I mentioned that in the OP and I do not know.
If it was an 11 year-old girl being assaulted by 13 year-old boys I wouldn’t be surprised if rather than a mere misdemeanor charge they’d be facing felony charges with child porn being among them.
I am surprised no one has explored this aspect.
I do not think, even were it boys doing it to a girl, that the culprits were on about child porn but sex offender laws are goofy. Public urination can land you on a sex offender registry.
Well of course, we are all just speculating. Someone can correct me if I am wrong but I think Title I schools have a high proportion of students who are poor or have some kind of difficult life circumstances. The middle school looks like a more typical middle class school. This could have had an effect on the girls’ attitude toward the boy and/or the mother’s willingness to pursue this in the courts.
We don’t have enough facts to say anything with certainty but I think it’s not inconceivable that differences in wealth could have affected the way this whole thing has unfolded. There is a lot of educated opinion out there saying that class issues overshadow gender inequality these days.
The girls are 13 and 14, the victim is 11. So if your girls did this you’d pooh-pooh it but if boys of the same age did it to them you’d go for blood?
Personally, what they did was awful and even worse was posted online (and shown on TV!) I think these girls need some kind of Scared Straight program, like talking to rape or gang beating victims, find out what it’s like to have a group of people hold you down and do things against your will.
Where’s your fire and brimstone? You’re a fucking piece of shit.
If there is a notable wealth disparity (poor boy, rich girls) then history teaches us his mom would be seeing dollar signs. She would either get a payoff from the girls’ parents to not press charges or would seek a criminal prosecution en route to a civil suit to get all she could.
Not everyone is like that of course but it would be the usual route for most people.
If the boy was rich and the girls poor then again history tells us the rich won’t abide such an attack and the mom would use her influence to be sure the girls were buried in the legal system.
Again, not everyone is like that but it would be the usual course of events.
FWIW I got no sense of a class issue here at all. It might be there but so far not heard of it.
It’s assault.
It’s not rape.
Is it sexual assault? Because he ended up naked, I’d call it sexual assault. But if there was no attempt to penetrate him or otherwise manipulate his genitals, it’s not rape. And I’d say the same if it was happening to a girl.
I fully support the mother and the victim deciding not to press charges. I would support that position if it was a girl it happened to. I think the way society (in general, not just in the US) treats victims of sexual crimes is very nasty. I don’t blame a parent not wanting to put their child through it. Especially in a case like this where it’s on video, it’s not just him-vs-her and his claims in a vacuum.
I believe these girls should be punished to the full extent of the law available without specific charges being brought by the victim and his mother. So if that means the state can bring a case against them by proxy, it should happen. This sort of shit is not on, no matter who it happens to.
I agree with how you view it (well…I think “sexual” assault seems a stretch as I saw nothing to suggest there was anything sex related about it).
At the end of the day though it is a matter for how the law in Florida (where this happened) defines those crimes.
Personally I have no clue how Florida defines this.
All I have to go on is the report I linked in the OP which says the girls faced a possible misdemeanor assault charge.
My quibble is that if it were boys doing it to a girl I suspect the possible charges would be more severe.
I agree. This is not that poor boy’s fault, but society has traditionally seemed to have had the mentality, so that when this sort of thing happens to a male, it’s winked at and thought of in more of a “well yeah, but men *like *that sort of thing…it’s not the same as with a girl” kind of way. I think that’s what palooka meant by his post, rather than being serious (though of course I can’t speak for him).
A good example is that gorgeous young Floridian teacher (can’t think of her name right now) with her young male student. That was viewed and dealt with in a VERY “Hot for Teacher” way, she got off with a slap on the wrist if I remember correctly.
That said, I agree with those that say “mom pressing charges or not, the girls should be dealt with by the law”. Perhaps they were just high-spirited pranks that got out of hand and the girls feel bad (8th graders? so they were only 13 or so, not the brightest of ages for a person), but on the other hand, they could be the sort of kids that have an overblown sense of entitlement. Either way, I don’t think leaving their punishment to their parents will bring home to these girls the seriousness of what they did.
I rather suspect a lot of cases like this happen in reverse gender, where the parents decide not to charge in order to avoid their child going through court etc, and for far more serious outcomes than this.
So overall Id say more attention is being paid to this than your run of the mill outrage that happens in the more common gender direction, given it seems to have actually made it to TV news.
Otara
Press charges?
They’re 11 year old kids acting like 11 year old kids. Give me a break. We all did stupid stuff when we were that age.
My post was more in response to someone earlier who called it rape. That gave me a bit of WTF?
I think regardless of boys or girls being the aggressors, they should be charged with the same degree of crime. If it’s a misdemeanour in the legal sense, it’s a misdemeanour regardless of whether boys or girls were doing it. Same if it were a felony. That’s the stance I support, and I think it’s the stance most moderate people support. The problem is that it’s always the frothing loonies who get the press and who manage to force the authorities to advance their hand. So you end up with the “double standard” because the vicious response comes from people on one side and not the other.
Read the fucking article. They were 13 and 14, the victim was 11. And, no, this is not typical behavior which is why it’s on the news.
Prime example of double standards.
Girls should spend a couple months in juvie.
Perhaps margin will appear to ascribe this to rape culture.
You did stupid stuff like gang up on lone children three years your junior, strip him/her naked while he struggles and begs you to stop, video tape it, and then put the video online for the everyone to see? Really?
I think this goes a little beyond “stupid”. Stupid, is stealing a chocolate bar from a shop, or skipping off school, or getting caught hiding a dirty magazine in your locker. Any one of these would’ve gotten me grounded for a month. This? This is malicious, spiteful cruelty. While I believe a prison sentence may do more harm than good, I’d certainly support their explusion, a couple hundred hours community service cleaning graffiti off bridges wearing fluorescent jumpsuits with the word ‘BULLY’ on the back in 12 in lettering, as well as the publication of their names and pictures in the local paper so parents of the kids in whichever school they may end up can warn their children to keep away from them. And if they do anything like it again, then yeah, chuck 'em in juvie and see if that does anything.
And there’s Mary Kay Letourneau
And Pamela Turner
Here’s an About.com reference of several women who were charged with some type of sexual misconduct with children. Not all of the cases were resolved at the time of publication and About hasn’t updated any of the articles.
Comparable male indexes were surprisingly difficult to find. The best I could find with a cursory search is Dateline’s To Catch a Predator, which doesn’t comprehensively detail charges and sentences.
I imagine a lot of male victims of statutory rape perpetrated by major females, especially teachers, are lauded by their male peers with many high-fives and “atta boys.” No way you’d get that with a female victim.
What Cort said sums up my views (pretty much).
As I said in the OP I am not out for their heads.
However I think leaving it to their parents to discipline them, given the apparent quality of children they have raised thus far, is bullshit.
My main gripe is that I wonder if you’d (statisticsnerd) would say the same thing if it was 14 year old boys tearing the clothes off an 11 year-old girl and then posting their exploits online.
We were all kids once. We (at least I) remember what right bastards kids can be. It was hard enough wading through the peer pressure waters as is. Can you imagine having gotten your ass kicked (assuming you are a male) by girls when you were 11? Getting stripped? Having that humiliation published for everyone in your school to see? Hell, for the world to see?
That kid will not live this down unless he moves or till he graduates. This kid has got to be crushed.. I cannot imagine being him and mustering the courage to go back to school or even face his friends. Those girls almost certainly did serious damage to that kid and you want to let them off with whatever their parents choose? Lose their TV privileges maybe?
As mentioned I do not want to see the girls in juvie. This is not solved by ruining the young girls’ lives.
That said I do not think a criminal record (which will be expunged when they hit 18) is amiss. I think they should wear Day-Glo jackets and clean city parks for the rest of the summer. No hanging with their friends. Frankly that is light punishment and the least they could do. If they fail at that or do this again then send them to juvie.
Anything less and it is a “Ha ha” deal for them.
What punishment would you think appropriate for guys who did the same thing to a girl?
All other things considered and completely equal, if it was the same age breakdown with just the genders reversed, AND a first offense, the punishments you are proposing would be equally just for the boys or the girls.
I think so in these circumstances. They are kids when all is said and done. They take their lumps but have a chance to move past it.
I just think if genders were reversed here it’d go a lot harder than that on the boys.
Almost certainly there are more female on male violence cases than gets reported*.
The difference here, I think, is the idjits filmed their exploits and they posted it for the world to see.
So instead of a, “Not sure what happened, we’ll probably never know” thing we have clear and obvious evidence of the attack. We also know that the police/State are apparently content to shrug it off.
Therein lies the unusual outrage in this case.
[sub]*There are a number of studies on this and it is widely regarded as true. The why’s and such are open to some debate. MOST importantly though is to note that while I say female on male violence exists it is NOT to diminish male on female violence which, no matter what numbers you look at, is more prevalent.[/sub]
What frigging testimony do they need? They fucking have video footage. There can be no not guilty plea on that shit.