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ABSTRACT
When a young Norwegian man talked openly about being raped by a Somali asylum seeker and for feeling guilty about the rapist's deportation, the news went viral not only in Norway, but also abroad. Several British and American tabloid newspapers as well as news and opinion websites from the UK, the US, Russia, Poland, Croatia and the Czech Republic reported about the Norwegian "politician" who felt "guilty" that Norwegian authorities sent his rapist back to Somalia. This article closely investigates the mediation of this story with a focus on how the emotion of guilt was staged in a national televised and digital media context in Norway before it reached the international tabloid media and opinion websites like Breitbart.com. It demonstrates how guilt functions as an affective nodal point at the intersection of many dimensions of identity, such as gender, sexuality, race, able-bodiedness, national identity, and political affiliation. The article also shows how a story of male rape from Norway facilitated an opportunity for tabloid journalists to rally against the Norwegian, and by extension, the European political Left, which they constructed as weak, feminine, and raped from behind by the very immigrants it seeks to protect.
KEYWORDS
Mediascapes; male rape victims; immigration; tabloid journalism
In April 2016, a twenty-six-year-old Norwegian man, Karsten Nordal Hauken, made international headlines after talking openly about being raped by a Somali asylum seeker. Tabloid newspapers from the UK and the US, like The Sun (Cox 2016), The Independent (Worley 2016), Mirror Online (Mullin 2016), Daily Mail (Malm 2016) and The Daily Caller (Bennett 2016), as well as other international news and opinion websites like the far-right Breitbart (Lane 2016), the Coffee House Blog of the British conservative magazine The Spectator (Murray 2016), and the international television network funded by the Russian government RT (RT 2016) reported on how Nordal Hauken felt guilty when he learned that his rapist was deported back to Somalia after serving a four-year-and -a-half sentence in a Norwegian prison. In capital letters or put in inverted commas, Nordal Hauken's guilt went viral.1 It popped on news feeds in the social media and provoked inflammatory reader comments such as despise, derision, and even hate.
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