There seems to be plenty of blame to go around in that strange Texas town. Best might be to look for anyone in the story who doesn’t end up smelling like scum.
However,
Sex between adult and 11-year old girl is always hideous rape, no matter how “willing” that girl might seem to be. I’m shocked that a Doper here seems not to know that.
Good. Let’s destroy the little bastards’ lives. I’m all for that. Since when is rape something that requires a ‘wake up call’? I’m not saying that you’re saying that, but this case has been minimized all over the Web. It’s not something you accidentally do. It’s not something you do because you need food or shelter or are righting an injustice. This kid was eleven. Who did the New York Times sympathize with? The rapists. Those poor dears, their lives are all upset and did you read the bit about the football team? Three or four or however many were arrested and the guys were upset. I didn’t get the impression they were upset because they were hanging around with child rapists.
I hope these scumbags wind up in jail till they have arthritis. Eleven years old, and she’s got people slut shaming her all over the place. Eleven.
Ah, once again it’s those damn Swedes :mad:
I didn’t post that - I was quoting another post earlier in the thread.
But you are right.
That is kinda the point. How can it be that there is an “ongoing sexual relationship” - as in repeated rapes, and nothing happened earlier?
Why didn’t something happen after the first instance? There is all sorts of fucked up going on in the girls life, from her parents, family, siblings, school friends if no one noticed this.
That is the point that is trying to be made. That doesn’t place blame on her, it does place some blame on those around her though.
There is also all sorts of fucked up going on from this guy that raped her repeatedly - how did his circle of friends not know this?
Norinew - if you are still here, I hope its ok that I cite your daughter as a girl that “got it right”. You taught her well, she had the appropriate knowledge, support, parents and courage to do the proper thing in a horrible situation.
If this poor 11 year old had come from a similiar environment to Norinew’s daughter, do you think this situation could ever have arisen?
This is what we should be looking out - learning from this such that parents can equip their kids with the skills to stop it happening from them - just as Norinew did with her daughter.
What the “men” of this town did to that little girl is repugnant in the extreme - however this can’t and shouldn’t stop us from learning from it for the protection of our own daughters and siblings.
To not learn from it, to say that this poor little girl has total passivity over what happens to her is a cop-out. That does blame her, it merely recognises that there are tools that we can equip our children with to help them avoid such horrible situations.
You’re comparing an eleven-year-old girl to a wad of cash, which is not a human being.
If you want to prevent it, teach your sons not to be rapist scumbags.
I’m getting sort of amazed at how with all this talk about responsibility and ‘stop it from happening to them’ and ‘educating your daughters’, nobody’s talking about stopping your sons from being rapists.
You know why nobody noticed what was going on? Because raping a kid regularly looked normal. Because as someone upthread said, she ‘dressed like a ho’. Because people have this idea that rape is about ‘walking around with cash in your hand in a bad neighborhood’----because hoes are that stupid, amirite? huh? amirite?----instead of men and boys who think they’re off the hook because it’s not rape to rape a ‘ho’, right?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but one hell of a lot of people can and do teach their sons not to be rapist scumbags.
But speaking as a father of two girls, I sure as hell aren’t going to rely to the success of other people, what they teach their sons, what values they impart to keep my daughters safe.
I also want to see what I can learn from this poor victim such that I can see what I can take from it to teach my own children.
I say again, to sit here and wring our hands and to say that this is just predestined and there is nothing going on in this girls life, there is nothing she could have done to prevent this is a cop-out. It does a disservice to our commununity.
On a different example, when the twin towers were bombed, did we say “Oh dear, we must teach our kids not to be terrorists” or did we also examine what we can do better as a society to protect ourselves?
So this girl is 11 years old - doe3s that mean we cannot learn anything from her?
Just want to point out that there’s a difference between being emotional about a topic and letting your emotions inform your opinions about the topic. It is possible to be find something horribly troubling, and yet still discuss it with detachment.
I would argue that your real problem is that, at least on this subject, you cannot do this.
As for the subject: what I want to say has already been said. It doesn’t matter what the situation: if you are repeatedly the victim of something, then chances are it’s not a coincidence, and something else is making it more likely to happen. Rape is not an exception, no matter how emotional we get about it.
In this situation, we need to know what that something is. And, if any of those things are in the control of the girl, then she needs to be taught to control them, as, if nothing changes, she will continue to be more likely to be a victim.
We make a big deal out of blaming the victim, but it’s really only an exaggeration of a legitimate concept. That’s what makes it so menacing. It is true that, in any situation, how you act can influence your chances to become a victim. The problem only comes when you use that truism to lay more blame on the victim than on the perpetrator. That is blaming the victim.
Teaching someone to avoid being the victim is not blaming the victim. It’s taking back control from those who would victimize you.
Markxxx, my apologies if I’ve created misunderstandings of your comments through my selective editing - I must look up the proper use of snipI think your points are key to keeping our discussion calm and on-track.
I’m truly sorry, Diogenes the Cynic that you have personal experience with such an atrocity against an 11 year-old child. Please know that (and I’m wrongly speaking for everyone here - but I haven’t read anything contrary to my point) we are all disgusted, saddened, horrified, and looking for answers to prevent this from happening to anyone’s child.
Shaking our fists and railing against the perpetrators of this evil is natural, and understandable but sadly, non-productive. I think at least some of us here have a need to not only express our anger that something so horrendous can happen, but also have a need to understand HOW such a thing happens and do what WE can to take action. There is absolutely no value to blaming a victim, but clearly there were factors that in combination led to this outcome. How do we protect our children if we don’t make sense of the factors? I would like to think that in understanding all of the elements that led to the situation we can inform society in our small way and prevent such violence within our communities.
Parents have no small task in raising their children to make decisions that are good for them and staying clear of life-altering threats and risks. The very reason we have laws around the age of consent is recognition of a child’s inability to assess future negative outcome.
My emotions are not informing my opinions. My opinions are the only ones morally possible. My emotions are simply making it difficult to be patient with all the slut-shaming of an 11 year old girl.
And yet you totally ignored the part about how rape is not theft, and rape victims are not stupid. Hint: that’s how you teach people to be rapists. A woman is not a wad of cash. A girl is not some doofus wandering through a dark alley. Those things indicate what your view of rape is. And it’s that kind of thing that led these guys to think they could get away with it.
Yeah, and if an ‘awful lot of people’ are teaching their sons not to be rapists, how come so many are in fact rapists? But, hey, let’s focus on the victim!
Do you not get how monumentally idiotic it is to refuse to look at the person who actually committed the crime for clues as to how to prevent future instances of that crime?
Looking at the victim for ‘clues’ is looking for what she did wrong. She didn’t do anything wrong, because rapists can exploit an awful lot of things. Yet the idea of focusing on men, and seeing what informed their actions is apparently taboo.
Why did no one think it was wrong for a much older boy to repeatedly rape a very young girl? What was the behavior of the rapists prior to and after the rape? What was their mindset? What was their upbringing? And so on. Those are the questions we need to be asking.
Let’s face it, ‘advice to the victim’ has already been done to death. It’s not stuff that the rape victim failed to do. it’s the actions taken by the rapist. What could have indicated that they were budding rapists?
And if I never see another example of ‘waving cash around but I TOTES AM NOT CALLING RAPE VICTIMS STUPID’ it’ll be too soon. Stop. Think. Do you really want to imply that rape is a result of women being stupid, incautious, provocative, and outright idiotic? Do you want to compare a wallet to a woman?
I’d like some answers because this happens every time rape comes up and that alone indicates that ‘tips for the victim’ is not constructive.
No you’re wrong.
You couldn’t be more wrong.
Who can I teach? My own two daughters or all of the few billion men in the world?
As an individual father, I am pretty much taking it as a given that my daughters are going to run across some seriously fucked up and nasty bastards - I want to know what she can learn so that this doesn’t happen to them.
At the same time, those with sons should be looking at why this “community” of men allowed this to happen in their midst. Why these scumbags could get away with it and what lessons they can take from it.
As long as you think that blaming the victim is basically okay you’re blaming the victim. We’re not talking about just any situation. We’re talking about a situation where the same old tired tropes about ‘avoiding being a victim’ are trotted out every time—and usually by men.
“Teaching someone to avoid being the victim is not blaming the victim.”
Yes, it is. What on earth makes you think that this case was preventable by the 11-year-old victim? And where on earth does one get the arrogance to assume that women are stupid and haven’t heard all these tired tips already? Been there. Done that. Studying women ain’t working. Sometimes you simply cannot avoid being a victim. That’s the choice the victimizer makes.
What DOES work is educating observers. Want to stop rape? Why didn’t anybody turn in those rapists? Hm? If so many people are telling their kids not to rape, are they leaving out the crucial act of being an observer and then doing something about it? Are they giving them the same definition of rape that’s been trotted out here—stupid woman walking down the street with her wallet hanging out? Because if you read anything about rape, that leaves a lot of actual, real world rapes off the table and that’s what a lot of those sons are committing.
Psst - I didn’t compare anyone to a wad of cash, so please don’t throw around that broad brush ok?
Also, rape being the result of being “incautious” - YES, sometimes it is, just the same way that sometimes when men get violently mugged it is because they were incautious, or stupid or whatever.
Attitudes like yours take power away from women, they tell us that women are some sort of passive little flowers that have things done to them, not people that can take control of themselves and influence what happens around them.
I’ll try a different tack.
You know what I spent the last 45 minutes doing? Changing the passwords to my emails, forums and facebook. Why? Because I suspect that my boss might have installed a keylogger on my work computer.
Now, I have taken action to protect myself. Should I have to, or should his mother have taught him not to be a wanker?
I think the answer to that is pretty obvious.
But let me ask you, which is better - a few minor steps of prevention now and “keeping myself safe” or coming and starting a pit thread in two weeks bemoaning the dishonesty of that arsehole.
Isn’t the answer obvious?
Would it have been “victim blaming” to ask me why I didn’t change my passwords or sage advice?
Things don’t “just happen”. There are many complex reasons why. Why did this girl think it ok to drive around with a 19 year old, why did his friends let it happen, why did she end up being so reluctant to report it, why did it get reported by a fine upstanding student at the school.
We can think about all this, or we can throw up are hands, cop-out and say - teach your sons not to be rapists.
Well I tell you something - if I had a son I would. I DO teach my nephew to have the courage of his convictions if that makes a difference to you at all.
Well perhaps some people haven’t learned how not to be a victim yet. Maybe this girl wasn’t taught appropriately in the home.
We have an example on this board of one girl that did everything right - that was taught the right things and did them properly, this kept her from being a serial victim.
We have, in this instance, a girl that was terribly victimised. Can’t we look at why?
I suspect that the dressing, such as it was, is a symptom rather than a cause of her victimisation. One suspects that part of the reason it continued is that she was sexualised inappropriately young. I would think this is something that DtC can identify with.
Would he let his daughter out of the house dressed like a 20 y.o college student looking to get laid? One doubts it. Is she better protected against becoming a victim? One would think so - but its not JUST the dressing, its a whole world view.
There’s a whole segment of the community that failed here, both in protecting this poor girl, and also in teaching the perpetrators of the crime the wrong value. Both sides can be addressed.
Don’t you dare compare rape to anything else, for starters.
That is complete and utter idiocy. Have you so much as READ a book about rape? Listen carefully, because I didn’t say any of that, and to be criticized for doing what YOU are doing is rich indeed.
Have you suffered a head injury recently?
Your analogy is stupid and irrelevant. So you’re whining that I misattributed a quote to you and yet you come up with another incredibly stupid example on your own?
You’re basically ignoring everything I’ve said. Do you have any IDEA what women do every day to protect themselves? The fear that women live with? And yet you’re comparing your paranoid fantasies about your alleged boss to a problem that you apparently haven’t read a single book about? I have a news flash for you: women have already heard all this advice. Your little tips are stupid, trite, and have been done before.
Victim blaming. Blatant victim blaming.
Once again, you assume that the GIRL did something wrong, that women are stupid and don’t protect themselves at all, and that rapes are somehow committed in such a fashion that the rapist will be clearly marked and delineated, that rape is a situation that is easily and simply prevented, and that, oh yeah, the rapist will not be someone whom the victim can easily identify or resist. Your entire post was pretty much mansplaination, and unless you start listening and learning, I’m done with you.
I’m still here, and yes, it’s fine if you cite mudgirl as a girl that “got it right”; she got it right largely because she has a good internal moral compass, she knows what’s right and what’s wrong, and she’s very brave. But she got it right in part because she was taught that it’s never OK for other people to touch you in ways that make you uncomfortable, especially when there’s genitalia involved. And she was taught, well and often, that she could come to her father and me about anything.
I think what we’re really talking about here is teaching someone that they can stop being a victim. This little girl had an “ongoing sexual relationship” with someone before the rapes. You know what? At age 11, I was in the same situation, since I was serially sexually molested by a man who lived in our house from the time I was 7YO. If you wanted to, you could have called that “an ongoing sexual relationship”; it was certainly sexual in nature, even if he was the only one getting his rocks off on it. But when I explained my situation to a school counselor (around 1975), all I was told was “talk to your mother about it”, which I did, but it didn’t do any good, since my mother already knew about it, and wasn’t willing to take measures to stop the situation. BUT things have changed. Laws have changed. These things are taken seriously these days. If a teenage girl went to a school counselor now and told the counselor they were being sexually abused at home and had been for years, they’d likely be removed from the home while a complete investigation was done. This is what we need to be teaching our daughters.
Look, I’m all in favor of mothers teaching their sons not to be rapist, child-abusing scums. But some mothers aren’t doing that. And maybe some mothers are trying their best to do that, but the sons aren’t listening. Saying that teaching our daughters not to be victims is the same as blaming the victim is like saying you shouldn’t have to lock your door at night, because everyone else’s mother should have taught their kids not to go into other people’s homes uninvited.
How many women get victimized after doing all the right things? Hm? How come fathers are never put in the position of teaching their sons not to be rapists, because the sons might listen to them? The thing is, not enough people are educating their sons because they’re raping an awful lot of women and girls, and some of them do it repeatedly. If people are really telling men not to commit rape, then they’re not getting the message and instead of throwing our hands up and going, “Boys will be boys!” maybe we should ask *why that is. * No, let’s focus on the victim at all costs. Because women are so stupid that they wander around waving wads of cash around in bad neighborhoods. They never protect themselves, right?
Telling women and girls stupid, feel good crap like “choose not to be victim” is, well, stupid because, what, does anybody think there’s a choice? “Oh, let me see: victim or non-victim, which one? Tough choice!” It also ignores the fact that sometimes you simply have no choice. But let’s ignore that, okay? It’s so ugly and it interrupts the victim blaming.
And once again, and again, and again, and again, if you want to understand rape, how come you’re not talking about rapists? The fact that people dismiss this out of hand as an unrealistic fantasy says volumes. Let’s study the rapists. It has been done.
Patronizing advice about how to ‘choose not to be a victim’ assumes that women get raped because they’re stupid and reckless. Saying that men already know not to rape, can’t do anything about the ones that do, to the point that you refuse to entertain the notion of studying them, is a refusal to take actual steps that would reduce rape.
During a string of rapes in Israel, Golda Meir was advised to put a curfew on women. “Why women? They’re not committing the rapes.”
This thread is advising women to curfew themselves. So much for that fighting ignorance.
Oh, and something else, too. “Choosing not to be a victim” is trite and ineffective. How come so many men commit so many rapes? Well, one could blame several things:
Er…I’m not a town folk, but yeah, I think that 11 year olds should be able to dress and act however they like without ever being gang raped. Nothing they can ever do should ever result in a gang rape.
And I know ‘people aren’t blaming the victim’ in this thread..but people in this thread have claimed they are not blaming the victim and then called an **11 year old ** a ho. Fuck that.
My alleged boss? If you want to call me a liar at least have the courage to do it. Alleged boss? What the fuck is that?
Rape can’t be compared to anything? Why not?