WAS THERE A “TWIST” IN THE “BOIS LOCKER ROOM”? BETWEEN NEUTRALITY AND FAIRNESS

- Sampurna Das

Source: arktos.com

 

The “Bois Locker Room” case got critical attention for the right reasons – display of misogynistic and voyeuristic content. But few days into the leak, Delhi Police announced that there have been some mix of images between this and another group on a different social media platform, Snapchat. One of the conversations – that of planning a gang-rape, the one which caught most attention - turned out to be from Snapchat. Further, this conversation was not between two males but a female who posed as a male and plotted her hypothetical gang-rape as a “loyalty test” for the male receiver of the chats. This fake internet profiling in Snapchat (henceforth, ‘Snapchat development’) revelation triggered a frenzy, surprisingly more than even the original exposé of the ‘Bois Locker Room’.

The woman was blamed for the entire “Bois Locker Room”. The ‘Snapchat development’ came to be tagged as a “twist” across the news articles. Media reports focussed on the Snapchat conversation. The serious nature of the ‘Bois Locker Room’ was rendered invisible. The media seemed in a state of collective amnesia.

In this piece, I briefly look at the various news articles that covered the ‘Snapchat development’ in the ‘Bois Locker Room’ case as a “twist”. This “twist” was seen as one more instance that “women naturally lie about being raped”. The problematic aspect here is that the articles were framed to suit a journalistic ideal of neutrality. It is an imperative need to move beyond these false journalistic ideals of “neutrality”, and instead hinge on “fairness”.

Media scholar Stuart Hall (2005), has earlier pointed out that neutrality in the news media is both practically and theoretically impossible. Despite this recognition, the journalistic convention requires some commitment to neutrality. As pointed out by another media scholar Stuart Allan (2010), this means that each news story needs to have two sides, and only when these sides are allowed to conflict will the journalistic endeavour be considered to be of some repute.

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Adding our perspective:

Popular culture, including films, often promote sexism in the pursuit of  'neutrality'. Take the case of the recent Netflix film, Chaman Bahar which clearly depicts "neutrality", "equitable crime" and "bogus headlining/captioning". The film normalises acts that easily fall into the category of stalking, and harassment  -  the male characters are seen following and sexualizing a school girl, and marking her as their territory to mention a few examples. 

The female protagonist is not given a single line in the film. Maybe a clever depiction of reality? Or maybe not. But the fact that she does not say 'no' to the male protagonist is equated to her being complicit in his 'love story'. The movie also gives away it's neutrality through bogus captioning as seen in the poster "Tobacco and love are injurious to health". Chaman Bahar is, however, only one amongst many. How can we forget Kabir Singh (2019) or Raanjhanaa (2013) with male protagonists who put you at unease and starred complicit/imperfect heroines?

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The “twist” story in the ‘Bois Locker Room’ was exactly doing the same – blaming both the gender equally for the misogyny and voyeurism in the ‘Bois Locker Room’. Through the framing and construction of the issue and its lack of attention to the overall contents of the ‘Bois Locker Room’, these newspaper articles actively worked to connect the ‘Snapchat development’ to the “rape myth”[i]. They were pushing aside questions like ‘Why are such false allegations so frequent?’ or ‘To what extent does this add to rape myth?’, by holding the fallacious premise that “women naturally lie about being raped”. The news reports were patently biased but in the guise of presenting neutral and objective facts. This reflects how these media houses practice “neutrality”. It also appears to be consistent with the recent “progressive” shifts in the Indian Penal Code (Nirbhaya Act, 2013) which dictates harsher punishments for the perpetrators, but at the cost of more trials. And as legal anthropologist Pratiksha Baxi (2014) points out, Indian rape trials are nothing but events of terrorising, slandering of the survivor, and questioning her testimonies. 

What vehicles this false neutrality is how headlining of the news articles takes place. Cases on point:

“Bois Locker Room: ‘Siddharth’ is actually a girl; fake account used to suggest a plan for sexual assault” (TOI, 11 May 2020)

“‘Bois Locker Room’ case: In a viral chat, police say girl pretended to be a boy” (IE, 11 May 2020).

“Bois Locker Room scandal: Police probe reveals strange twist” (ET, 11 May 2020)

 The semiotic structure of the headlines ensures that the reader would not go back to the core issue, that ‘Bois Locker Room’ was circulating misogynistic and voyeuristic contents. Copy Marketing strategists would say that headlines are the single most important element when creating content. It decides whether the target audience will read your article or not.  Not surprisingly, therefore, the articles presented the ‘Snapchat conversation’ as if all the conversations that ever happened in the notorious Instagram group was initiated by the said girl.

First, even though the new articles themselves in their body text, point out that only one of the conversations was initiated by the girl that too in Snapchat; the headlines had already conveyed the message that they intended to. Second, in a row are the images used in the articles which act as framing devices to embed and legitimize these ‘false neutral’ coverages. As we see below, the images that go with the stories are either of a female figure working on the computer or the Snapchat icon. These seem like symbolic placement meaning to turn the entire ‘Bois Locker Room’ episode to the feminine duplicity. As sociologist Van Zoonen’s (1998) put it, “Because the news is made by men, it is thought to reflect the interests and values of men too”. 

Figure: Pictorial depiction of the ‘Snapchat development’ in the “Bois Locker Room” case in different news articles.

Inherent in this neutrality paradigm is also the idea that while in the past men oppressed women, the obverse happens now. Women use false allegations to oppress men. As psychologist Nicola Gavey and Virginia Gow (2001) puts, the news articles repeatedly used an ‘equitable crime’ rhetoric. One below from an online portal ‘The Print’ openly forwards this idea ‘equitable crime’.

“Young women standing up to sexism and female objectification — as some did when the Bois Locker Room controversy first broke — shows that that wheel isn’t going to turn as smoothly as it once did. But, when you call out bad behaviour, you need to call it out in everyone, even if it’s the person on your side” (The Print, 12 May 2020).

The ‘Snapchat development’ completely fits this ‘equitable crime’ rhetoric. Not to mention that before this ‘Snapchat development’, screenshots of a dubious ‘Girls Locker Room’ were in circulation as a way to mark ‘equitable crime’. Most media channels instantly confirmed that the nature of even these ‘Girls Locker Room’ screenshots was different, But in a few hours, the ‘Girls Locker Room’ had done its job of marking both gender guilt of voyeurism.

The debate between ‘fairness’ and ‘neutrality’ is relevant here. As Veena Das puts it “ To establish fairness, then, societies cannot rely on neutral or impersonal principles but have to ask how they value different moral goals, say statistically produced fairness versus fairness to individuals (Das 2020).”

Sampurna Das is a Doctoral candidate with the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics (DSE).

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References:

Allan, S. (2010). News culture. McGraw-Hill Education (UK).

Baxi, P. (2014). Public secrets of law: Rape trials in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Das, V. (2020). Facing Covid-19: My Land of Neither Hope nor Despair. American Ethnologist website, 1.

Gavey, N., & Gow, V. (2001). Cry wolf', cried the wolf: Constructing the issue of false rape allegations in New Zealand media texts. Feminism & Psychology, 11(3), 341-360.

Hale, M. (1971). The history of the pleas of the crown (Vol. 1). London: In the Savoy.

Hall, S. (2005). The rediscovery of ‘ideology’: Return of the repressed in media studies. In Culture, society, and the media (pp. 61-95). Routledge.

Van Zoonen, L. (1998). One of the girls? The changing gender of journalism. In C. Carter, G. Branston, & S. Allen (Eds.), News, gender, and power (pp. 33–46). London: Routledge.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/sidharth-is-actually-a-girl-fake-account-used-to-suggest-plan-for-sexual-assault/articleshow/75667020.cms

https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/in-viral-chat-police-say-girl-pretended-to-be-boy-6403746/

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/bois-Locker-Room-scandal-police-probe-reveals%20%20strangetwist/articleshow/75674632.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

https://theprint.in/opinion/pov/bashed-bois-Locker-Room-silent-on-snapchat-controversy-women-where-is-your-outrage-now/419643/

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[i] Rape myth is a widely accepted belief that sizeable number of allegations of rape or plots of rape are false and suggesting “nothing really happened” – women just lied or made up the story is known as “rape myth”. This can be traced to English law – particularly opinions of Sir Matthew Hale, a distinguished seventeenth century English jurist, who regarded “rape as an accusation easily to be made, hard to be proved and harder yet to be defended by the party accused” (Hale, 1736). This medieval English mindset travelled to Indian jurisprudence, where along with the misogynistic assumptions faced by the English women their Indian counterpart had to additionally carry the baggage of being unreliable natives (Gavey and Gow, 2001).