But boys will be boys, and they're just having fun! Stop feminizing them!

Out of Australia comes a case that's eerily similar to the egregious home made snuff porn of the Orange County Rape Case here .

THE devastated father of a teenage girl shown degraded and sexually abused on a DVD vows to hunt down those responsible. The film shows up to 12 youths from the outer western suburb of Werribee attacking the girl, said to be intellectually impaired. It shows members of the group urinating on the girl, setting fire to her hair and shows her performing lurid acts on the boys. DVD copies of the video have been sold in schools in Melbourne's west for $5.

The girl's father was told by a local TV station that the parents of two of the boys who made the DVD laughed this off as a bit of fun. A bit of fun? For whom, exactly? Certainly not the girl who was raped, urinated on, and whose hair was set alight. Perhaps these parents wouldn't mind if their pwecious widdle boys traded places with her? It is, after all, just a bit of fun.

What also galls me is that other parents knew of the contents of the DVD, and said they didn't approve, but apparently didn't do much else. A brother of one of the teens thought the film was disgusting. Yet the DVD still made the rounds at schools (sold for $5! whee!) and no one sweated that much about it.

Look, I disapprove of many things--baggy jeans that fall way below the waist, sideways baseball caps, cruel shoes, and press-on nails. Disapproval is mild considering that this DVD documented an atrocity. This doesn't just garner disapproval, it should inspire outrage, disgust, and rage. But it was just a bit of fun, right? The DVD--the bit of fun--had some extras, as well.

Other excerpts of the film, featuring the boys dropping flares on a homeless man, preparing chlorine-filled bombs to detonate in suburban streets and throwing eggs at taxi drivers. It shows the teenage males throwing eggs at taxis and harassing a homeless man. It then shows cuttings of reports of their exploits in the local press. The press clippings include an incident where a Commonwealth Games volunteer was pelted with bottles by young males. Members of the gang film themselves at night dropping a series of lit flares down a stairwell into an area where homeless alcoholics regularly sleep. When a taxi driver stops his car and approaches the large group of males after being egged, the teens all flee.

I grew up with kids who were raised by entitled whiny parents like this. People who thought their precious princelings could do no wrong, and shouldn't be held accountable for their behavior. Oh, they didn't approve of their hijinks, but it was all part of being a boy! And it's quite used, old, and tired, from the OC Rape Case, where a girl was raped on camera by three male "friends" and blamed for it, to the Glen Ridge, NJ rape case, where a developmentally delayed girl was gang-raped by the town's athlete high-school heros and blamed for it.

In both cases, the survivors were said to be whores, sluts, asking for it, and actually raping the perps. In both cases, defense attorneys insisted that the perps needed protection from the survivors. (Yes, even in Glen Ridge, where the girl had the mental capacity of an eight-year-old. One of the defense attorneys called her a pig. Methinks someone was projecting there.) In these cases, the perps are excused, their misdeeds minimized, their victims reviled, blamed, and harassed. The perps are said to be nice guys, good boys, so kind, their whole futures are ahead of them, why destroy their lives over something so minor? The traumatized girls they assaulted count for nothing.

When parents start screeching about PC mores run amok and the feminization of boys, it's often in conjunction with their indulged little princes getting reprimanded for misbehaving or hurting someone. It really shouldn't be all that shocking that these guys move on to worse misdeeds. Why shouldn't they, when their prior acts have been either dismissed or excused by their parents and mouth-frothing pundits? Why shouldn't they, when their own schools and towns shrug off what they've done before?

Greg Haidl has had many run-ins with the law, and was never held to account. The Glen Ridge perps had a history of sexually harassing girls in their school, but they were just being boys, after all. How much do you want to bet that these guys in the latest case will have their own records of legal run-ins, school troubles, and pranks deemed harmless by parents and other adults around them?

Rapists are made, not born. When you raise someone to feel entitled to take what he wants and regard others as so much trash, don't be surprised when they're picked up for assault.

Via Shannon.

Comments

[Janiebabes]

It has been a distressing set of events to watch unfold so close to home.

Almost but not quite related were the comments of Sheikh Al Hilali, the Muslim cleric who said that women would be safe if they stayed at home, wearing hijab.

The outrage at the Sheikh's comments was palpable, disingenuous and somewhat manufactured. The fact is, in Australian society, a horrifying number of people woudl agree with him, that women do much to bring these kinds of attacks on themselves. And it's not a generational thing from men of that age, as one commentator would have it. My teenaged daughters bring the same attitudes home from school.

We feign outrage in our newspapers, but at home we agree, apparently, that the way a woman dresses or behaves or exists plays a part in the dynamic of the man who attacks her.

pax

Jane