Which is to also point out that of course at NO time did I in any way imply or say what you claim I did here:
Your lack of clarity on whether at least four and up to 20 boys raping a girl for two and a half hours, into unconsciousness, left to die under a bench, is really a rape or whether it might possible be consensual sex, is appalling

Since any fair reading of everything I've written here would clearly indicate that I am not at ALL confused about this incident being a 'real rape' or not, and instead I'm pointing out a potential problem that I feel may need to be addressed on whether or not our KIDS know the difference, I'll thank you not to twist my words and to save your indignation for Whoopi “rape-rape” Goldberg.

Christine, with respect, that truly strains credulity to the breaking point. A mob of up to 20 boys gang-raping and watching other boys gang-rape a 15-year-old girl outside the school building, on the school grounds for two and a half hours, leaving her unconscious under a bench, with the physical evidence of a brutal assault all over her body,does not look to anyone like a “teen party.” That is just absurd. The girl had to be air-lifted to the hospital in critical condition, Christine! Do you understand why she had to be flown and not taken in an ambulance, Christine? Because she had all but been raped to death, that's why, and her survival depended on getting her to the hospital by the quickest means possible!

And just as in my time, if you came upon a couple having sex in a car or somewhere at a school dance, you wouldn't report them- if these kids have normalized those kinds of activities then they're not going to report them either.

This is not analogous to two teenagers having sex in a car, Christine — except that if I saw a boy raping a girl in a car, I would be able to tell the difference between that, and a boy and a girl having consensual sex. And “these kids” who watched and participated in the California gang rape had not “normalized” anything — they were participating, either actively or passively, in a rape. Naturally they didn't call for help, Christine! The entire mob was 100 percent boys who had specifically gathered to take part in the rape!

Anyway, it may or may not be the case that the event in question was obviously not consensual, and without more details it's impossible to know how much it might have appeared violent vs. sexual in nature, and whether or not there were signs that other kids would have necessarily have seen as indicators of rape.

Everything I've already written above. Your lack of clarity on whether at least four and up to 20 boys raping a girl for two and a half hours, into unconsciousness, left to die under a bench, is really a rape or whether it might possible be consensual sex, is appalling. I don't have significant disagreement with any of the points you've made about talking to teenagers about sexual activity, but this uncertainty you apparently have that what was obviously one of the most brutal sexual assaults in this country in recent memory was actually rape and not consensual sex is ludicrous to the point of being deeply distressing.

… which aren't even honest platitudes, because what is meant is “being prepared” (or “being careful”).

No, not at all…but sometimes I don't think it's taught appropriately (sometimes giving kids too much confidence in what it can and cannot protect against, or even if the scientific information is presented correctly there's evidence that girls tend to be most freaked out about pregnancy and so all they really hear is the part about “do this and you won't get pregnant” even though many of those activities still leave them vulnerable to STDs.

And, I think there should be more emphasis on the emotional /psychological effects of sex instead of just brief platitudes of 'being ready'. I think that schools could do more to help kids understand the actual emotional ramifications more clearly, and to present information about how girls are even more affected by sex as an emotional bond and that is why boys need to better understand the girl's readiness or lack of readiness.

Do you see these, and everything else, clearly yet, Kathy? I've been subjected to all kinds of incorrect, unwarranted, and even mentally ill responses to my comments, which were perfectly normal and correct.

I don't pretend to have all of the answers- there really IS no good substitute for family support. But I do think we could make the surrounding culture less toxic and stop accepting certain elements of entertainment or calling people prudes if they don't accept the status quo. And if schools are going to be the stand in for educating kids about sex, then I simply can't agree that morality has to be left out (it just needs to be secular morality rather than religious.)

And even more to the original point of this discussion, how does all this lead you to believe that a mob of boys gang-raping a girl for two and a half hours is in danger of being misinterpreted by passersby as consensual sex?
As I tried to indicate, I could be completely off base on that- but what I have been made aware of currently is that teen parties often include a fair amount of group sexual activity and voyeuristic stuff so that I'm not so sure that a bystander wouldn't see this as 'normal'. And just as in my time, if you came upon a couple having sex in a car or somewhere at a school dance, you wouldn't report them- if these kids have normalized those kinds of activities then they're not going to report them either.

I also have been told that a lot of girls are participating out of a sense of coercion so that it's not enough to say that boys should be taught to accept no for an answer but to also understand that the default answer isn't yes.

Anyway, it may or may not be the case that the event in question was obviously not consensual, and without more details it's impossible to know how much it might have appeared violent vs. sexual in nature, and whether or not there were signs that other kids would have necessarily have seen as indicators of rape.

The lack of emotional support and guidance is what I was getting at when I referred to family dysfunction, as well as possible abuse. If you're saying that families should provide this emotional support and guidance, I certainly agree. If they do, obviously that protects children from unhealthy societal messages. But then I have to ask, if they don't — and I think you would agree that all too many young people today suffer from emotional neglect — then what is it you are advocating with regard to the larger culture that will make up for that? Are you objecting to middle- and high-schoolers being given information about birth control? How are you going to change the sex-saturated culture in a way that makes up for parental neglect? And even more to the original point of this discussion, how does all this lead you to believe that a mob of boys gang-raping a girl for two and a half hours is in danger of being misinterpreted by passersby as consensual sex?

First, you seem to think that if or when I express discontent with current policies or trends, that this means that I want to return to the status quo ante. In this discussion, you made several comments here indicating why we shouldn't return to the old ways and attitudes, and I mostly agree with you. The trouble is, you seem to think there are only two choices and I think that we need to evaluate critically the way we're currently educating our kids, and the cultural environment they're growing up in, without meaning that we should go back to the 1950s.

The second area leading to some disagreement, I believe, is our age difference (I'm not younger by that much, but I believe your child is grown and mine is in the trenches of this right now, plus I'm very immersed in this stuff out of concern for where it's leading for my younger kids when they reach adolescence.) I honestly think that you are a bit out of touch when you indicate, for instance, that sexual activity in a girl of 12 probably indicates prior abuse- because although I was shocked by it, I found that 12-13 is now not at all uncommon for loss of virginity (although more common than that by far is oral sex among middle schoolers.) Part of that trend seems to be physiological, as puberty is occurring at younger ages- but I believe the cultural immersion in all things sexual is partly to blame as well.

FWIW with regard to the girl I mentioned, abuse could be possible (that's always possible anyway, no matter what things look like from the outside), but primarily the family seems to not provide appropriate emotional support and guidance. And when I talk about all of these societal factors, that's the kind of thing I'm referring to as well, with families abdicating their responsibilities to the kids and then in that void, the surrounding culture and authority figures at school fill the gap in ways that aren't at all healthy for kids.

It's not the concept of discouraging early sex, sex in the absence of emotional maturity and mutual commitment, that I object to. It's the linkage between that kind of education, and “morality” I find counterproductive at best and repugnant at worst. DE-link moral issues from fact-based conversations about reproduction, birth control, and the emotional/psychological/maturational component of sexual activity.
My issue here is that morality need not be (and shouldn't be) distinct from those emotional/psychological/maturational components. I think you're confusing morality in general with religious morality, and a particular kind of religious morality at that. I'm sensing that you hear me say 'teach the morality' and think of the kind of stigmatizing/shaming that you probably believe goes hand in hand with religious morality with regard to sex. At its core though, morality is about treating other people with respect and that's my opinion of the proper background to teach both the religious aspect (which I agree should not happen at school, but through the home) and the secular aspect of sexual morality. What I sense there's not enough of in school based sex ed is teaching the self respect to know when you're actually ready (which protects against the societal and peer coercion) and the deep respect for others which goes beyond just 'don't push if the other person says no' and extends toward really knowing and caring for the other person enough to know if there's a 'silent no'.

I am seeing dozens of cases of girls emotional health being completely wrecked by our societal attitudes toward sex and the exploitation that it enables.

Those attitudes have always been there. Before birth control made it possible for women to have at least some level of increased control over their reproductive systems, there was still teenage sex. There was still premarital sex, or non-marital sex. And there was still rape. And exploitative sex is not the same thing as rape. The two are different. Sex is exploitative when one person in some way manipulates the emotional needs of another in order to gain consent to have sex. Rape is a crime of violence and both physical and psychological domination that by definition happens when consent is not present. Rape is no different in kind from stabbing or shooting or beating someone — the only difference is that the weapon of choice is a penis rather than a knife or a bullet or fists. Whether a girl or a woman is sexually active or not has no bearing on her chances of being raped. None.Although clearly if a woman *is* sexually active and is raped, the sexual experience will almost always be used to explain and justify the rape. In truth, the two are not connected. The risk factors for being raped are being in the physical vicinity of a rapist.

The girl is 15 and I'm fairly sure she's been sexually active since the age of 12, with boys who were high school seniors or older.

If the girl has been sexually active since the age of 12, there is a good chance she was sexually abused and/or raped by a family member or by an adult known to the family, before she became sexually active. If that is the case with this girl, then the societal permissibility of casual sex has nothing to do with the girl's sexual activity (or at least it's not the primary factor). Instead of turning teenage sex into an exclusively moral issue, banning scientifically accurate sex education from schools, and teaching the lesson that good girls who respect themselves and are deserving of respect from boys do not have sex until they are married and thus should not even have a need to know about the biology of heterosexual sex and the female and male reproductive systems, I think it would be much better to consider the possibility of incest and/or other serious family dysfunction as a cause for very early sexual activity.

Part of the reason I relate all of this to teen sexuality in general is that I have to wonder, given the circumstances that have been reported, how many of the bystanders really saw it as a violent attack or did it appear as a consensual sex party incident? And no, I'm not at all making the argument that Kathy criticized from that blog post, and I completely agree with that criticism (the girl was not at fault or 'asking for it'.) But I do think a huge problem with rape today is that the greater assumption seems to always be that everyone wants to have sex, and unless obvious violence is involved, the presumption of coercion isn't there even in a situation with a group of males and one female, in a public venue. Years ago, NO ONE would have stumbled on such a situation and thought twice about whether or not the girl was participating consensually, yet today I don't think it's at all uncommon for people to think that way.

I take you at your word when you say that you do not intend the above to imply the victim is to blame for being raped, but in effect, that's what you are suggesting. A contemporary assumption that “everyone always wants to have sex” may make it easier for rapists and their enablers (and that term does not refer to you, Christine) to avoid personal responsibility for the rape, but it's not what caused the rape, or led to the rape, or allowed the rape to continue. I am stating here, categorically, that those high school boys who gang-raped their female classmate, knew quite clearly what they were doing. They knew it was not consensual sex, and the onlookers who found out about the ongoing attack because boys went in to the school building and urged them to come out and join the fun also knew it was not consensual sex. As well, the passerby who happened to overhear one of the rapists boasting about what he and his buddies had done, knew they were talking about rape and not consensual sex. The difference with the passerby, of course, is that the passerby understood that a mob of boys gang-raping a girl into unconsciousness is not something that should be ignored, and called the police. Any one of the boys who was watching the rape during the two and a half hours it went on could have done the same thing as that passerby did, and the fact none of them did does not in any way indicate that they thought the girl was consenting to be sexually penetrated by up to 20 boys over and over and over again for two and a half hours.

I was the age of those students a good many more years ago than you were the age of those students, and back then rape and gang rape were treated with the same attitudes of victim-blaming — or permissive sexual morals-blaming, if you prefer — that they are now. If there is a difference between then and now, it's not that bystanders were more likely to intervene, or that strangers hearing about a rape after the fact were more likely to condemn it. If there is a difference between then and now, it's that rape was condemned and punished in relation to who the victim was. If the victim belonged to a societally protected class (“good” girls, virgins, middle-class housewives, women not viewed in sexual terms like elderly women or children), then rape was a serious crime. If the victim belonged to an unprotected class (loose women, sluts, prostitutes, women in bars, women who lived independent lives outside of a husband's or parent's supervision) then the general response to rape was like that newspaper blog reader I quoted.

Your conviction that the normalization of consensual sex, sex education, birth control, etc., are behind societal attitudes toward rape, and that rape would not be tolerated as it is now if girls were taught to abstain from sex and not given information about contraception, etc., is well-intended I have no doubt, but in my view it is completely wrong (in the sense of mistaken). Just to be clear, this is NOT to say that high school students (and younger) should not be taught to postpone sex until they are in a committed relationship — they should. They should also be given the knowledge to understand how, when, and why pregnancy happens and how to prevent it (not to mention STDs).

It's not the concept of discouraging early sex, sex in the absence of emotional maturity and mutual commitment, that I object to. It's the linkage between that kind of education, and “morality” I find counterproductive at best and repugnant at worst. DE-link moral issues from fact-based conversations about reproduction, birth control, and the emotional/psychological/maturational component of sexual activity.

In that same spirit, one of my all-time favorite movie scenes is the one in Thelma and Louise….. If you've seen the film, I probably don't have to finish that sentence.

Your reply included the implication that I believe the girl should be held criminally responsible for her own rape. In your words, “The young girl who had the misfortune of being targeted in this atrocity: is she also to be implicated of (sic) the crime committed against her?” That is deeply and personally offensive! An apology is in order. I regret that you haven't the honor to offer one.

I shall assume, then, that your answer to my question would be no. Another thing which we agree upon.

As an aside, what you have quoted from me is, in fact, a question that I posed to you. Were I to have implied, I wouldn't have asked in such a way. I didn't write anything that was misrepresenting you; you read it as if I were. You demand an apology for something I did not do, holding further healthy debates as ransom. It's a rather unfortunate turn of events.

Here's a litmus test. Imagine taking a time machine and plucking someone from the 1940s or before and putting them in front of a TV set or internet machine today? They would probably either die of shame from what they saw or start vomiting or go back and tell everyone to kill themselves because of what lies in their near future. The reaction in any event would not be mild. It would border on shock.

Say what you will about the old ways, but at least there was a basic moral fiber that ran through the country, even if there were the glaring exceptions now and then. But how they viewed the Bonnie and Clydes of their day was with morbid disgust, curiosities at best but certainly nothing to mimic!

It will be interesting to see if anything comes of this. Yes there's violent crime every day but now and then it takes just one of these stories to jog a reaction. Either that or we'll all just go back to our numb acceptance of whatever the cable company sends down the pipes. Even if it is shit.

The mysogyny that's routinely found in “rap” or “hip-hop” “music” (noise accompanying a degenerate form of poetry, which is being kind), and in the underclass culture it celebrates (whose main characters may be considered “Demonic Males,” with all the book by that name introduces) has been long noted.

“I would certainly agree with the point I believe you're raising about subgroups in inner cities [...]“

This also makes me think again about Chicago, and how it stirred the susceptible to muttering again about gun control (which is sought by the city of Chicago and some of its suburbs, and which will be the subject of an important Supreme Court ruling soon). It in turn makes me think about not only the underclass culture, and how one intelligent author debunking generalist arguments in favor of gun control not only mentioned something that Dr. J did earlier on this thread (a county in medieval England, to name one example, had a murder rate that is a multiple of today's in the USA, and at a time when arms were knives rather than guns), but which stressed the “clinical” metaphor: it's obviously a myth that all of us are susceptible to committing or experiencing violent crimes like this, so the first thing that should be done is to distinguish which people are more highly associated with this kind of criminality, and look for the causes primarily in this sub-population that is exhibiting the behavior to a much greater degree than others. It's a cultural phenomenon, complete with lack of family structure (gangs as surrogate families have long been acknowledged, for example) and self-absorption (due to immaturity), and to what seems to be a rising extent, a lack of empathy or (more importantly) a growing lack of conscience.

And then of course, among the broader demographic of adolescents, I would certainly agree with the point I believe you're raising about subgroups in inner cities, where there's little or no positive role modelling or value teaching by adults in the environment, and often gangs with associated violence and domination taking on the role of family support for kids.

There's no doubt about this, just as there is an obvious problem with violent programming (about which I provided a pair of links to Silhouette, earlier). “Calvin Klein ad” is a joke about this, as well as cliche'.

I do view the central issue as that this is a violent act first and foremost (some feminists would say, of domination, which may or may not be so; certainly a clinical view would see such things as a form of bullying if self-satisfaction by the male[s] were sought), and related to it, the underclass subculture. The sorriest people are those decent people caught in that culture due to poverty or other reasons, who can't escape, and fall victim to this. (This could well have been true the second time my car was stolen in LA and used in a fatal drive-by shooting, killing a 14- and a 16-year-old; it wasn't even a drug or turf dispute but merely a show of bravado by the car thieves and shooters. It's safe to presume that kids like those two that were killed could very well have been innocent, not criminals themselves, and to feel sorry for them, in fact to feel sorry even if they were criminals — “nobody deserves this.”)

Well, that's what worked for me as a teen as well, and it's what I try to impart on my daughter.

I realize my take on this incident focuses on sexuality while yours mostly focuses on the violence of the act and of the subculture. I think there's some truth to both, but I attempted to point out another perspective on general adolescent culture today (which I'm led to believe by friends who are parents of kids just 5-10 years older than my eldest, has gotten much worse even in the time span since their kids were going through it) in which kids wouldn't report a sexual incident because there's never any presumption that all parties involved aren't consenting to the acts. And I do think that adults in our society- through the crass sexuality in popular entertainment as well as an overreaction toward destigmatizing kids who are sexually active out of choice- have contributed to a great deal of confusion in the younger generation about the absolute right to say 'no', and the normalness of that response as well as the 'yes'.

“We've done our best to opt out of it and fight for a healthier moral environment in which to raise our kids, but are often called prudes or religious zealots for doing so.”

Among the wonders they have brought to my life, my goddaughters, when in high school (Los Alamitos, CA — LA metro) chose the high road themselves (including a good dose of religion) and rebelled against the conformity there (sex, drinking, other drug use) that was often ruining their peers' lives then. They were quite strong-willed about taking the positions they chose. Along with “parental” pride I also felt a good deal of relief.

“Don't play dumb folks…”

While there is merit to the argument that violent programming (television as well as video games) has an effect on youth,

http://www.killology.com/article_teachkid.htm

http://www.killology.com/article_trainedtokill.htm

there is a larger problem here (which I've listed already — the “underclass” culture in particular as well as the decline in civility that we've seen since the late 1960s). Incidents like this, just as so much other violent crime, are not found everywhere in our society, but concentrated where there are other, related problems.

It's still surprising, and pathetic if it shouldn't be so, that so many people on this thread actually are astounded that something like this would happen, after participating in a thread not long ago about a worse crime, murder, in Chicago metro, which featured the same kind of “filming-bystander” witness behavior, and was noted for refusal of anyone to contact the police, which was followed about a thread about a violent attack on someone in Florida that was a reprisal against someone who informed the police about a crime. T-Steel, at least, is among those who understands that there are violent places in this country where violence is an accepted and even institutionalized part of the culture.