Once I get beyond my initial feelings about the whole situation, I’m left wrestling with a number of questions that still feel terribly unresolved.
(Note: This post contains some frank and graphic discussions of sex and sexuality.)
Two boys from a Steubenville Ohio high school (I’ve opted not to use their names, though they are readily publicized by other media) have been sentenced to time in a juvenile detention center for the rape of a 16-year-old classmate who was reportedly so drunk at a party that she could no longer stand on her own. Aside from “digitally” raping the girl with their hands, reportedly multiple times, one of the boys took photos of the girl without her clothes, shared them via social media, and both young men bragged about the incident to their social networks following the incident.
As the father of both a boy and a girl, I was particularly angered and disturbed by this story. The very fact that such things happen in a supposedly civil society is a stark reminder that we have only a tenuous hold on the well-being of our kids once they leave our sight. We can only hope and pray that we’ve empowered them with the sense of autonomy, respect, compassion, and restraint to keep them either from becoming victims of such violations, or perhaps even perpetrators of it themselves.
But once I get beyond my initial feelings about the whole situation, I’m left wrestling with a number of questions that still feel terribly unresolved.
- How do we understand rape in our culture? During the investigation of this crime, dozens of high school peers were interviewed, many of whom were in attendance at the party. A shocking number of them confessed that they did not consider what the boys did to this 16-year-old girl to constitute rape. For me, this raises similar concerns that I’ve had in reading about the so-called “hook up” culture, in which many teens (if not perhaps a majority) don’t consider things like manual or oral sex to actually be sex. This is our fault. We’re letting peer groups and media define for our children what is appropriate behavior, how they should establish and maintain boundaries for themselves, and how they should respect the rights of others’ bodies. Rather, we risk distilling one another down to sources of pleasure, to be exploited like any other commodity.
- Where do our children learn compassion? I was profoundly troubled by a statement made by the victim’s mother after sentencing, in which she said,“Human compassion is not taught by a teacher, a coach, or a parent. It is a God-given gift instilled in all of us.” Granted, I do agree that we are inborn with some innate sense of concern for one another, but to suggest this isn’t taught, modeled, or even enforced by parents, teachers, or other figures of authority is ridiculous. We bear a daily responsibility to model compassion in word and deed for your children, and to instill in them a sense of responsibility to do the same within their respective peer groups.
- Why didn’t anyone stop them? In a social setting such as this, bystanders are implicitly responsible for allowing such violations to take place. Further, in so much as they share images of a victime, they are complicit in the crime to an extent. And finally, if they are found to have deleted messages, responses, “shares,” “likes,” and such, they are liable for tampering with evidence in an ongoing investigation. There are so many points at which those witnessing the event itself and the related fallout should have brought this to the attention of authorities, parents, or school officials that it points to a systemic breakdown of collective accountability.
- Where did they get the alcohol? I’m not naive. I drank at a few high school parties, and certainly in college before I was of legal age. But for a group of small-town high school students to have access both to a home to throw a party and enough alcohol for a young woman to be unable to walk on her own points not only to the failure of the parents of the perpetrators, but also the parents of all children in attendance. It’s one thing to allow minors on given occasions to drink; it’s entirely another to put them in a situation where they have relatively unlimited access to alcohol and are unsupervised in a private home.
- Isn’t it time to talk about sex yet? We are both a sexually repressed and a sexually obsessed culture. On the one hand, we cling to puritanical values that suggest “good people” don’t talk about sex and sexuality — certainly not in detail — in places like schools, houses of worship, or around the dining room table. On the other hand, we consume more pornography than any generation in the history of the world before us. We speak in generalities, lean on vague moral lessons from Sunday school, and hope that the high school gym teacher’s six-week sex education class will suffice to equip our kids to deal with sexuality through the most confusing, emotionally charged, hormonally volatile, and socially confusing time of their lives. And then we’re surprised when they don’t think oral sex is as big deal, or they wonder if they can get pregnant if a boy ejaculates in a hot tub they’re in. Until we’re willing to answer every question our kids have about sex — and even to anticipate others they’ve yet to formulate — we’re equally responsible when such tragedies take place.
The way that “abstinence only” gets taught today and redefined by kids today may be part of the problem here. There are many teens today who define “sex” somewhat differently than teens might have in earlier generations. There are teenagers out there taking celibacy oaths that don’t include oral or anal sex in their abstinence. They tend to define “sex” primarily as “vaginal intercourse,” which come to think of is a pretty old blind spot in American ideas about sex, so maybe this is hardly a new thing at all. For a lot of young people today, if the activity… Read more »
Thanks so much Christian for a very thoughtful article. These are ALL disturbing questions that need to be asked. The first question you brought up seems to be the MOST disturbing, especially with all the (now discredited) coverage of many in the media who were over-sympathetic with the perpetrators. I agree what Julie said about about the situation being “humiliation as a bonding exercise.” I also wholeheartedly agree with your concern about compassion. You could also use the term “connection” – not having a sense of connection with others. This lack of connection makes it easier for individuals to commit… Read more »
It’s funny how if a man rapes a boy he is EVIL, but when men or boys rape females people just make excuses for them and blame “society” instead of blaming the perpetrators. I bet Jerry Sandusky wishes people had tried to humanize him instead of calling him “evil” and a “monster.” If he had raped girls people would make so many excuses for him like they do with Roman Polanski and the Steubenville assholes but people hate him because he likes boys.
Remember the outrage over Larry Vick? Apparently, people also place DOGS above female human beings. That thought gives me, as the father of two young women, a lot of comfort (sarcasm most definitely intended). We live in a sick society, indeed.
It’s funny how if a man rapes a boy he is EVIL, but when men or boys rape females people just make excuses for them and blame “society” instead of blaming the perpetrators. I suppose this is where mileage may vary when it comes to perspective. The way I see it when a man rapes a boy there isn’t that much mention of rape culture and how we need to change our attitudes about sex (thus decreasing the number of boys that are attacked this way), but when a man rapes a girl all of a sudden the rape culture… Read more »
Very good point Danny.
It’s a shame we can’t discuss rape without it being tainted by these concepts which are so inconsistently applied to society.
Beyond the crime itself, I think we should take a harder look at crimes committed by athletes, and how they are somehow less punishable (in the media and in the courts) than the same crimes committed by nonathletes. IF you’re an athlete you can literally get away with murder, and you will be called a “pillar of society” — which although no one really explains why being able to catch a football or dunk a basketball makes you anything other than an athlete — and are therefore somehow exempt from consequence. It happens ALL THE TIME. My advice, if you’re… Read more »
As much as we’d like to believe Steubenville was an isolated incident, alas, it is not. The problem isn’t even particularly new. I was a high school senior 25 years ago, in an affluent suburb or a redder-than-red state, the kind of place people moved to because “bad things don’t happen here,” when an incident took place that was not unlike this case. A party was held at the home of a member of the football team, a handsome, popular “good kid” who came from a “good family.” His father was a bishop in the local ward of the LDS… Read more »
Yep, this is not about sex. It’s about humiliation as a bonding exercise. Cross promoting here, but this is what I wrote about it, and linked to Yes Means Yes with a very thorough take. http://juliegillis.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/curing-that-which-ails/
Thank you for this Christian. All questions I have. I am cynical enough to think there was more than alcohol going on, perhaps even rohypnol, but all those questions are things I ponder and wrote about at GMP as well.
Well I’m wary of any conversation of alcohol because of the way it is so widely used to victim-blame (though I do not think that’s what you’re doing here, Christian). What I will say is that I grew up in a small town. When I was 12 I was already considered pretty weird because I didn’t occasionally get totally shit-faced at parties (I didn’t even go to parties). When I was 14, a friend of mine very nearly died of alcohol poisoning at a house party. The parents were completely complicit in the party…their argument was that they’d “taken the… Read more »
Right, and two decades ago when I was in high school it wasn’t any different except the girls who wound up raped didn’t report it and no one took pictures. So yes, alcohol is something that has always been abused and used to release whatever inner nastiness is already there. I’m far more worried about how social media and the use of online tools flattens our experience of those online as “real people” and allows us to be pretty horrible to others under the veil of anonymity. If we think about compassion as a muscle and we don’t have to… Read more »
“If we think about compassion as a muscle and we don’t have to engage that muscle in our online encounters, well, does that have an effect? The internet is a tool so I’m not blaming it, I want that clear. But I wonder where all this callousness comes from.”
Yup! Right now it’s generally agreed that people behave nastily online in ways they never would in real life. But do that enough, create enough of a culture that accepts trolling and what-not…and it’ll bleed into the real world too.