We know there’s not one way, one light, one stupid truth…

Amongst my clutter of childhood memories there is a vague recollection of nine or ten year old me sitting in an English class listening to my teacher speak at length about something called “the passive voice”. The example he used to elucidate this scary new linguistic concept has stayed with me for years: “The road was crossed by the chicken”, of course the passive form of that well known chicken crossing the road. As a class we understood it instantly, and enthused, the teacher went on to deliver a stirring argument against the use of a passive voice in any form of journalistic writing, particularly news stories. I have it on good authority that this teaching is both a basic principal of Language and perhaps the foremost tenet of any journalism course, reiterated constantly to ranks of fresh faced wannabe reporters the world over.

For this reason I find myself bemused and disgusted to repeatedly discover news stories using the passive voice when reporting crimes that have a female victim, particularly instances of rape or abuse involving a male perpetrator. A basic linguistic rule that is taught to children is regularly ignored by journalists and used as an underhand tool in the subtle subjugation of vulnerable women. Take for instance these excerpts from a variety of national news websites from the last 24 hours alone, all found by entering “woman” into an MSN search engine:

(1) “Police today made an appeal for witnesses after a young teenage girl was sexually assaulted and robbed at knife point by a man in Whittlesey.”

(2) “A new mother was unlawfully killed when an epidural drug was fed into her arm via an intravenous drip, an inquest jury found.” 

(3) “Model Sally Anne Bowman was killed by a ”homicidal maniac” with a history of sexual violence in a perverted sex attack, the Old Bailey heard.”

(4) “Sabia Rani, 19, was killed by Shazad Khan. He was jailed for life for her murder in January 2007.”

These 4 sentences are prime evidence that a passive voice suggests the subject of a verb is undergoing, not executing, an action or process, often re-codifying the agency of the subjects and objects within a sentence to the detriment of the victim. Indeed the very problem with the passive voice is that it makes it possible for the subject to be removed entirely from the sentence (and ergo the situation). For example: “Model Sally Anne Bowman was killed in a perverted sex attack, the Old Bailey heard”, and it is as though the ”homicidal maniac with a history of sexual violence” had nothing at all to do with the murder. Even worse, we see in example (1) that authorities are often cited as the subject alongside an ostensibly heroic verb, whilst the real “action” (that of a brutal sexual attack on a young girl) follows meekly, with the real subject (the violent and perverse attacker) becoming a mere sideline to the event. 

The use of a passive voice in these news reports erroneously lead the reader to believe it is a story about “a woman who got attacked”, rather than about “a man attacking a woman”. At first this may seem simply to be an arbitrary grammatical issue, but in the recounting of these abhorrent crimes removing the perpetrator from the action serves to paint the picture that men don’t attack women, women simply go around getting themselves attacked. It is of concern to me that this grammatical anomaly routinely appears in stories about individual women, whilst reports of crimes committed against men or groups of people are nearly always constructed with the aggressor as the shameful subject, as well they should be. 

By situating the woman at the centre of the ‘event’ this common practice is perpetuating, however subconsciously, a sense that women are somehow to blame for the problem of gender specific crimes. In a similar way it is widespread knowledge that many women who have been raped are accused of “asking for it” by daring to wear a short skirt, appeals for protection by desperately afraid women and girls are thrown out of court because it has been proved that they engage in flirtation with men, and were therefore somehow complicit in a savage sexual assault. No less harmful than these fatal injustices, and reaffirming outdated hegemonic values, the passive voice is a huge and insidious player in the subtle attempts of trusted media outlets to continually intimidate women and portray them as accountable for the crimes of others. Clearly then Journalism classes and primary school English teachers can never reiterate the anti-passive rubric enough, as it would appear misogyny continues to permeate even the most grammatically pedantic editor’s conscious.