During the past few months several athletic programs have
made the news not so much for the rapes that have occurred at the hands of
their athletes but moreso for the ways in which athletic programs and
communities have reacted to these allegations.
Though the types of events vary what they all share in common is a
willingness to excuse the behavior at the very least and protect the athletes
from facing consequences at the most severe.
A caveat: I am
completely aware that some of the events and cases I'm going to highlight did
not ultimately end up generating criminal charges and in some cases trials
failed to garner a conviction. It's not
the legal outcomes that are my concern.
My interest is in the way in which parents, communities and athletic
departments seek to excuse athletes from serious misbehavior and in some cases
protect them from consequences be they legal or internal, including campus
judicial systems. Furthermore, I'm
deeply perplexed by our society's unwillingness to have serious conversations
about the interwoven cultures of masculinity, sport, and violence against women
that allows too many young men to behave in ways that are troubling and too
many women to become sexually victimized by these young men.
Steubenville, Ohio is merely the latest of these cases, and
in many ways it is not all that unusual.
It only seems so today because of the impact of social media. Today
bloggers and hackers like the Anonymous Group-- that
called for the young men to apologize to the victim-- can see evidence of a
rape and the culture in which it occurred displayed on social media--including
instagram, twitter and facebook--and share that with the world. Watching a youtube video of a young man from
Steubenville talking about the victim as being "dead
as a doornail" made many ask why the police department was moving so slowly
and the high school working so hard to protect what appeared to many of us to
be a clear cut case of rape.
I wonder what we would have seen if a cell phone user had
videotaped the strippers the night of March 13, 2006 at the Duke lacrosse
house. Would we have had a similar response?
Or, during the gang rape of a developmentally disabled young
woman in the basement of a home in Glen Ridge, New Jersey (March 1, 1989) when
the members of the football team raped her with a baseball bat?
Would we have patently accepted the explanation by their
fathers and communities that boys will simply be boys? The reader will recall that in the case of
the Duke lacrosse team one of the fathers indicated that he didn't see what the
issue was, he and his Wall Street colleagues routinely unwind together at the
end of the day at strip clubs.
Really? This is
supposed to make me feel better?
What conclusions might we have come to if we had been inside
that Colorado hotel room with Kobe Bryant and the woman who accused him of
rape?
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