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'via Blog this'It's easy to dismiss something shocking and horrific as a random act of brutality.
But when a 15 year-old girl was gang raped last Saturday behind a high school in Richmond, Calif., it was an extreme example of behavior that is all too common, according to some experts' chilling research.
Around 9 pm that evening, a teenager left her homecoming dance at Richmond High School. Friends assumed she was heading home early. It wasn't until nearly midnight, after she had been repeatedly raped and beaten for over two hours that she was discovered, bloodied and unconscious, under a bench on school grounds.
Police have said that as many as 10 people participated in the crime, while another 10 looked on without intervening or calling for help.
How does such a thing happen? Certainly school officials and security guards shoulder some of the blame for a lack of vigilance. Perhaps the onlookers were paralyzed by a psychological condition called "the bystander effect."
But beneath it all is a grim reality: gang rape among troubled youth in urban areas is common.
In interviews with teenagers between ages 13 and 19 living in poor and violent neighborhoods in St. Louis, Missouri, sociologist Jody Miller found that incidents of gang rape were alarmingly high. Of the 75 kids Miller interviewed, 45 percent of boys admitted to "running train" -- local slang for gang rape. About one half of girls reported being sexually assaulted and one-third said they'd been attacked more than once.
"What concerns me is that this is relatively common," Miller said, whose research was published last year in the book Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Genderd Violence (New York University Press). "Among the boys I interviewed, they did not conceptualize what they were doing as sexual assault."
"This incident in California echoed so much of what my own research has said," she added.
So far six arrests have been made in the case. Three boys aged 15, 16, and 17 were arraigned on Thursday on and charged as adults in connection with the rape. Nineteen year-old Manuel Ortega was charged with a slew of rape and assault crimes, Jose Carlos Montano, 18, was arrested Thursday evening on suspicion of rape, rape in concert with force and other charges and Salvador Rodriguez, 21, is in custody under suspicion of rape. More arrests are expected.
Miller's insight may also partly explain why 10 bystanders did nothing to stop the attack -- they simply didn't believe it was sexual assault. Another possibility is that they feared physical or social retribution if they intervened.
"The question is, what does society teach us? Does it celebrate bystanders for being helpful, or treat them as snitches?" Victoria Banyard of the University of New Hampshire in Durham said.
Miller added that such behavior isn't limited to urban areas. College fraternities, sports teams, and the military also tend to foster forceful, misogynistic male dominance over women.
But for teenagers, under-served public schools form perfect breeding ground for sexual assaults. Troubled kids will often sexually harass girls in class, Miller said, testing them for emotional vulnerability. Teachers, either jaded by bad behavior or simply overwhelmed, ignore the behavior.
Once outside the classroom, boys will find an out of the way place in the school, whether a bathroom, or as at Richmond High, a darkened lot. And then with their friends watching, even helping, they will pounce.
"The issue of consent doesn't even enter into the equation," Miller said. 'Gang rapes are really performances for other male peers. The girls are basically just objects."
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