The image of a woman — her face blurred to protect her identity, struggling to free herself as she is stripped of her clothes and sexually abused by riotous crowds at last year’s Mardi Gras celebration in Seattle — is completely disgusting. In an equal-opportunity assault, black, white, Asian and Hispanic hands clamor to grab her breasts and crotch while other revelers pin down her arms and legs. The woman is obviously dazed and helpless while jovial faces of titillated men swarm around her. The photo is extremely graphic in nature and depicts what most people would choose not to see over their morning coffee on the front page of the newspaper — humankind at its worst.
But just because the image, taken by Seattle Post-Intelligencer photographer Mike Urban, is haunting doesn’t mean people shouldn’t look at it. On the contrary, Urban’s photo is the most important image taken during the violent Pioneer Square riots — where one man was brutally beaten to death in the streets — precisely because of its evocative nature. Sexual assault is a reality of life, and people who do not understand its ramifications or turn a blind eye to the epidemic need a picture as shocking as Urban’s to effect social change.

The photo, which was never printed in the P-I itself, won first place in the 2001 National Press Photography Association’s “Best of photojournalism — domestic news” category, much to the chagrin of opponents who claim it was unethical for Urban to take the picture in the first place. But as a journalist, Urban’s duty was to photograph what was happening that awful night — not to police an angry mob of sexual predators. After all, that’s what the Seattle Police Department was for, and by in large, officers failed the public by simply watching the melee unfold.
I am from the Seattle area, and many of my girlfriends were at Pioneer Square that night. They have told me their horror stories of being grabbed, sexually assaulted, verbally harassed and scared to death of what the crowd would do next. But the stories of the sexual assault survivors somehow got lost in the controversy surrounding the SPD’s apathetic response to the riots. And my friends’ struggles that night are epitomized by the sexual violence that the anonymous woman sadly experienced.
A picture like Urban’s is worth a thousand survivors’ stories to be told about that night, and it should not be swept under the rug just because it is controversial. Sexual assault survivors are constantly being brushed off by a society that would rather believe these kinds of atrocities don’t happen in the first place. Although Seattle-area newspapers wrote stories about the assaults, descriptions don’t affect readers as much as an image could have. So which is more unethical: Taking a graphic picture or pretending the incident never happened?
What is unethical is not the photographer or the photograph, but the plethora of men clearly enjoying the sexual assault of a powerless woman. I am thankful to Urban for taking the picture when he did, if only to spark a public debate about the lack of sexual assault discussions in the media. What happened to the woman in the picture was awful, but it would be far worse to let her story slip through the cracks of social denial.