Representations of Rape: Scandal, Downton Abbey, and House of Cards

Trigger warning: Rape, sexual assault

This television season has been a notable one for many reasons, but one that has stood out is the high profile sexual assault stories featured on several of the most popular shows. To see such stories on mainstream television can be both comforting and disturbing. While it is good to know that telling survivors’ stories is becoming more of a priority, the way some shows do so can be damaging. It is not easy to portray sexual assault on TV. It comes with many challenges and often goes wrong. Three shows to tackle sexual assault story lines recently stand out for their varying methods: Scandal, Downton Abbey, and House of Cards. Each of these shows portrayed sexual assault in a different way, sometimes the wrong way. I’d like to examine what each show did right and what each show could have done better in the hope that media will improve even more in its representations of rape in media.

Let’s start with Scandal. The show made headlines in November with the episode “Everything’s Coming Up Mellie,” centering around the oft maligned first lady, Mellie Grant. The episode, largely one of flashbacks, was clearly meant to humanize the fiercely strong FLOTUS. Unfortunately, the way it did that was with a rape perpetrated 15 years ago by her father-in-law. To many loyal viewers it felt like a cheap plot device meant to explain some of Mellie’s current day personality traits and behaviors and it begs the question “Why do we need to humanize strong female characters like Mellie?”  That said, Scandal did handle some elements of the story well. Many of these elements were highly accurate representations of what sexual assault is really like. For example, the crime was never reported or prosecuted which is very often the case in real life cases. In addition, the perpetrator was not a stranger hiding in the bushes. It was someone Mellie knew, someone she was close to. Most survivors are not raped by strangers but by friends, family members, or acquaintances. Repeating this crucial information is so important to changing the way rape is perceived and stopping rape culture.

One thing Scandal did do right that our next show didn’t was make Mellie’s rape Mellie’s story. Downton Abbey failed to do this. When Anna was raped by a visiting valet on the show, the story quickly became about her husband, Mr. Bates, instead of about Anna, the survivor. Instead of seeking support from him, Anna was forced to try to hide her experience for fear that he would seek revenge from the perpetrator. Anna is forced to deal with what her husband might do instead of dealing with what happened to her and that makes it even harder for her to cope with a situation that is already incredibly difficult to deal with. Even when Anna was forced to sit at the dinner table with her attacker, a troubling scene to watch, the focus was not on Anna but on her husband and her rapist. Anna’s story was not her own and that is upsetting.  If rape is to be portrayed on television, it must be portrayed as the survivor’s story.  Again, Downton Abbey did manage to get a few things right. Just like Mellie’s case, Anna’s case goes unreported and unprosecuted and again the perpetrator is an acquaintance, not a stranger. But even those correct points do not excuse the way the show handled Anna’s story.

The final show to be discussed, House of Cards, arguably handled sexual assault the best of the three shows discussed in this piece. The Netflix hit did not show the sexual assault on screen as the other two shows did, but it did make the storyline just as powerful, if not more powerful. This story is one of Claire Underwood, the second lady of the United States, coming forth about the sexual assault that happened to her years ago at the hands of her then-boyfriend, a future high-ranking military officer. Claire is first required to tell her husband what happened to her when he must award a star to the perpetrator as vice president. After her husband, Frank, reacts with a violent outburst, smashing a lamp, Claire reclaims the storyline when she confronts him about his behavior later at night and bravely recounts what happened and her own anger at the situation, an anger she was forced to deal with lest it consume her, but where Frank smashes an object with that anger, Claire directs it at making a difference years after the assault. After is Claire is forced to come forward with her story on national news, an experience most of us could never imagine, she spearheads an effort to reform the military justice system with the help of the first lady and another survivor of sexual assault at the hands of the same rapist. Her efforts mirror the current struggle to pass similar reforms, the Military Justice Improvement Act, in the Senate, making Claire’s story very timely and relevant. While Claire’s effort ultimately falls short and Claire is forced to trade her goal of true reform for a lesser alternative because of her husband’s career, the story is elegantly told and the audience is able to see how it affects Claire and how she deals with it. She is the model of strength and resilience and she is allowed to claim her own story in a way that Mellie and Anna were not.

Again in Claire’s story, as in Mellie’s and Anna’s, the attacker is not a stranger and the attack goes unprosecuted. But in addition to these well-done elements, the three women’s stories shared one other important distinction and that is that they were never blamed. The only character on any of the shows who even begins to blame a survivor is Anna’s attacker and another characters shuts him down so quickly and efficiently it is an admirable statement on victim-blaming. While it may seem like a given, the lack of victim-blaming in these shows is crucial. If we are ever to get past rape culture and appropriately tell and honor the stories of rape survivors on television, victim-blaming simple cannot happen and when a character does do it it must be met with the revulsion and fire it was met with on Downton Abbey. Only once we get past a culture of victim-blaming, will we be able to truly end rape culture. Thankfully, all three of the discussed shows help us to do that.

This is the first time I've addressed representations of sexual assault on television on my blog and I wanted to do it in a way that was sensitive to survivors. If, for some reason, this post fails to achieve that level of sensitivity, let me know and I will try to be more sensitive in any future writing.