This Is Too Much For Me

I first became aware of the now infamous Steubenville rape case last December. Maybe it's because my own daughter is the age of the victim, that she goes to parties with her friends, that I no longer always know exactly what she is doing at any given moment, but I found myself, off and on, obsessively reading anything I could about the case: crying, raging, then reading some more.

If you're one of the few people who haven't by now heard about it, here is one of the better written pieces I've come across. Before you click on it, please be aware that it will boil your blood, make you cry if you have an ounce of decency, and, as they say, potentially trigger some nasty stuff if you've ever been a victim in your life, and there are far too many who have. Hell, I'm fighting back tears as I write.

And damn it, I don't want to write about this. I've been fighting the imperative for four months, and particularly the past several days since the verdict, which found two teenaged boys guilty of the crime of carrying a drunk (possibly drugged) girl from party to party like a trophy, raping her in public, letting their friends take pictures, humiliating her, treating her like . . . No, that's not what I'm going to write about. Others have already done it far more powerfully than I could ever hope to. Again, if you click, please be careful. It's awful.

I just finished watching a long, unedited interview with a man whose home was where some of the teenage boy witnesses retired to apparently revel in what they had seen their friends do to this poor girl. There is a video shot in his basement of one boy in particular who seems to be in utter joy about it all, hardly able to contain himself as he details what he saw. It's so horrible that I will not provide a link. I wish I'd never seen it. I will forever be cursed with a memory of that kid's tomato red face as he mocks this girl in the most vile terms imaginable.

I was a teenaged boy. I was, like these boys, a high school athlete in a small town. We sometimes drank too much and I was there as both girls and boys reached a blackout state of inebriation. When that happened, we always, always, always either found someone sober to drive them home, or put them to bed, on their sides so they didn't choke on their vomit. This was a small town. Everyone knew each other. That meant everyone took care of each other. And being an athlete meant you had to be extra careful not to get into trouble. We were all always aware that the bar was set higher for us. One of my friends was kicked off the team for intentionally breaking a bottle in a parking lot. He told me later that he felt he deserved it.

Apparently, the Steubenville High School football coach actually tried to help his players cover up their crime. Apparently, in this small town, there was, and still is, little an athlete can do to bring shame on themselves or their team, with the exception, I suppose, of losing or getting caught. From many of the things I've read, from the reactions of students and residents, it seems that many still see the greatest crime as being that they were stupid enough to post the evidence on the internet.

People are writing that all of this is evidence of a "rape culture," and while there was a time not long ago that I'd have felt that description to be an exaggeration, I now think I understand what it means. It means that there are still far too many people who believe that girls and women somehow invite rape, that they deserve it for their mistakes of drinking too much, or showing too much skin, or for simply flirting. Frankly, I've been shocked at the number of people who have blamed the victim in this case. I thought we as a society were far beyond this. Two 16-year-old girls, presumedly her classmates, were arrested earlier this week for making death threats against her. According to the girl's mother, her friends have left her. Indeed, two girls described as "former best friends" testified against her in court. She is being blamed for ruining the lives of these "promising" young men.

This is all too much for me, really, too much for me to bear as a parent, yes, but also as a human being. This is obviously a failure of the adults in Steubenville, not just of those, like the football coaches and others in the community who actively aided and abetted these local heroes, but also the ones who looked the other way. It was these adults who taught their children to stand by, to say nothing, as they witnessed "Jane Doe" being abused before their very eyes, to think all was normal, nothing was wrong,  to lack the ability to empathize or the courage to step in. I'm not talking about the kids who joined in by taunting and shaming the girl: these kids may already be beyond hope. I'm talking about the majority of the kids who saw what was happening and did nothing. I'm talking about the boy who testified (and many refused to testify) that he saw it all and didn't do anything because he didn't even know it was rape. I can't get my mind around this sort of mass sociopathy -- and that's what it has to be. How could there not have been one kid that night able to step forward to help this girl no matter what her reputation, no matter what side of the tracks she was from, no matter who was committing the crime, no matter how drunk she was or how she was dressed? 

It's too much for me. The story of Steubenville is apparently one that's far more common than I knew. I've often admitted to living in a bubble, one in which we bend over backwards to teach empathy, to teach fairness and equality, to place social and emotional needs above the rest. People in our school get frustrated sometimes that our meetings can get bogged down in discussions of how people "feel," but man, look at the alternative.

I fear that this is the story of modern America: a small town in which the factory has closed, unemployment is high, families are struggling, a place in which the only thing left holding things together is the high school football team, a collection of young men in whom a community desperately places its hopes for a better future. That's much of the narrative, at least. I hope it's wrong. I hope that these are the people living in a bubble.

To assert that this is a failure of the adults in these children's lives is an observation so obvious, I think, that it's barely worth asserting. I don't know what to do for them. But it is equally obvious that the school has failed the children. I can't help but save my most intense outrage for the football coaches, administrators and teachers, many of whom seemed to know, even condone, the behavior of these boys, to even celebrate them. If this were my call, the sports teams would be shut down for a generation, and all of those resources would be put into a curriculum of social and emotional education, with the idea of replacing a state championship football team with world champion human beings.

But I'm not in charge of anything but myself. So I talk to my daughter about this and redouble my efforts to teach children to play nicely with one another and hope that our bubble is bigger than their bubble.

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