Actually Jonri I totally disagree with you. She will need counseling and her parents should probably get her on birth control. I grew up in a pretty open family where there is no “shame” in talking about sex, pregnancy, birth control, abortion and all sorts of things. I don’t judge you if you think 15 is too young to be open and honest…that is your prerogative to think that way. As an older person who grew up in an enlightened environment and who raised her kids in a pretty open dialogue of course I think this young lady could use some guidance. The fact that she was planning and willing to engage in heavy petting tells me that she may not have understood what she was getting into and where it might go.
I have a thick skin…ask dstark.
This thread is about high school kids not college adults…and the boy was charged. Totally different than threads about date rate where the women do nothing when they should or worse do something out of ulterior motives. The young lady did end up participating in pressing charges. I waited to comment until it was all over just because i did not feel like participating while the trial was going on. I already stated that the only charge I had a conflict with was the computer charge. I think the jury, the prosecutor and the defense attorney did the best they could. They both need counseling for different reasons and I won’t ever be convinced of anything different. My position has been and always will be that in the case of felony sexual assault or felony rape depending on your state’s terminology the police and courts should be involved.
Wouldn’t it be better to focus on the numerous, very important teachable moments from this case than arguing about which poster is the “most judgmental?”
I thnk it is ok to call some opinions horrible or judgmental. Some opinions are wrong. Some opinions stink. 
I am happy with the verdicts. We will see what the judge decides.
I am not in love with many of the opinions on this thread. I hope a new thread captures my fancy because this thread is losing my interest.
Over dinner on Friday night, I discussed this case with my husband and sons, one who graduated from college in May and the other who’s a rising college sophomore. It was a fascinating conversation bc I got to hear the opinion of boys around Owen’s age, which isn’t represented here on this thread. Neither was sympathetic bc they both felt Owen should have behaved differently despite the culture of his school, which interestingly enough, they think is pervasive and a fault of both some boys (for my older son, mainly boys) and some girls, and gave good examples of the ways that each gender contributes to this culture. Hearing this, my husband responded that it didn’t sound much different than what he was exposed to when he was a teenager back in the late 1970s.
But then my husband emailed us an article that he read last week in the New Yorker about the teenage brain, and our conversation after reading that was even more illuminating.
I wrote a post upthread that stated I feel that as parents we need to talk to our kids and tell them a million times over what our expectations are for the lessons to stick, and apparently studies by neuroscientists claim the same. Who knew?!
This article explains why from the start I’ve felt empathy for both the girl and the boy in this encounter. My sons haven’t parented teenagers yet. And they are still too close to their own mistakes, albeit nothing like this case, to understand that kids their age often display bad judgement no matter how bright they are.
I think parents and teenagers alike should read this article to get a sense of what they’re dealing with:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-terrible-teens
I’m only going to copy & paste some passages in the article that apply to our discussion here, but there’s lots more that do, and the entire article is well worth your time.
“When we think of ourselves as civilized, intelligent adults, we really have the frontal and prefrontal parts of the cortex to thank,” she writes. But “teens are not quite firing on all cylinders when it comes to the frontal lobes.” Thus, “we shouldn’t be surprised by the daily stories we hear and read about tragic mistakes.”
This is where parents step in. “You need to be your teens’ frontal lobes until their brains are fully wired,” Jensen writes. By this she seems to mean near-constant hectoring.
“Nothing—whether it’s being with your friends, having sex, licking an ice-cream cone, zipping along in a convertible on a warm summer evening, hearing your favorite music—will ever feel as good as it did when you were a teenager,” Steinberg observes. And this, in turn, explains why adolescents do so many stupid things. It’s not that they are any worse than their elders at assessing danger. It’s just that the potential rewards seem—and, from a neurological standpoint, genuinely are—way, way greater. “The notion that adolescents take risks because they don’t know any better is ludicrous,” Steinberg writes.
Steinberg explains the situation as the product of an evolutionary mismatch. To find mates, our primate ancestors had to venture outside their natal groups. The reward for taking chances in dangerous terrain was sex followed by reproduction, while the cost of sensibly staying at home was genetic oblivion. Adolescents in 2015 can find partners by swiping right on Tinder; nevertheless, they retain the neurophysiology of apes (and, to a certain extent, mice). Teen-agers are, in this sense, still swinging through the rain forest, even when they’re speeding along in a Tundra. They’re programmed to take crazy risks, so that’s what they do.
Both Steinberg and Jensen make the case that the violence hump, too, is a function of weak frontal lobes and oversensitive pleasure centers. And both argue against decades-long sentences for youthful offenders. …she and her colleagues asserted that “adolescent criminal conduct frequently results from experimentation with risky behavior and not from deep-seated moral deficiency reflective of ‘bad’ character.”
I want to share a couple of points for people who are unfamiliar with life at boarding school; it may make it easier for them to understand where some of us parents are coming from. My daughter is at a good New England prep school because the community there is better for her than day school, public or private. She loves it and is excelling there. She is our only child and we made huge financial sacrifices (including selling our house and downsizing) to send her there, since we make just enough income too not qualify for financial aid. It ripped our hearts out to let her go away to school, but it was going to be life-changing for her and we knew it, so we sucked up our grief and did it. It’s the best money we ever spent, hands down. The school is tasked to act “in loco parentis” and they do a great job of it, but like real parents, they can’t have eyes on every kid, every second of the day. But I would venture to guess that on a daily basis, my child is exposed to way less “sex, drugs and rock n’ roll” than she would be at day school. So to some of the people posting on here who can’t understand why anyone would “send away” their child, realize that to us, it’s a huge upgrade. My own boarding school experience was life-changing and hers is as well. It’s also not just an East Coast thing…I grew up in Texas when I went to BS and we live in Florida now.
California actually has 2 very well respected and sought after boarding schools - Cate and The Thacher School. D looked at Thacher and it is an amazing and very special place, but ultimately decided on another boarding school.
Two well known boarding schools, just two, in the most populous state, a state with lots of wealthy people says something. Boarding school is just not part of the culture out here.
@HarvestMoon1, Thacher is an amazing school! We considered that one long and hard because it was so highly recommended by our academic advisor (as was Cate, actually), but we decided we wanted to stay on the East Coast since we are in Florida. We were beyond impressed by the horse care project that newbies do at Thacher…very special indeed.
Maybe @TatinG, you know Californian culture better than I. But we have our fair share of them at D’s boarding school.
I don’t think we have a boarding school culture in California but here is a list of 26 boarding schools. A school like San Domenico has a mix of live ins and non live ins.
@dstark, the most well known private school in CA–as well known and as prestigious as the leading NYC private day schools and the east coast boarding schools–is the Harvard Westlake School in LA, which is a day school, not boarding. It usually ranks among the top 15-20 private schools in the country, whereas the CA boarding schools do not. Doesn’t mean, however, that they don’t offer a fabulous education and all around experience.
I am not an expert on boarding schools. I wasn’t addressing private high schools. I have a relative who goes to a boarding school. She is not a boarder though. I took a class on social class in education. The class was taught by the wife of a former Phillips Exeter student. The professor spoke very highly of boarding schools. I am still not an expert on boarding schools.
Around here … The top students who want to go to private high schools schools go to University High in SF, College Prep in Oakland and Branson in Ross. I don’t know where the south bay students who want to go to a private high school go.
In the South Bay the older money kids go to Menlo School while many high achieving Silicon Valley tech kids go to Harker which routinely has many kids who do very well in the Siemens Competition and the Intel Talent Search.
Yes, I knew some wealthy families that sent their kids to Harvard-Westlake and I know a woman from a wealthy family who went to the Marlborough School for Girls. Neither is boarding. Most of the boarding school ‘culture’ if you can call it that is in the NE.
People send kids to boarding schools for various reasons. Some send them to the traditional boarding schools, the Choates and Andover and Exeters, because of the success rate of those schools in getting kids into Ivies and such, some figuring they will network with the rich kids whose families have gone there for generations, some simply because they believe the school gives the kids the best chance. A friend of mine sends her daughter to a prep school because her daughter is very bright and gifted, and where they live the school options are limited. All those schools have the stereotype students, the well off kids from ‘old families’ , the snotty rich kids seen in movies like "scent of a woman’, but they also have people of more modest means who sacrifice to send their kids there. Though my son didn’t do boarding school, he went to private prep day schools that we sacrificed for him to go to (neither offered financial aid unless you were really, really of modest means), because we felt it gave him a better education, even though socially it wasn’t a great fit.
When I was a kid, high school was 9th grade through 12th. 9th grade was NOT junior high. The only thing that has changed is that there is now middle school instead of jr high, and middle school has grades 6-8, and sometimes even 5-8. Which probably just means that 8th graders are lusting for 6th graders, who used to be in elementary school (where IMHO they belonged…).
Yes, and many decades ago I was living in a coed situation of about 20-30 young people over the summer and one night when we were being silly some of the females drew up a list apportioning the guys amongst us. One person actually acted on it with one of the guys on her list, who she was interested in anyway. The rest of us did not.
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