Anonymous & Steubenville

[diggitydot]

Are they straight up nude minors or have the girls' images been blurred? I would think nude minors would set off a whole shit ton of kiddie porn investigations.

Also, whether the information can be used as evidence is moot after conviction.

[TulipsAndSunscreen]

I see where you're coming from ST. I think it's hard to say from the outside in any case that "no one could be wrongly accused in this case". I mean, if you read the early articles on the Duke case, the articles basically described an open and shut case of rape, assault, etc. and implicated every member of the team. Did the team display horrible judgement, YES, but so do hundreds of college boys (including probably many people we know and love) and they aren't falsely accused of rape.

I think it's very likely, given the evidence, that there isn't someone guilty of a horrifying crime against this young girl but I understand why the rush to judgement is a slippery slope. I'm all for justice, I think it needs to go through the justice system and not hackers. We all support the actions of the hackers because we agree with their current position but it's a problem to allow them to sway the public opinion because what if next time, they're going after our loved one and we don't agree with their position.

I don't agree with the alleged small town coverup anymore than the actions of the hackers. These cases need to be brought to fair and impartial justice, that's the way the justice system works in a civilized society.

[diggitydot]

I don't always agree with Anonymous and their methods, but when it comes to small town corruption where there is no one to turn to for a sex assault victim, I'm all for someone exposing these injustices to the light if day.

[Sheherezade]

I read a great comment on Anonymous' involvement in this case yesterday on a different website.

This is a prime example of people not understanding what the internet is. It’s not just an open forum for your friends and family members, it’s a huge global electronic empire. This whole situation started because some idiotic kids (and I suppose adults?) posted things online that they really shouldn’t have about things that they REALLY shouldn’t have done.
This is the same internet that rioters and reformers in other countries used to over throw their own government. Just because you live in a small town in nowhere Idaho does not mean that you’re safe and secure from the wilds of the internet.
You can’t do something horrible, boast about it online, and then hope to hide. Everything online, stays online and for the city to try to defend itself is lunacy. You’re going to try to combat a group known for going at governments, major corporations and global spanning religious organizations? And you’re going to do it ON THEIR TURF? Yeah, that’s really smart.
It’s the new information age people. And it’s controlled by people who grew up wanting to be the super hero. You’re just giving them the tools they need to try, and try they will.

So very true. In this case, I do think the group is acting as a "superhero". It's vigilante justice in the tech age - sure - and that has the same downside that all vigilante justice has always had.

I think I'm behind it because there has been NO action against these people and it's been months. MONTHS. This happened in August? If that was my daughter and I lived in that town and no one would even arrest a kid? I'd be calling the police office every day - and yeah, I'd be calling the New York Times by now. And I'd be thrilled that someone was finally making something happen.

I read that the State's Attorney's office was taking over the investigation. Probably also a positive move for the victim and her family. At least they will feel that this is moving forward, not just closer and closer to being completely under the rug and forgotten.

ETA: About the quote, I know that it's Ohio not Idaho (poster was wrong) and I'm glad that if Anonymous wants to DO something, they seem to be fighting on the side of light and justice. Heck, they could take their talents to Iran and help hack our power grids. There's money in that type of talent.

[TulipsAndSunscreen]

Why this is not Duke Lacrosse: those people were over 18. The alleged victim was an adult and an escort. In Steubenville, the girl is 16.

Those elements don't make the crime more or less likely to be true. They make it all the more heinous if it is true.

The accused are also under 18. And yet their names are all over every paper. If by some small chance this is a mistake (which sadly, it probably isn't), those boys lives are ruined too. I'm all for justice in this case. If those boys did this crime, they deserve to rot in their cells. But I would hope that, for everyone's sake, justice will be swiftly administered in a court of law, not the court of public opinion.

[diggitydot]

Ideally, yes, this SHOULD have worked its way through a court system for justice before anyone in the media heard about the whole ordeal. However, when several powerful community members circumvent that process, though, I'm glad when SOMEONE tips the scales of justice back where they belong. When the perpetrators are the ONLY people receiving any kind of protection, I absolutely encourage and appreciate the actions of the hacktivist faction within Anonymous.

[HouseofWool]

I think what bothers me most about the whole situation of trying this in the court of public opinion (media). I wish that there was a way for a group like Anonymous to do their work and the report it to the correct authority (State Dept of Justice or the like). While I am guessing that a great number of the teens involved in this are guilty, it still isn't right to place their information all over the news until the officials complete their investigation and release the information.

[TulipsAndSunscreen]

According to this article, two of the main suspects are 16:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/sp...nted=all&_r=2&

[Pollyanna]

Wow, this is such a multifaceted situation I don't think there is an easy answer. My very first thought is for the survivor and her family. When I trained as a rape crisis counselor one of the biggest take home messages was that we were not to direct the survivor in how she wanted to handle her recovery. Even if she had all the evidence in the world, we could talk to her about pressing charges, etc. but we were NEVER to push her because the last thing she needs is to be violated by those trying to help her. We also encouraged parents to follow her lead (even in the case if a minor). Some parents want to go to the mat and some want to pretend the rape didn't occur. Everyone and I mean EVERYONE needs to let the survivor chose the course of action. We need to put our biases and opinions aside and follow the lead of the young lady that was so brutally violated.
I don't follow this case so I don't know what the young lady wants and I worry that she feels like she is continuing to be raped because she has absolutely no control over the situation. If she is supportive of the cyber-mob fighting her case in the court of public opinion then okay but if it causes her more pain then people who are trying to help need to back the hell off. So given that I don't know what the survivor wants I can't form an opinion that has her best interests at heart.
In general I think mob mentality is dangerous. Hearing about the recent rally where a 9 year old girl got up to speak and cried because she was scared of being raped pissed me off. A child of that age should have never been brought into this conversation and sure as hell shouldn't be scared to the point of tears not to mention how her vision of sex and men are being formed. I find that to be the collateral damage that happens with mob mentality, even if its for a good cause some people lose all sense.
In the end I suspect the young lady will not be the only one who's life is forever altered.
Interestingly, my uncle grew up in Steubenville and when we used to ask him why he never wanted to visit old friends there he used to say because its a cesspool. Note, he is 80 years old so apparently very little has changed over the years.

[Rapunzel]

How is this different from the Duke lacrosse situation? Answer: These young sociopaths bragged about their crime during the commission of the crime in video and tweet form. They basically live-blogged the crime!!! That makes everyone viewing their crap witnesses to the crime. (I haven't watched the video - I've read the description of it with quoted excerpts - they did the video while the rape victim was still in the next room!).

Why Anonymous is not at fault for causing additional harm to the victim: Anonymous made people aware if what these sociopaths already had widely disseminated online themselves!!! All Anonymous did was stand up, point at these little monsters, and say, "Look what they are bragging about having done!"

I feel zero sympathy for those rapists. They publicly bragged about their crimes and fully expected to get away with it.

This is no he-said-she-said case. This was a brutal gang rape with the perps bragging about their crimes in detail and posting it on the Internet for the world to see. Once you place the evidence and confession of your OWN crime online you and only you are responsible for having the world label you for those crimes. And, you and only you are responsible for having negatively influenced every jury pool in the US against you. These aren't just monsters - they are stupid, arrogant monsters whose actions do point to their being sociopaths who are clear dangers to society. And, I say that based on the evidence and interviews these idiots posted to the Internet on their own.

[Rapunzel]

Pollyanna, I agree that the victim should choose her course of action. But, I also believe her rapists took away most of her courses of action when they posted the crime online. These people tried to murder her soul - and they made it public. That drastically reduces her avenues.

Additionally, as the mother of five daughters, I definitely want rapists who brag about their crimes on the Internet - with the victim still nearby and still unconscious no less - to be removed from the general population by the jystice system. This crime is intensely personal, however, leaving these criminals unpunished and unknown helps them do this to countless more victims.

[diggitydot]

This crime is intensely personal, however, leaving these criminals unpunished and unknown helps them do this to countless more victims.

Exactly.

Also, with all of the perpetrators' connections in the community and law enforcement, there was no way this young woman could have brought any charges without Anonymous shining some national attention on the issue.

This faction of Anonymous has also been responsible for hacking and exposing people who make/trade child pornography. I'm totally cool them.

[Pollyanna]

Great insight by Rabbi Shmuley


An American Tragedy in Steubenville
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

A significant number of American values failures came together to create the tragedy in Stuebenville, where two teenage High School football stars, Trent Mays and Ma'lik Richmond, were found guilty of raping a 16-year-old girl.
Foremost among them is the American tragedy of sexualizing teen girls at an age where they are not yet women. Madonna sexualized herself in her mid-twenties. Brittney Spears brought the age down to about eighteen. Not young enough for you? Miley Cyrus reduced it further to sixteen. One wonders when our culture will feel that even sixteen is not a young enough age to sexually exploit girls.
Then there is the issue of sports as an emerging religion where those gifted to be athletes feel a sense of entitlement that often has them crossing lines to their own detriment. The idea that two high school football stars would think it acceptable to post pictures of a nude 16-year-old to their friends on social media shows how they thought the normal rules did not apply them. And this would be true even if there weren't the far more serious conviction on rape. How sad that two young men have ruined their lives and done so much damage to a defenseless victim.
Next is the growing culture of alcohol abuse by minors. Alcohol played a central role in this unfolding tragedy with the essential argument on the part of the prosecution that the girl in question was so drunk there was no possible way she could give consent. One wonders why our youth are so inclined to heavy drink. Is it mere experimentation or is something deeper at work? Are they at already, at so young an age, as unhappy as adults who have been battered by life and are therefore drinking negative emotions away? After all, no one in America really portrays the teen years as a bowl of cherries.
I passed my later teen years in an all-male environment in Yeshiva where the focus of my life was study. I certainly was a lot happier than the co-ed environment in which I was immersed in my early teen years where peer pressure, popularity among the girls, and a general self-consciousness made my life less enjoyable than it should have been.
Then there is the general tragedy of the absence of responsible parenting in America. The biggest question for me in this heartrending story was where were the parents? Where were they when the three teens left one party at 12:30am to go to another? Where were they to monitor extreme drunkenness on the part of people not old enough to vote?
Many African-American young men are not raised with a father's guiding hand. I was astonished, therefore, at the honesty displayed by Malik Richmond's father, Nathaniel, when he said in a CNN interview that he had walked over to his son right after the guilty verdict and told him he loved him, essentially for the very first time. "I haven't been involved in Malik's life like I should have been at those early years. And I want to stress that parents should be more involved in their child's life... be a parent and not a friend."
No one is better qualified to address this issue than President Obama who also grew up without his father and is by all accounts a very loving and involved parent himself. The president has addressed the subject only lightly, but it's time that he make this an all-out campaign.
But the greatest tragedy made manifest in Steubenville is the attitude of teenage men toward girls. Immanuel Kant wrote that the definition of immorality is treating a fellow human being as a means rather than an end. The abomination of American slavery was that a white child was taught to see a black child as a walking bale of cotton. Slavery trained a white man to see a black woman as lacking the same spark of the divine that lent him his humanity. When he looked upon the woman, she was stripped of her own dreams, her own opinions, her own aspirations. She was nothing but an extension of the white slave owner's drives and ambitions. Like a third arm she existed to simply to do his chores.
Something analogous is happening with the growing sexualization of women wherein teen boys are being taught to see young women not as their equals but as the walking fulfillment of their sexual desires. This is an issue I addressed a few years ago in a full-length book called Hating Women, but it only gotten worse. I had a 17-year-old boy, from a leading prep school, tell me how angry he was at a sixteen-year-old girl he knew because she had gone out on a date with a friend of his and had not given him anything sexual. "Not even a hand job. Can you believe it? She's just a c---tease." He said this with righteous indignation. A girl like that, who refuses to play the roll accorded her by a secular society that uses women's bodies to sell beer, cars, and everything in between, is often called a 'b---h' for not playing ball. Who does this uppity girl think she is anyway, not to give men their rightful due?
That this is attitude is becoming prevalent among teen boys is evident from how the two accused sent pictures of a drunken girl to all their friends, posting them on the internet, and there was no outrage. Just another guy feeling entitled to see a girl as some drunken 'dead body' who was there for his erotic enjoyment.
There was a time when men were raised to be gentleman. Society impressed upon them the need to nurture, protect, and take care of women. Yes, I know it all sounds pretty mushy today, and many a woman would dismiss such sentiments as patriarchal, patronizing and hopelessly sexist. But is it really too much to ask that when a girl is drunk and helpless, a young man feels the obligation to get her safely home to her parents, enjoying their thanks and the feeling of being a gentleman as something far more pleasurable than whatever sexual thrills her drunkenness can provide?
We males combine within our person the carnal desires of the animal as well as the spiritual transcendence of the uniquely human. The struggle between the two is felt within us constantly. Employing our freedom to choose moral behavior over outrageous indulgence is a serious battle and one that should be helped by an overarching culture that trains boys from their earliest days to respect women as equals and to see in them a divine image rather than the breathing realization of an erotic urge.

[diggitydot]

Sorry -- I think he missed the mark in a few places. For one, the rape survivor wasn't drunk; she'd been drugged. For another, how about we do away with this antiquated "...but, but, Teh Womens need our protection" bullshit and make sure our young men and boys can figure out how to simply not rape.

[Sheherezade]

I think it was a great essay. We can quibble about all the sentiments within, but I'll take his view over many that I've heard from others along the way. I think we should ALL take care of one another, man to woman, woman, to man. Whatever. The world has become far too crass.