Over the past fortnight, a long-anticipated criminal case has been underway in the ACT. On trial is Bruce Lehrmann who is accused of raping his one-time colleague Brittany Higgins in Parliament House in 2019. Lehrmann has pleaded not guilty. Whilst it is Lehrmann, not Higgins on trial, you’d be forgiven for being confused by some media headlines, implicitly suggesting otherwise. Even the ABC, usually a stickler for the protocols of court reportage was called out for ‘victim blaming’ by those objecting to its labelling of the story as the ‘Higgins trial’. The story on which that headline appeared was posted on a weekend evening and removed the next morning.
The ABC isn’t the only news media outlet to be accused of victim blaming - where the victim of a harmful act is blamed for the crime. Several commercial media organisations also labelled their court stories the ‘Higgins trial’. It’s true that for a long time Lehrmann was unable to be named as the accused and the allegation of rape inside Parliament House garnered a lot of media attention, with Brittany Higgins herself as the focus of all these stories and, with Grace Tame, the leader of a reinvigorated #MeToo movement in Australia as a result of the publicity. But some media organisations are also attracting negative social media attention for the tone of their stories on the trial with critics accusing them of getting close to the levels of victim blaming that Amber Heard received, though in the Heard-Depp case, a deliberate and large social media campaign fuelled the victim blaming.
The signs of victim blaming are almost always via implication – implying that what a woman wore and how much she drank makes her ripe for the picking, such as The Daily Telegraph's headline which implies that a woman’s behaviour – even drinking socially – is to blame. There’s been plenty of implications in the reporting of the Lehrmann trial, including that Ms Higgins was ‘not ashamed’ of giving media interviews ahead of reporting the alleged rape to the police because she sensed a #MeToo reckoning of institutional power, with the bonus of inflicting maximum harm on the Liberal Party for which she worked at the time. The news media were, of course, reporting the evidence being given in the court room, as it must. And there were many instances where news media rectified the way it labelled the trial reportage. But when headlines like ‘Higgins Trial’ are slapped on reportage that highlights a narrative implying the victim is lying, you have to wonder whether old norms might still be at play.
Monica Attard, CMT Co-Director
This featured in our newsletter of 14 October. Read it in full here.
To subscribe to receive it fortnightly, click here.