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.
