through a variety of techniques. See, e.g., Susan Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault,”in A.Jaggar & S. Bordo, eds., Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989); bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990); Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987) (“MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified”); Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women (New York: W. Morrow, 1991). Though critical of many representations, most scholars influenced by postmodern theory approach media production and dissemination as processes of contestation, examining how subversive and marginal representations of women, as well as skeptical “receptions,” challenge dominant understandings of gender and sexuality. See, e.g., Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Elizabeth Traube, dreaming Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation in 1980s Hollywood Movies (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1992).Google Scholar

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9 Young, id. at 45, explains the process whereby media images pervert feminist discourses of the body: “Both Greenham women and the institution of the press draw on the female body as a resource for the generation of discourse. The distinction is, of course, that where the Greenham women are attempting to find a bodily expression which is independent of the negative connotations that femininity can attract, instead the discourse of the press deals solely in exactly that negativity.”Google Scholar

10 The relation between media interests and the interests of other institutional sites of power in society has been the subject of considerable debate, with many analysts of media culture maintaining that powerful institutions support one another. See, e.g., Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran, & Janet Woollacott, eds., Culture, Society and the Media (London: Routledge, 1982); Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986); Edward Said, Covering Islam; How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Pantheon, 1981) (“Said, Covering Islam”); Gaye Tuchman, Making News:A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978).Google Scholar

11 Bumiller, “Fallen Angels” (cited in note 1).Google Scholar

12 For description and analysis of the “real rape” model in judicial decisions, see Susan Estrich, Real Rape (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987) (“Estrich, Real Rape”)Google Scholar

13 For example, the real rape model assumes that the victim and attacker are unacquainted before the incident, although most instances of rape in the United States involve individuals who know each other rather than strangers.Google Scholar

14 For a recent discussion of four highly publicized cases, see Benedict, Virgin or Vamp (cited in note 1).Google Scholar

15 Changes in court practices that have resulted through feminist efforts to protect victims of rape from experiencing the “second victimization” associated with rape trials have included the censure of judges and attorneys for using demeaning language in court and the institution of rape shield laws. For a discussion of how some of these efforts have affected the prosecution of rape, including how assumptions about real rape linger in subtle ways, see, Zsuzsana Adler, Rape on Trial (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987); Gregory Matoesian, Reproducing Rape: Domination through Talk in the Courtroom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law (New York: Routledge, 1989) (“Smart, Feminism”).Google Scholar

16 Benedict, Virgin or Vamp. Google Scholar

17 Bumiller, “Fallen Angels” (cited in note 1).Google Scholar

18 For recent contributions to this ongoing debate, see, e.g., Joan Scott, “Experience,” in J. Butler & J. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992); Sara Suleri, “Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition,” 18 Critical Inquiry (1992). In addition, many feminist scholars have struggled to develop ethical means of representing women's experiences in published work.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 I take the opportunity here to express my sympathy for the young women at St. Kizito and my hope that we will find of ways of working in local and international contexts to stop rape and other violence against women.Google Scholar

20 Mary Hawkesworth, “Knowers, Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth,” 4 Signs 555 (1989); Sharon Marcus, “Fighting Bodies” (cited in note 2).Google Scholar

21 Marcus, “Fighting Bodies” at 387.Google Scholar

22 Id. at 388. For one of the most influential articulations of the construction of female victimization in which women are depicted as “essentially rapable,” see MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified (cited in note 7).Google Scholar

23 The school and the parish are named after one of the Ugandan saints martyred in the 19th century by the Kabaka, ruler of the Kingdom of Buganda.Google Scholar

24 The chain of information about the St. Kizito attack began with the Kenyan News Agency, which collected and disseminated news of the incident to the international news agencies. Subsequent articles about St. Kizito were written by individual Kenyan and U.S. reporters, some of whom visited the scene. For a discussion of how international news agencies use local African news organizations to report national news events, see William Hachten, “African Censorship and American Correspondents,” in B. Hawk, ed., Africa's Media Image 40 (New York: Praeger, 1992) (“Hawk, Africa's Media image”). Google Scholar

25 My analysis focuses to a more limited extent on the Kenya Times, the paper of, at that time, Kenya's only legal political party, and also the Standard, a Kenyan daily with more limited national circulation than the Daily Nation. Google Scholar

26 These include the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, all of which have national or substantial regional circulation.Google Scholar

27 Front-page articles appeared in newspapers for more than a week, and the story was reported on almost daily for a month.Google Scholar

28 Daily Nation, 15 July 1991, at 1.Google Scholar

30 This schoolgirl witness was quoted as saying that “some of them were raped while others were trampled underfoot in the darkness.”Id at 2.Google Scholar

31 Daily Nation, 17 July 1991, at 1.Google Scholar

33 Weekly Review, 19 July 1991, at 5.Google Scholar

34 Id. at 7.Google Scholar

35 Id. at 12.Google Scholar

36 In addition to controlling the press's access to the scenes of some crimes, the Kenyan state routinely Influences the content and positioning of news articles. This is especially the case for the party paper, the Kenya Times; however, Ochieng describes ministerial interference in the operation of other papers as “a fact of life.” Peter Ochieng, I Accuse the Press: An Insider's View of the Media and Politics in Africa 18 (Nairobi: Initiatives Publishers, 1992). A full discussion of the relationship between the Kenyan media and the state is beyond the scope of this article, but see J. Abuoga & A. Mutere, The History of the Press in Kenya (Nairobi: African Council on Communication Education, 1988).Google Scholar

37 Washington Post, 15 July 1991, at 14.Google Scholar

39 For discussions of the use of stereotypes in Western media reports of Africa, see Hawk, Africa's Media Image (cited in note 24). An early and influential discussion of Western bias in media representations is found in Said, Covering Islam (cited in note 24).Google Scholar

40 See also Bumiller, “Fallen Angels” (cited in note 1); Marcus, “Fighting Bodies” (cited in note 2). Certainly the tendency in press accounts to minimize or even ignore the subjectivity of the victim extends to crimes other than rape and is in many circumstances related to decisions made by police, prosecutors, victims, as well as the press.Google Scholar

41 Carol Smart & Barry Smart, “Accounting for Rape: Reality and Myth in Press Reporting,”in C. Smart & B. Smart, eds., Women, Sexuality and Social Control (London: Rout-ledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) (“Smart & Smart, ‘Accounting for Rape’“).Google Scholar

42 See Beverly Hawk, “Metaphors of African Coverage,”in Hawk, Africa's Media Image (cited in note 24).Google Scholar

43 See Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), for an influential account of the construction of myths that link African American men to violent sexual attacks on white women. Davis describes how these myths have been mobilized throughout America's history to justify the “control” of black men by the judicial system and extrajudicial bodies, through lynching and other violent punishments. For a discussion of myths about race and rape associated with colonization in Africa, see Vron Ware, “Moments of Danger: Race, Gender, and Memories of Empire,” 31 History & Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History (Issue on History and Feminist Theory, ed. A. Shapiro) 116 (1992) (“Ware, ‘Moments of Danger’“). Ware argues that images of black masculinity as uncontrollable sexual aggression have been developed with reference to deep “structures of feeling about white women and the Empire” that reflect a long history of racialized and gendered colonial encounters. Id. at 129. Ware's analysis of the rape and murder of a British woman tourist in Kenya emphasizes the salience of such images in media depictions of the incident: “Julie Ward, alone and vulnerable in her broken-down jeep, allegedly fell victim to the uncontrollable lust of black men, a point made by the judge at the trial of the park rangers accused of her rape and murder when he referred to the fact that one of the possible culprits who had escaped prosecution was ‘fond of white women.’“Guardian, 30 June 1992, as quoted in Ware, “Moments of Danger,” at 131. For other significant discussions of racial myths and rape, see, e.g., Estrich, Real Rape (cited in note 12); Jackie Dowd Hall, “Partial Truths,” 14 Signs 902 (1989); Marcus, “Fighting Bodies” (cited in note 2); Nell Painter, “Hill, Thomas, and the Use of Racial Stereotype,”in T. Morrison, ed., “Race-ing” Justice, Engendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction of Social Reality (New York: Pantheon, 1992) (“Painter, ‘Hill/Thomas’”).Google Scholar

44 Painter, “Hill/Thomas” at 209.Google Scholar

45 The Weekly Review profiled the funeral of one of the dead girls and included quotes from members of her family. However, the article, offering few details about her life, did not question or explore her “identity” with the other victims. “The Meru Tragedy,”Weekly Review, 19 July 1991, at 5.Google Scholar

46 In recent years, the names of rape victims in the United States and Kenya have been shielded from media publication in order to guard against additional victimization.Google Scholar

47 Beginning with the initial articles, Kenyan papers advanced a range of speculative explanations of the incident, and explaining St. Kizito became a focus of Kenyan coverage, particularly in editorials. The second articles on St. Kizito in most major U.S. newspapers, appearing a full week after the initial coverage, report on the arrest of some of the 39 boys and also address what motivated the attack. One article includes two brief explanations: (1) the schoolgirls reportedly refused to join the boys in a protest against the headmaster, and, anticipating the attack, they crowded into the most secure dorm, and (2) the Kenyan Medical Association stated that “stress caused by a heavy schedule contributed to the violence at St. Kizito.”Washington Post, 22 July 1991, at 12. These explanations remain unelaborated in the article and, only after several weeks, when most U.S. readers have likely forgotten the incident, do the U.S. papers explore the reasons behind the violence.Google Scholar

48 Smart & Smart, “Accounting for Rape” at 89–91 (cited in note 41).Google Scholar

49 Some newspaper accounts alluded to ethnic rivalries among school personnel and in the community as contributing to the tension at the school, yet this issue fades as media coverage continued. In postcolonial Kenya ethnic differences and tensions are sometimes the idioms through which people explain the incompetence of individuals and the deficiencies of institutions.Google Scholar

50 Daily Nation, 16 July 1991, at 6.Google Scholar

51 Sunday Nation, 14 July 1991, Feature section.Google Scholar

52 Daily Nation, 16 July 1991, at 6.Google Scholar

53 Sunday Nation, 21 July 1991, Feature section.Google Scholar

54 Students had participated in more than 21 strikes in More district alone in the month preceding the incident.Google Scholar

55 Many authors have noted the prevalence of this myth; see, e.g., Benedict, Virgin or Vamp (cited in note 1); Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York; Penguin, 1975); Smart & Sman, “Accounting for Rape.”Google Scholar

56 Daily Nation, 16 July 1991, at 6.Google Scholar

57 For discussions of political repression in postcolonial Kenya, see, e.g., Human Rights Watch, Kenya: Taking Liberties (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1990); Ngugi wa Thiongo, Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (London: Heinemann, 1981); Jennifer Widner, The Rise of a Party-State in Kenya: From “Harambee” to “Nyayo!” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) (“Widner, Rise of a Party-State”). Google Scholar

58 Weekly Review, 19 July 1991, at 1.Google Scholar

60 Ng'weno clearly did a service to the cause of feminism in Kenya by presenting the St. Kizito incident as an instance of the abuse of women. However, perhaps he took a strong feminist approach in order to counter the critique of government policy emerging in other media sources. This interpretation is suggested by the frequent charge (albeit through rumor) that Ng'weno's magazine is influenced if not controlled by the ruling party. For a discussion of this issue, see Widner, Rise of a Party-State” 234–35.Google Scholar

61 Weekly Review, 19 July 1991, at 1.Google Scholar

62 Though two paragraphs in the middle of the long article noted the connection between the St. Kizito riot and violent uprisings at other schools, the uprisings are trivialized by statements like: “Recent complaints by students that appear to have led to the riots have ranged from bad food to no running water. … At one school the boys were so upset that they dumped the cook into the porridge.” The limited analysis, with the emphasis on a comical image, did not reflect the broad dissatisfaction in Kenya with the education system. N.Y. Times, 30 July 1991, at 7.Google Scholar

64 N.Y. York Times, 4 Aug. 1991, sec. E, at 4.Google Scholar

65 See Hassan EI Zein & Anne Cooper, “New York Times Coverage of Africa, 1976–1990,” m Hawk, Africa's Media Image (cited in note 24)-Google Scholar

66 N.Y. Times, 30 July 1991, at 7.Google Scholar

68 “A Night of Madness,” Time Mag., 12 Aug. 1991, p. 43. Several U.S. joumalists establish the link between tradition and the abuse of women by emphasizing the irrationality of traditional culture. This issue arises in a report on National Public Radio's “All Things Considered,” which aired several days after the event. Daniel Zwerdling, an NPR correspondent stationed in Kenya, described the St. Kizito incident as a riot similar to others in Kenyan schools and indicative of social unrest due to deteriorating political and economic conditions. Questions from the show's host in Washington, Noah Adams, display the strategy of depicting the perpetrators as irrational:Google Scholar

Adams: And then the boys just—What?—went out into the countryside? Zwerdling: Yes, the boys apparently disappeared in the bush. This is a rural area. Adams: This is not all that uncommon we're hearing in—in Kenya. In fact a Kenyan editor said, Kenyan youth are in a blind, directionless revolt that has exploded into senseless violence in the past. How—how often does it happen?” In his response, Zwerdling insists that the revolt was far from senseless but rather indicative of a pattern of protest directed at specific grievances, such as the excessive demands of a corrupt education system.Google Scholar

69 For an analysis of how Africa is portrayed in the U.S. media, see Hawk, Africa's Media Image (cited in note 24). She argues (at 13): “What is marketed to us as news from Africa is actually news created by Americans to the shape of an image Americans currently hold. The metaphor in which correspondents frame their stories and, indeed, the selection of the stories themselves tell us more about America than they do about Africa. The information we receive about Africa is the return of American ideas to the American market.”Google Scholar

70 N.Y. Times, 30 July 1991, at 7.Google Scholar

71 For a discussion of the construction of the category “Third World Women,” see Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in C. Mohanty, A. Russo, & L Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). See also Trihn T. Mihn-Ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Post-Coloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

72 For a discussion of media coverage of this case with respect to gender, see Patricia Stamp, “Burying Otieno: The Politics of Gender and Ethnicity in Kenya,” 16 Signs 808 (1991). For other studies of the case, see David W. Cohen & E. Atieno Odhiambo, Burying S.M.; The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992); j. B. Ojwang & J. N. K. Mugambi, eds., The S.M. Otieno Case: Death and Burial in Modem Kenya (Nairobi: Nairobi University Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

73 See Stamp, 16 Signs. Google Scholar

74 This critique does not preclude defining some issues as “women's issues” but states a preference for examining both of the incidents described in the text as the result of sexism shaped by other relations of power, such as state oppression and ethnic politics.Google Scholar

75 Friends and colleagues in the United States with whom I discussed this incident also expressed their outrage over Kithira's remarks. For many individuals who encountered the story solely through media reports, Kithira's remark is the only detail of the incident that they remember.Google Scholar

76 “African Women and Rights,”Christian Science Monitor, 7 Aug. 1991, at 12.Google Scholar

77 An editorial titled “Feminism vs. Multiculturalism” pursues this line of argument (Young, Providence, 3 April 1992).Google Scholar

78 Lata Mani, “Cultural Theory, Colonial Texts: Reading Eyewitness Accounts of Widow Burning,” in L. Grossberg et d., eds. Cultured Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992). Mani, at 395, argues: “This tension is not merely an intellectual one, but also emotional and visceral. Keeping it central to my reading has been my strategy for developing a critique of the discourse on sari that is simultaneously anti-imperialist and feminist.”Google Scholar

79 For a similar discussion that examines polygyny, see Diane Bell, “Intra-racial Rape Revisited: On Forging a Feminist Future beyond Factions and Frightening Politics,” 14 Women's Stud. Int'l F. 385. She offers (at 402) a pragmatic approach to the feminism/cultural relativism debate:Google Scholar

In terms of the workings of polygynous marriages, 1 have no easy answers about where we draw the line between protecting women from exploitation, exhibiting cultural sensitivity, and respecting personal preferences, any more than I have answers regarding marriages in western society. As far as 1 can specify my position, it would be that as long as the practice does not involve another being brutalized, demeaned, or abused, I will entertain arguments regarding difference. But I am not prepared to accept crude cultural relativism dressed up in arguments regarding “difference” to licence the stance that whether they kill, mutilate, and abuse the powerless, one must avoid being judgmental and ethnocentric because that is their custom.Google Scholar

80 Marcus, “Fighting Bodies” (cited in note 2)Google Scholar

81 Weekly Review, 19 July 1991, at 8.Google Scholar

82 In speaking out after the St. Kizito attack, several prominent Kenyan women claimed that their school experiences had included sexual abuse by authority figures and male peers.Google Scholar

83 The growing problem of AIDS in Kenya is a silent narrative accompanying attempts to make sense of St. Kizito. As men try with increasing effort to woo young women and girls, assumed to be virgins because of their youth (and thus not infected), understanding the relation between coercion and sexuality becomes even more critical.Google Scholar

84 Media representations of both Joyce Kithira and Mercy Tharamba also demonstrate the fine line between female victim and female villain as constructed through media ultimately responsive to culturally specific patriarchal discourses. The recounting of their stories offers culturally appropriate female scapegoats to bear the blame for this painful tragedy perpetrated by men. The feminist ire engendered by Kithira's remarks perhaps betrays the unspoken terror that some women, through their complacency, allow incidents like St. Kizito to happen.Google Scholar

85 See Lisa Frohmann, “Discrediting Victims' Allegations of Sexual Assault: Prosecutorial Accounts of Case Rejections,” 38 Soc. Problems 213 (1991). Frohmann describes the “common sense assumptions about normal heterosexual relations” that prosecutors attend to in screening sexual assault cases. These assumptions shape their interpretations of rape victims' credibility and call into question many victims' accounts of acquaintance rape. For a general discussion of the problems of expanding the definition of rape, see Smart, Feminism (cited in note 15).Google Scholar

86 See MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified (cited in note 12). For discussion and critique of MacKinnon's approach, see, e.g., Liz Kelly, “The Continuum of Sexual Violence,” in J. Hamn/ier & M. Maynard, eds., Women, Violence and Social Control (London: MacMillan, 1987); Smart, Feminism. Google Scholar

87 Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990) (“Segal, Slow Motion”). See also Beth Gerstein, “Reconfiguring Rape and Sexuality” (presented at American Anthropological Association meeting, San Francisco, Dec. 1992); Smart, Feminism.Google Scholar

88 For discussions of rape in cross-cultural perspective, see Peggy Sanday, “The Sociocultural Context of Rape,” 37 J. Soc. Issues 5 (1981), and her Fraternify Gong Rape: Sex, Brotherhood and Privilege on Campus (New York: New York University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

89 Daily Nation, 16 July 1991, at 6. The phrase “money has been poured” refers to the euphemistic use of the Kiswahili term dm, meaning “tea,” to refer to bribes.Google Scholar

90 See, e.g., Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Segal, Slow Motion; Smart, Feminism.Google Scholar

91 Since the St. Kizito incident, there have been several prominent cases involving Kenyan police accused of rape.Google Scholar

92 “St. Kizito Dormitory ‘Built on Haunted Site’,”Daily Nation, 17 Dec. 1991. Thirty schoolboys were charged in the incident, and all pled not guilty to 19 counts of manslaughter. The two charged with rape pled not guilty as well. About half the defendants were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to four years in prison or probation depending on their age. There were no convictions on the counts of rape. At the first trial female witnesses charged that all the boys at the school, not just those arrested, had been involved in the attack; schoolboys claimed that they were either away on the night of the attack or just visiting “their wives” in the dormitory; and the headmaster claimed that the dormitory had been built on a haunted site where many people had died in the past.Google Scholar

93 Robert Hariman, ed., Popular Trials: Rhetoric, Mass Media and the Law (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1981).Google Scholar

94 There are striking parallels between the role of the St. Kizito incident in Kenyan politics and the Thomas/Hill Senate hearings in U.S. politics in virtually the same time period. Press reports about gender and politics in Kenya often mention both events as catalysts for women's participation in political campaigns. In addition, the St. Kizito incident acted as a catalyst for public and media attention to sexual violence in Kenya in much the same way as the Hill/Thomas hearings raised public awareness about sexual harassment in the United States. In addition, the two events came to symbolize the problems of sexism in each nation.Google Scholar

95 In a compelling critique of “rape culture,” Haki Madhubuti uses media reports of instances of rape in several countries to condemn men's complacency in stopping the crime. Included in his analysis is a brief discussion of the St. Kizito incident. See Haki Madhubuti, “On Becoming Anti-Rapist,” in E. Buchwald, P. Fletcher, & M. Roth, eds., Transforming a Rape Culture (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1993).Google Scholar

96 Bumiller, “Fallen Angels” (cited in note 1).Google Scholar

97 Benedict, Virgin or Vamp (cited in note 1).Google Scholar

98 See, e.g., Sanday, 377. Soc. Issues (cited in note 88).Google Scholar

99 Elspeth Probyn, “Technologizing the Self: A Future Anterior for Cultural Studies,” in L. Grossberg et al., eds., Cultural Studies 502 (New York: Routledge, 1992).Google Scholar