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<p>Really? Not what the law is and how it was broken? Not how many people who had the chance to take care of a fellow human being failed to do so? Not how a community failed to seek justice?</p>
<p>And unfortunately, some people can’t understand that blaming the girl (and a multitude of other people) for poor decisions does not equate with blaming her for being raped. See post #211.</p>
<p>American culture hasn’t changed that much, as Hanna points out. When we were in high school in the '60’s and 70’s, “nice” girls knew better than to party with the football players. They were big and strong and there were lots of them. It just wasn’t safe, and even back then graphic stories circulated in school about what went on at those parties. Those that went knew what they were getting into. That doesn’t mean any of it was right, but just as the football players back then weren’t “boys being boys,” neither were the girls just sweet, naive victims.</p>
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<p>Welcome to rape culture 101. </p>
<p>thank you for sharing the thoughts of those who choose to support the rape culture. If you think THIS is not “victim blaming?” You are a part of the problem.</p>
<p>Did you honestly say “nice girls?” Jeeeeeez.</p>
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<p>So, do you think schools should pass out a handout at the start of each school year, “Although we have decided to admit these young men to play on our football team, it is not safe to go to their parties. Any girl who attends these parties should be aware she is at high risk for being raped.” ?</p>
<p>Do you think the school has any responsibility to provide a safe environment for all of its students? At all? </p>
<p>Or do you just think if the girls are “nice” and “naive” this won’t happen to them?</p>
<p>Do you think schools should bar these men from going to the parties at the start of the year? Or do you just think girls should stay home and not go to the parties since they can’t be safe there?</p>
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<p>Did you really just say that? Sorry, but I’m not believing for one second that any woman, even a young woman who is not a “nice” girl :rolleyes: ever goes into a situation knowing that they are going to be raped and that they are ok with that.</p>
<p>I think it is easy to blame ‘modern times’ , porn, the internet, ‘slutty clothing’ and the like, but the reality is this kind off thing has been going on a long time, the only difference is these days it is a lot easier to cover up. Keep in mind that in generations past, a girl who was drunk and got assaulted likely wouldn’t come forward, knowing what she faced. Back then defense lawyers would rake the victim over the coals, argue that her own behavior led to it, seduced the boys, etc, there weren’t the rape shield laws in place that there are today (from what I recall, the lawyers tried to argue things about the girl, tried to bring up her dating habits, etc, and the judge wouldn’t allow it). In past years, the coach, the school administration, more then likely local law enforcement, would get together to make sure that it wasn’t prosecuted, to 'protect the school, protect the team" and so forth (put it this way, picture some of the kids in Friday Night Lights doing what supposedly happened here, think anything would happen?). This happened in NJ, in 1989 a group of football players sexually assaulted a mentally handicapped young women, who had an iq of 65, in Glenn Ridge, NJ, and the response was disgusting (the prosecutor and the cops, thank God, resisted pressure from the athletic supporter types to cover this up), the poor girl was accused of being a s**t, seducing them, consenting to it, and these arrogant jocks sat there nodding and smiling., a lot of the town rallied around them, were outraged that the boys were convicted, there were death threats against the girl and her family. You know it is pretty bad when the boy’s priest made the statement that the boys were innocent and the girl in question “set the whole thing up” (this a girl with a mental age of roughly 6 or so). </p>
<p>I don’t think it is all modern society, I think it is that it is out in the open. The drinking, the sex, were going on when I went to High School, and the attitude that let these boys do what they did was there, too, the arrogance and so forth. What disturbs me is when I hear about girls being sexual, dressing sexy, you name it, as an excuse for this. First of all, teen girls when I was growing up were doing similar things,trying limits, so that is nothing new (this was 30+ years ago). Secondly, this isnt’ a case of teen sex getting out of hand, this was rape, and there is a reason why it is treated as rape. They weren’t lusting after her, they weren’t after gratfiication for themselves, like all rape this was about power and control, and about quite frankly wanting to violate someone to show them disrespect, they wanted to humuliate her. It wasn’t she seduced her, it was they had a victim for their cruelty and they took it. </p>
<p>I hear the AG is going to invoke a grand jury to investigate, I hope they go after those who stayed silent, refused to talk or refused to help. I only hope that I have taught my son to protect those who need protecting, I am proud to report that at the program he is in on weekends, there is a boy who could define a chauvinistic pig, the kid made remarks about some girl friends of my son, and he ripped the kid a new you know what, I hear the kid turned pale as hell for being disrespectful, I was proud of him. </p>
<p>I can feel sorry for the boys who did this and their families, I don’t think the families are proud of what they did, and I hope the boys can learn from this and move on, and I hope the girl learns something from this, she wasn’t responsible for the rape, but she also needs to learn that there are people out there who will do the wrong thing, even otherwise decent people, and that you need to protect yoursel, too. It is very easy to throw around terms live evil, these boys weren’t evil, they probably were otherwise decent kids caught up in something stupid and they forgot that the girl was a human being, hopefully they will understand what they did and how bad it was, but there is hope for them.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I think a lot of people need to wake up and realize that no one is a god, no one deserves to be treated as deities, and football is a sport, no more and no less, and those who play it are as accountable as the kid who is a nobody in high school. The people who knee jerk defended these kids, tried to cover up for them, vilified the victim, or otherwise aided and abetted, should be ashamed of themselves (and if the coach did what he supposedly did, he should be fired, and quite honestly, if the law allows it, I would put him on a sex offenders list, on the grounds that covering up for a crime like this is as bad as doing it…but I suspect the law doesn’t allow it)</p>
<p>How can people on this thread preach so sanctimoniously about the lack of respect for girls by young boys when they themselves lack the ability to respect the views of others?</p>
<p>The anonymity provided by the Internet provides forums for frank discussion - yet - so many people don’t want to hear differing views. I am keeping an open mind. If I can learn something from this story, I am willing to do so. If I can discuss it with a young person and point out forks in the road where a multitude of people could have made better/different decisions - than that is my plan.</p>
<p>Have a little respect? For what?</p>
<p>Tell those who would differentiate between a “nice girl” and a girl who gets raped at a football party to have a little respect.</p>
<p>Because, rvm, your point of view is not persuasive to many here. It’s not a matter of respect; it’s just that many here, myself included, do not see it the way you do, and no amount of repeating your point of view is going to change that. Asking people to “keep an open mind” seems here to be equivalent to not having an opinion, and assuming that no one else has examined the evidence available before coming to a conclusion. i beieve my view is based on a mountain of evidence.</p>
<p>You are asserting a position–that women are partly to blame for rape. You keep saying that’s not what your’e saying, but frankly, that’s how it reads.</p>
<p>I for one am fine with hearing different opinions–we need to know that this kind of thinking exists. That doesn’t mean I or anyone else has to assent to it.</p>
<p>@GFG-</p>
<p>Sorry, but that is a crock, I went to high school in the late 70’s, and no one went to parties ‘knowing’ what went on, I was at parties with mixed crowds, that included jocks, and I don’t know of any girls who went to those parties looking to get raped…it implies that a girl that went to a party with a football player was ‘looking for it’, and that quite frankly is outrageous, among other things, it totally misconstrues what rape is, something unfortunately we see among some members of the hard right (you can’t get pregnant if you are really raped, anyone). </p>
<p>If as you are implying a ‘not nice’ girl went to a party like that to have sex, that has nothing to do with rape, if she decided to have sex with someone, and made that choice, that is not rape. What bothers me about what you are saying is that let’s say a girl was sexually active, went to one of those parties, got drunk, and someone forced himself on her then that would be ‘okay’, because after all, 'she went there looking for it", and if so, that is truly pathetic. Rape isn’t about sex, it isn’t about desire, if someone takes advantage of someone, overpowers them, there is no consensuality, and it is them using their power to violate them, humiliate them, rape comes out off hate and disrespect, not wanting to have sex. On top of everything else, you have to be a pretty warped person to want to have sex with someone who is out of it, it can’t be very much fun, to say the least, that alone is twisted. </p>
<p>The real point is, whether nice girl or tramp (words I bloody well hate, given that the converse in boys is wimp or stud), there is no excuse, none, for someone taking advantage of them, looking for sex is not permissioning for rape, and if anyone really feels like that, I feel sorry for them. Once upon a time what passed for a legal system allowed that kind of crap, demonizing the victim, arguing ‘she asked for it’, and so forth, but fortunately it has grown up, if some people haven’t.</p>
<p>The boys committed a HEINOUS CRIME. I don’t care if the girl lied to her parents or had some beer. The girl was the VICTIM. Would it be “more of a rape” if her non-alcoholic drink was drugged versus her having chosen to drink alcohol? How can anyone excuse what these boys did? Certainly, I hope all students exercise caution (and get their own non-alcoholic drinks at parties), but that in no way diminishes the culpability of the criminal.</p>
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<p>That seems to be code for “I am trying to figure out why others don’t see that this girl was partially to blame.” You have tried to couch your judgment of her in a variety of different ways but you seem to believe that her behavior somehow mitigates the egregious behavior of the boys. Most of us are saying that there is nothing she could have done to justify what was done to her and as long as some people divert the attention to her choices that night, nothing will change.</p>
<p>The scary thing is that there’s nothing out of the ordinary in the Steubenville crime. It’s completely common for small (and sometimes not so small) towns to idolize it’s HS standout athletes. Same for many universities. A long tradition of allowing bad or even criminal behavior on the part of the local “heroes” has existed, while looking the other way. These towns’ senses of self-worth are not uncommonly tied to school pride. Their teams’ successes bring self-esteem to the mass of citizens who never grew up. Think Penn State’s cover up of the heinous crimes of Sandusky. The officials who knew and kept quiet, purely out of love for their football team’s legacy should be held accountable, and sentenced to long prison terms for each and every child they failed. Why are any of us surprised at this tragic assault’s cover up?
In the small town where I grew up, football was king, too. In order to maintain grades requisite to continue playing football, the star players were given extra “help”. In a tiny WV town, my sister was named a Merit Scholar. A first for this HS. That same year, the senior quarterback received a full ride to the largest state university. Guess who got the front page spread in the newspaper? This was 30+ yrs ago, and nothing’s changed.</p>
<p>RVM-</p>
<p>There is a point to be made about someone like the girl in question using questionable judgement, and I would be the last person to sit back and say that the girl behaved rationally…did it play a factor in what happened? Of course, and it was a lack of judgement.</p>
<p>The problem with saying that is that that can be taken as the argument “she got drunk like that, she want to that party, she didn’t tell her parents the truth, and if she hadn’t of done that, she wouldn’t have been there, and the boys wouldn’t have been tempted to rape her”…I am not saying you are saying that, what I am saying is it can be taken as that.</p>
<p>Let me give you an analogy, some typical suburban doofus is driving around the big, bad city, and ends up in (Watts, the South Bronx, South Side of Chicago), and instead of hightailing it out of there, decides to park and walk around cause he always wanted to see gangbangers or whatever…and ends up getting mugged, his car stolen, and shot…would you argue that he was a stupid moron, and therefore, those who did that to him are any less culpable?</p>
<p>The girl in question did some very stupid things, but know what? Name any teenagers who don’t, name anyone, including adults, who don’t do stupid things. The person who goes drinking in the city and gets drunk and gets robbed, the couple who gets drunk, has sex and the woman gets pregnant, all are stupid things we do…but arguing ‘they should have known better’ is no justification for what happened to them, and the answer is, not only should those jocks have known better, they not only were stupid, unlike the girl, what they did was criminal, and that trumps all. Personal responsibility is a great thing, but that never, ever takes one bit off what the boys did.</p>
<p>The girl is paying a big price for her stupidity, she has pictures of her out there nude and passed out, her reputation is in tatters, and she probably has more then a few blue collar doofuses ready to get out their guns and shoot up her house, based on the angry comments I have heard coming out of the town, not to mention the trauma of what happened, which she will pay for as well, in more then a few ways.</p>
<p>I agree msprior. We have a similar scandal in a neighboring town. Several HS hockey players made a sex tape with a passed out 15 year old girl. It has since come out that the tape is an annual initiation thing. Four boys and the coach missed ONE GAME. They were all on the ice the next day (and never missed a day of school). Nothing happened to the rest of the team which was standing by and watching the initiation. The local outrage was very predominantly about how the school would likely now miss the state tournament. Something has got to change.</p>
<p>Wow, an annual initiation! Where were criminal charges brought on that one!?!? Ick!</p>
<p>@msprior01-</p>
<p>The historian Hannah Arendt in writing about the holocaust coined the term “the banality of evil”, to describe the many people who contributed to that horrible event (and I apologize for using that example, this incident has nothing to do with that terrible event, and I would never conjoin the two). Her point was that calling it evil masks something major, that otherwise ordinary, decent people can do horrible things, in the right /wrong circumstances.</p>
<p>The culture of sports is well known, take a look at big time college football, where players are given courses you can sleep through and get A’s, or worse, have all kind of infractions overlooked. There used to be jokes about the U of Oklahoma and Nebraska football teams, about which would be higher, athletes graduating or athletes going to jail. I think it was Oklahoma graduated a student, Dexter Manley, who was illiterate… The movie Friday Night Lights perfectly describes the mania, in many towns, this is what they have, this is what they put their pride in, doesn’t matter if it is Football made Texas, small town Pennsylvania, suburban NJ. The culture of entitlement, of being above the rules, is all too common (for example, a number of football players were at the parties in question, drinking, how many of them do you think will be thrown off the football team, even though most of the schools have zero tolerance policies officially for student athletes who get caught drinking or doing drugs)…</p>
<p>Put it this way, if the kids who were convincted of the assault were two kids on the debate team, all the people defending the boys, threatening the victims, would instead be screaming to ‘hang those nerds up high’ and the like, and would be outraged if someone defended the nerdy kids the way they defend the jocks.</p>
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<p>And frankly, Rockville, a couple of days ago, you weren’t even willing to admit this was rape. It was “touching a girl inappropriately.” I’m puzzled by your attitude, it has nothing to do with “respect.”</p>
<p>@momof2-</p>
<p>Yeah, we do need to get our priorities straight. Not related to criminal activity, but like most school districts, our local one has tightening budgets, cutbacks, you name it , and they just killed in the middle and high school what little gifted program they had, and cut back on advanced courses and such…but meanwhile, the sports types managed to push through a major bond issue to spend some ridiculous amount on the high school sports stadiums (there are 2 high schools in my district)…yeah, like let’s cut back on education, but sports,well, ya know, that is what school is for.</p>
<p>" She made extremely poor decisions that night - from the excessive drinking - to lying to her parents about her plans for the evening - to leaving party #1 without her girlfriends and going off in a car with 3 football players."</p>
<p>Her mistake was getting into a car with two RAPISTS. Not football players, not students, not poor mommy and daddy’s little boys, not kids who drink, but RAPISTS. Let’s call them for what they are. </p>
<p>And many of the rest, it seems, were accessories to criminal behavior, either before or after the fact. Accessories to criminal behavior have names - CRIMINALS. Not football coaches, friends, fellow students, CRIMINALS. Let’s call them for what they are.</p>
<p>Underage kids who get drunk at parties usually suffer consequences.</p>
<p>They puke their guts out when they get home.</p>
<p>They say stupid things that may cost them a friend or two.</p>
<p>They get in trouble with their parents.</p>
<p>They get suspended from school or sports.</p>
<p>Those are the predictable, and in my opinion, justified repercussions of drinking to excess. A friend of my daughter’s last year got drunk at a party (unbeknownst to my daughter until later) and fell down a flight of steps. In the process she broke her foot and had to withdraw from a prestigious summer dance intensive she had a scholarship to attend. She missed six months of dance, her passion. And she did significant damage to her reputation. THOSE are the extent of the things she might have “deserved,” not to be taken advantage of, treated like an object and violated in a completely revolting and CRIMINAL manner.</p>