There has been no mention here of the awful Steubenville, Ohio rape case before today, and there was a reason for that. This is a massive ethics train wreck that is not only still rolling and accumulating passengers and victims, but is also too full of debris and wreckage to fully understand. At the end of this month, a grand jury will begin examining the looming question of whether others besides the two high school football players already convicted of the rape should be indicted. The town is also doing an investigation of its own. These will help. My hesitation in diving into this gothic American nightmare is that recounting the obvious instances of miserable, heartless, ethically incomprehensible conduct by participants, observers, public officials and commentators doesn’t begin to make sense of it. We will be analyzing and discussing this episode for a long time—we will have an obligation to do so. It is every bit as important and alarming as the Penn State scandal, and more significant than the infamous New Bedford pool table rape case, which was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film, “The Accused.”
The crucial cultural questions that will have to be answered are these:
- First and foremost, what is the matter with Steubenville? Is it some kind of isolated pocket of callousness and rotting values, like one of Stephen King’s cursed fictional Maine hamlets, or is what happened in Steubenville something that could happen anywhere in the U.S.? Following a party attended by members of the Steubenville high football team and many others on August 11, 2012, a helplessly drunk (and perhaps drugged) 16-year-old girl was raped by team quarterback Trent Mays and wide receiver Ma’lik Richmond. In the early hours of the next day, over a six-hour span, the boys carried their victim from party to party, photographed her nude and semi-nude, assaulted her in a car, dropped her in the middle of a road, and took her to a basement, where, she later testified, she awoke naked in the company of Mays, Richmond and another teenage boy, absent her underwear, shoes, phone and earrings. She had little memory of her ordeal, but since her various assaults and degradations had been witnessed by dozens of bystanders throughout the night, many of whom happily texted, tweeted, and otherwise reported on the ongoing crime on social media, there were hundreds of messages and cellphone pictures available to document what occurred. Nobody called the police. The lack of sympathy for the incapacitated girl displayed in the messages and posts is stunning, and that isn’t all. Parents and community members rallied to the defense of the rapists, attempted to block their prosecution, and blamed the victim. Reading the contemporaneous posts and seeing the photos, I cannot fathom this at all. Any Steubenville resident who understands what happened to this young woman and whose reaction is anything but pity, anger, disgust and shame is missing essential ethics alarms to a dangerous extent, and apparently the town is crawling with such creatures. Why?
- What is it about football that obliterates communities’ sense of right and wrong? Reno Saccoccia has been coaching Steubenville High’s Big Red football team for 30 years, achieving an 85-percent winning percentage for the program and getting himself enshrined in Ohio’s Football Hall of Fame. There is also plenty of evidence suggesting that he is Paterno-like in other respects, protected his felonious players when he should have been reporting their crimes. Not only did he continue to play some of the students who were implicated in the rape scenario long after their involvement was known, he also, according to the messages sent by various players, knew about his stars’ abuse of the rape victim and assured them that he would “take care of it,” which would be a violation of state law. But never mind: Reno just was awarded a two-year contract extension.
Consider that for a moment. His stars were just convicted of sexual assault, avoiding far more serious sentences only because they were minors. His team, which he was responsible for teaching character and decent values to as well as football skills, was at the epicenter of a horrendous crime. To allow him to continue to coach under those circumstances makes an unequivocal statement that winning football games is more important to the town than raising its children to be good citizens and human beings, and that this stomach-turning incident is, in the grand scheme of things, no big deal to Steubenville. I have always lacked the football gene, I confess, but can someone explain to me how a mere game manages to wipe out an entire community’s conscience and sense of responsibility?
What is the matter with Steubenville?
- Where are our leaders, role models, celebrities, families, schools, media and culture so miserably failing that the victim of a humiliating and dehumanizing rape would be threatened and denigrated by other teens, and in the social media? Where does this lack of empathy, justice, respect and fairness come from? In the Steubenville case, these were not isolated incidents, but widespread. A clue to the cause may be in the jaw-dropping coverage of the convictions of Mays and Richmond by CNN, whose correspondents focused on the plight of the rapists, as if they were the victims of circumstances beyond their control. “It was incredibly emotional — incredibly difficult even for an outsider like me to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believe their life fell apart,” oozed CNN’s Poppy Harlow after the verdict, as she was egged on by the equally sympathetic Candy Crowley. Small wonder so many viewers took this as a cue that blaming the victim was appropriate.
- When will law enforcement get serious about crushing Anonymous, and when will the media become responsible about reporting on their disruptive activities? This juvenile renegade internet vigilante group injected itself into the investigation and coverage of the Steubenville case, and forced students who had posted negative comments about the victim to take their posts down and even apologize for them. The group is lawless, arrogant, a bull in multiple china shops, and operates without principles or restraint according to whom it judges to be in the right. The members of this group have neither the credibility, the judgment nor the authority to appropriate this role, whether they happen to choose their targets wisely or not. They don’t deserve praise, no matter what they do, because their very existence is a threat to civil society and the rule of law, and the more power they are allowed to wield, the more certain that they will abuse it.
There will be more to consider regarding this particularly odious ethics train wreck once the grand jury has done its work, and I will return to Steubenville then.
I’m not looking forward to it.
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Sources: Cleveland.com, Atlantic 1,2,3,4, 5, CNN,Washington Post 1, 2, Res Ipsa Loquitur
In a photograph posted on Instagram by a Steubenville High football player, the victim was shown looking unresponsive, being carried by two teenage boys by her wrists and ankles. Former Steubenville baseball player Michael Nodianos tweeted “Song of the night is definitely Rape Me by Nirvana” and “Some people deserve to be peed on,” which was reshared later by several people, including Mays. In a 12-minute video later posted to YouTube, Nodianos and others talk about the rapes, with Nodianos joking that “they raped her quicker than Mike Tyson raped that one girl” and “They peed on her. That’s how you know she’s dead, because someone pissed on her.”[3] In one text, Mays described the victim as “like a dead body” and in another he told the victim that a photo of her lying naked in a basement with semen on her body had been taken by him, and that the semen was his. In a text message to a friend afterwards, he said “I shoulda raped her now that everybody thinks I did,” but “she wasn’t awake enough.”[2] One classmate testified he videotaped with his phone while Mays exposed the victim’s breasts and penetrated her with his fingers in the backseat of a car, and another testifed he saw Richmond digitally penetrate the victim while she lay in the basement.[1][4][5]
In the days following the rapes, according to the New York Times, Mays “seemed to try to orchestrate a cover-up, telling a friend, “Just say she came to your house and passed out,” and pleading with the victim not to press charges.[1]
Ohio investigators confiscated and analyzed 15 cellphones and two iPads, collecting hundreds of text messages from dozens of students, and interviewed almost 60 people, including students, coaches, school officials and parents.[4]
Ethics Alarms 
Possible explanation for Steubenville: Tribalism; the biggest threat to modern civilization. And it’s not limited to just the Middle East or conservative Islamic societies. And what’s better at fostering an “us against them” ethos than high school football in a smaller town? Tribalism also hides within the Trojan horse/sacred cow of diversity, an equally toxic threat.
That’s as good an explanation as any I’ve come up with—“Lord of the Flies.” Which IS a favorite Stephen King theme, come to think of it.
And tribes posit “the ends justify the means” as their basic tenet. Unfortunately, our political parties, “special interest groups,” professional “advocates,” and the media have devolved into tribes.
What kind of parenting produced these dirt bags?
You may not have the football gene, so let me give you the baseball equivalent: “Manny being Manny.”
A well-considered response, though even my fellow, misguided, Red Sox fan Manny-enablers wouldn’t MBM a rape. At least, I don’t think so…
This has been going on at least since I was in high school. I would assume this goes on in every town in the US every weekend. From what I have seen, the girl never would have said anything unless the boys hadn’t taken the pictures and video and shared them around, humiliating her publicly. Her friends seem to indicate that this has happened to her before. Teenagers aren’t ready to handle dealing with the “hero worship” aspect of athletics. The boys aren’t ready to handle the power they get from it, and the girls in these instances seem to idolize them too much. The parents, the teachers, and the coaches all have their share of the blame for letting these kids get away with this sort of behavior.
These kids were out at all hours of the night, drinking, going from house to house obviously drunk. Several boys bring an unconscious or semi-conscious girl into the house, take her downstairs, and have sex with her. What kind of parents allow that? But in fact, if you listen to the interviews, this is an average weekend. I knew people in high school that did this every weekend too. To stop this will require a serious change in high school culture.
WHAT???
How could you be unaware of this? I have discussed this with my colleagues and this went on at all of their high schools as well. If you want to lock up every teenage boy who has done this in the past year, you aren’t going to have enough jail space. It disgusted me then, it disgusts me now. I just can’t believe the parents let this go on, but their children rule them, not the other way around.
I can answer one question – yes, this is apparently normal.
http://www.care2.com/causes/high-school-protects-basketball-star-at-the-expense-of-his-rape-victims.html
The resemblance to Steubenville ends there, as in this case the local police force were not so enamoured of basketball that they didn’t investigate, and after the second rape by this player, got a conviction.
As for Anonymous – please tell me exactly how they’re worse than the current system? It’s not that they have any powers of arrest, fine or incarceration..Any victims of their wrath have equal right of reply.
They should not be necessary. I’m not sure they’re not the lesser of two evils.
…
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-19/national/37840947_1_tweets-malik-richmond-twitter-accounts
Let me repeat that again…
“Two teenage girls have been arrested on charges of threatening the victim of the Steubenville rape case on Twitter….”
What is wrong with these girls? How could girls engage in this kind of thing?
I don’t have much to add, except for a comment on Anonymous.
The funny thing is, I supported Anonymous when they started Project Chanology and still do when they’re in line with the goals of that project: resisting censorship and free information (not necessarily information gained through hacking, of course). They were anonymous because then they couldn’t be targeted by the notoriously litigious Church of Scientology. I think freedom of speech is something you can support and still be legitimately anonymous.
But when they do stuff directly to hurt people, even if in the pursuit of justice… then you’re not Anonymous anymore. Once you take that step out, you gotta be responsible for your own neck.
I will also say that taking out Anonymous is probably impossible. I really don’t think there is a central figure in it, as there is in smaller groups like LulzSec. Members speak out on behalf of the group as if they did, but I don’t think there’s anyone in the center.
Anonymous also consists of sympathetic people who’d never hack or cause harm, but perhaps they’re not actually “part” of it. Anyone who’d say they were part of Anonymous who wasn’t, at that time, Anonymous, I guess wouldn’t be part of it by definition.
I dunno. Maybe I spend too long on the computer.
Power corrupts, and it particularly corrupts young, inexperienced people who spend too much time viewing the world on a computer screen. A large, lawless, unsocialized bunch of arrogant anarchists must not be ignored with the shrug of “we can’t stop them” any more than international terrorists, organized crime or human traffickers.
I’m not saying you can’t stop the individuals, but it’s sorta like (and this might not be a fair analogy, but I persist) when people were like, “Why is Al Qaeda still around? We GOT bin Laden!” And I really don’t think Anonymous even HAS a central figure like that.
Sick souls. No other explanation seems to fit. These boys are only different in degree from the Boston bombers. Same lack of soul. Looking at the helpless as victims and brutalizing them. No other explanation.
Jack, three boys from West Springfield High School in Fairfax County, Virginia were recently arrested by police at the school in a sexting ring. In this case the girls consented to the sex and were not passed out. Drinking Alcohol was involved. What the girls did not consent to was being videoed and photographed and having these images shared publicly by the three boys (which of course went around the school). Two took a plea bargain and one was convicted – sentencing is in June. Producing, storing or sharing lewd or explicit pictures of a minor is a felony in Virginia. The school system said it was out of their jurisdiction, as these events did not occur at school or on school property. So the boys (who were all athletes – soccer, football and basketball I think) were never suspended and all continued to play on their respective teams and remained in classes with the humiliated girls. It is a different story – not quite as wretched as Steubenville, but the boys thought what they did was funny. They had no idea what they did was anything worse than a “prank.” Local forums were filled with people feeling sorry for the boys like they were the victims here – having to endure the police coming into their school to arrest them. I was thoroughly disgusted reading about the Steubenville case and then days later learned of this sexting case in my own back yard.
Jack,
I’ve been out of the loop for several weeks. Thanks for addressing Steubenville. I strongly believe that short of genetic psychopathology, lack of nurturing and abuse causes dysfunctional personalities. Empathy, compassion, honesty, integrity, courage, self-control, respect for self and others; these must be taught and observed by children in order to be inculcated. We are raising a generation of sociopaths! These kids don’t know right from wrong. They live moral relativism. Some things must be learned in early childhood or can never be taught. Empathy is one such trait. Do not do what is evil to one self to another person. A rule that has been sorely lacking in our culture for a long time.
We have seen what previous generations of sociopaths did in Auschwitz and Nanking.
“But it is above all by controlling ourselves – by fortifying the better angels of our nature — that the struggle against evil progresses.”- Jeff Jacoby, “ People are truly good at heart? Sadly, no ” The Boston Globe, Jan. 2, 2013