Last night, I got around to reading a thought-provoking piece in last week’s The New Yorker, headlined “Trial by Twitter,” with the subhed, “After high-school football stars were accused of rape, online vigilantes demanded that justice be served. Was it?”
The question is not definitively answered, although some things do come across quite clearly.
One is that there was a rush to judgment in the Steubenville case, sometimes on the parts of people who should know better.
Another is that the passion of an amateur blogger is no substitute for cold, deliberate, professional journalism, which is admirably on display (in its “long” form) in this piece. We are also made wary of the cohorts of perpetually half-cocked people in the Twittersphere, the self-styled guardians who confidently and aggressively appoint themselves the arbiters and auditors of our more deliberate institutions, of which they reflexively disapprove. (Everyone needs an editor, as evidenced by that sentence I just wrote.)
This piece reminds me of another in The New Yorker that I wrote about more than a year ago. I headlined that post “Kids, lost in a latter-day Heart of Darkness.” That earlier article and this one both explored the morally bewildering sexual wilderness that kids today try to negotiate and survive, sometimes unsuccessfully.
And both revealed facts that were sharply inconsistent with what tout le monde just knew had happened. An excerpt from that earlier piece, about a tragedy at Rutgers:
It became widely understood that a closeted student at Rutgers had committed suicide after video of him having sex with a man was secretly shot and posted online. In fact, there was no posting, no observed sex, and no closet….
This latest story was about the rape charges against high school football players in Steubenville, Ohio. We are introduced to a blogger, Alexandria Goddard, who decided that a rape was being covered up because the perpetrators were football players in a small town that makes heroes of such athletes. Her take on the situation was so widely accepted that Nicholas Kristof, one of the soberest, most careful journalists working today, wrote a column headlined, “Is Delhi So Different from Steubenville?,” comparing the incident to the infamous one in which an Indian woman was gang-raped so brutally that she soon died from her injuries — and giving credence to “concern” that the system protected the perpetrators.
Here’s what Ariel Levy finds in her New Yorker piece:
In versions of the story that spread online, the girl was lured to the party and then drugged. While she was delirious, she was transported in the trunk of a car, and then a gang of football players raped her over and over again and urinated on her body while her peers watched, transfixed. The town, desperate to protect its young princes, contrived to cover up the crime. If not for Goddard’s intercession, the police would have happily let everyone go. None of that is true…
What actually did happen was sordid and appalling, although many details remain sketchy. And the author by no means intends to downplay the horrific problem of which this incident was supposed to be emblematic:
“Rape culture” is not an empty term or an imaginary phenomenon. According to a survey published by the Centers for Disease Control in 2011, one in five American women have been raped or experienced attempted rape. In May, the officer in charge of preventing sexual assault in the U.S. Air Force was arrested for groping a woman in a parking lot. Two days later, the Pentagon released a poll of a hundred and eight thousand active-duty service members showing that twenty-six thousand had been sexually assaulted. Worldwide, women between fifteen and forty-four are more likely to be injured or die from male violence than from traffic accidents, cancer, malaria, and the effects of war combined. This sustained brutality would be impossible without a culture that enables it: a value system in which women are currency, and sex is something that men get—or take—from them.
In April, a teen-age girl in Halifax, Nova Scotia, hanged herself; her mother said that four boys had raped her and then disseminated a photograph of the assault throughout their high school. In late February, two eighteen-year-old football players in Torrington, Connecticut, were arrested for raping two thirteen-year-old girls at the home of one of the boys. Their classmates responded on Twitter. “Young girls acting like whores there’s no punishment,” one wrote. “Young men acting like boys is a sentence.” These situations, in which teen-agers were assaulted, and then further victimized online, have inevitably been compared to Steubenville—a town that has become synonymous with gang rape.
There was much appalling behavior on the part of young people in Steubenville that night, some of it pathologically animalistic, suggestive of the collapse of some fundamental assumptions of a civilized society, as they once lived in the hearts and minds of individuals. But there seems to have been no systemic failure, no coverup — nothing of the kind of thing that caused such widespread opprobrium to be aimed at the town, its institutions and culture. Lots of things failed in Steubenville, but apparently the criminal justice system did not.
Hey, I think people make too big a deal over football, too. But that doesn’t blind me, and it doesn’t blind Adrien Levy, apparently. Nor does she make excuses, for anyone.
If you read or heard anything about what happened in Steubenville, and made up your mind about it in some way, you should read this piece. But I warn you, it’s not pleasant.
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Next to last graph “Ariel”. Yes, very thoughtful piece. Editors and fact checkers are valuable. Bloggers don’t have ’em.
But it’s more than that, Kathryn. There’s no substitute for approaching a subject with an open mind, for having the attitude, “I’m here to find what I find, and report it dispassionately.”
I was hoping more of y’all would get into this topic. The last post like it, more than a year ago, generated more than 50 responses. (Not a record-setter or anything, but respectable.)
But I figure that it takes awhile for busy folks to get around to reading something like this. After all, it took me more than a week — although once I started, it went pretty quickly.
That’s the thing about “long form” journalism — it can be so rewarding, but harder to find the time for…
TLDR.
I read The New Yorker at bedtime. Nice thin magazine, with nice black type on white paper, unlike many overly art-directed mags.
I read the article. There are few redeeming characters in this story. Not the victim, not the convicted offenders, not the police, not the Twitter-verse… but despite all the ancillary bad behavior I can’t let go of one simple fact: none of this would have happened if the two football players had any morals. Everything was spawned by their awful, disgusting behavior. In my view, they got off easy.
Twitter has just become what was once called the “rumor mill” on steroids. It’s just like the old game of “Telephone” where a message is passed through a line. Now it just goes faster and wider. Technology allows the worst in people to be disseminated to the world.
The NYT article is the “best” I have read on this sad sad case. Society and journalism both seem to be in a debased state.
As I read this, the same discussion is taking place on Piers Morgan. These actions are so wrong on so many levels. The first thought begins with absence of parenting and moves on to misplaced values, unrestrained words, selfishness, lack of respect for others, victimization of women both in reality and fiction .. These parties are taking place in homes with no supervision?! Who is providing the alcohol?. Minors shouldn’t have Internet accounts unless parents have all the pass codes and are on their friend list etc. It is most certainly a societal problem and journalism, too, when journalists publicize the rumors and innuendo. But, Brad, it is frustrating to keep hearing of these dire cases but seeing no fixes. How long has it been since we first heard of “Tail Hook” and we are still hearing of major sexual assault problems in the military?
From the article it appears that the parties were taking place in houses with parents (or at least older relatives) home. I wonder if the parents of the victim’s family have sued the parents who “hosted” the alcohol fueled parties, or if they were ever charged with anything?
Good question.
There wuz me, that is Trent, and my three droogs, that is Anthony, Ma’lik, and Mark, and we sat in a party in Steubenville trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. The party had beer-plus, beer plus liquor or crystal meth or Slushies with vodka, which is what we was drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-fingerbanging.
Offensive
What you got back home, little sister, to play your fuzzy warbles on? I bet you got little save pitiful, portable picnic players. Come with uncle and hear all proper! Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones. You are invited.
I think Silence means to be devastatingly satirical — Swiftian, even.
I think he’s saying these kids are no better than Alex and his droogs, and that society has descended to the dystopian level envisioned in the novel.
Of course, maybe I think that because I have a fondness for Burgess.
Of course the most pertinent line would be from the novelist in the book, Frank Alexander, he and his wife were victims of Alex and the droogs “Suprise Visit.” A visit which results in Mr. Alexander’s beating, also it results in Mrs. Alexander’s rape and eventual death:
Well, I was going for satire, and since we are talking about a rape, I knew that we were on the edge of acceptable topics. I can’t speak for Litle Alex, but to me the whole thing is awful.
There’s a pack of young men who are town “heroes” but who are behaving badly, drinking and probably doing other substances. Perhaps they are rapers. I don’t think the football hero stuff is really relevant here.
There’s a girl and her friends who are also behaving badly as well. Sneaking out, drinking, possibly doing other drugs, and also possibly engaging in risky sexual behavior. At a minimum they are placing themselves in dangerous situations.
None of this behavior (from the boys or girls) is particularly unusual for teenagers.
The parents seem to be either absent from the picture, or willingly allow the kids to break the law in their homes.
The D.A.’s son is friends with the boys, and possibly involved, so she tries to do damage control.
There is failure here on so many levels it’s hard to fathom.