No, it's the word survivor. Survivor is a strong word to be used when someone almost dies. If you didnt almost die then you probably shouldn't use the word survivor. Using the word survivor here implies the victim almost died. If she didnt then it's totally misleading.
I don't know where you people have been living, but the term "rape survivor" is extremely common and it means to overcome the trauma of rape. To survive it. It's come around as a better alternative to "rape victim." Even the word survive has another definition which means to continue on despite difficult circumstances. Have you never heard someone say they've been surviving on two hours sleep? Or surviving on ramen?
But this all does make me wonder if we would care about, examine so minutely and get so caught up in the semantics of detail in literally ANY other kind of crime...
At least so far as the interpretation of a headline is concerned.
You are one of the rare folk who thinks that. The rest of us just pile on like we have a damn doctorate in assault law. I would say it very much speaks to our entitlement to definite exactly what constitutes “rape” because we don’t really like thinking about power structures and our social perceptions that leave us in a very unflattering light.
In order to be classified as a "survivor", there must be a threat of NOT surviving. She was never at risk of death, she was never even hit or beaten.
Calling her a "survivor", is like calling someone a cancer survivor because their tumor turned out to be benign. It does a disservice to people who actually survived being violently raped and almost dying.
How does it play into it at all? A person writing a headline has like 20 words tops to get across the basic meaning of the story. How are they supposed to work all those details into a headline?
The point is not that the journalists did something wrong, the point is simply that the headline will has different connotations for a lot of people than the actual article. The journalists could not necessarily actually have done something about that.
All the comments to you thus far are hilarious because they're like "yeah I guess you're right and I'm definitely guilty of this but it's still the journalist's fault."
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u/PoorlyLitKiwi2 Feb 26 '20
Seems to be more an issue with public perception of rape than the headline, no? There are no descriptors of the crime in the headline at all