Usually called the doctor. Or the caretaker.

I instantly communicated it to Ranj and Aurelia, to test it out: I start a lot of post titles with "So".

No, that wasn't it. It could have been, but it wasn't.

It's no secret that I've been doing a lot of thinking about that eleven-year-old girl in Milwaukee who was gang-raped by a crowd of older boys, ring-led by an older girl she admired. A lot of people have said--out in the open! where people could see them!--that they thought that it was her fault, or that it wasn't really a rape (Really? Tell you what. I'll come over to your house with a bunch of bigger, older men and orchestrate your serial oral rape, and then you look me in the eye and tell me it wasn't rape. Yeah. That's what I thought.), or that the boys shouldn't be punished too severely or have their lives and futures affected by their participation in a gang rape, because some of them might be good kids who made a bad choice.

I've been turning this over in my brain like a jumbled up Rubik's cube, turning it over and over and switching pieces around trying to figure out how someone could say such a thing, and I finally came up with something that I think might be it:

Deep down in their heart of hearts, a lot of people believe that the desires of the many should outweigh the needs of the one. I'm not going to get into why people might believe that, at least not in this post, but I really do think that's it. Otherwise rational, sane people look at the needs (safety, bodily autonomy) of one scared little girl and the desires of the many (freedom, a future untainted by their presence on sexual predator lists, perhaps the opportunity to go to college or to hold a professional job one day), and for some reason, they think that because there are more of them, the rapists' right to go on walking around in the fresh air is more important than that little girl and all of us who used to be little girls and boys knowing that justice was done and her rapists are being punished by society in the way that we have determined is appropriate for their crime.

The race and social status of the victim is also a huge factor in the public feeling about such crimes. If this little girl had not been black, HIV-positive, and living in poverty, there would be a great deal more outrage. Consider the recent Pennsylvania case of the obviously mentally unwell man who murdered several young Amish women and then killed himself, and contrast it with the Florida youths who murdered a homeless man for kicks. This little girl, that homeless man, had little in the way of social status, and their victimizers are seen as being "more valuable" than the victims. If the Pennsylvania shooter had done the same thing in an inner-city Pittsburgh school, would the reaction have been as marked? If the Florida youths had kicked a stockbroker out on his evening jog to death, would there have been so little fuss?

The thing is, though, it's not just the victim. It's the victim and all the other potential victims, and all the people who live in a little more fear now than they did two months ago. It's society. We are the many, and the criminals, the rapists--they are the few. Our needs outweigh their desires. They desire to walk around in the fresh air and go on making bad decisions, and we need to know that when criminals make bad decisions and hurt people, they aren't allowed to go on doing it just because they decided to organize.

If this had been one sixteen-year-old and a crowd of little girls and boys, no one would argue that the rapist needed to go to jail. Because it was one little girl and a crowd of teenagers, somehow people turn it around. They need desperately to feel that this could not happen to them or to anyone they know, and since they can't control the people around them, they exert control over the projected situation by making it the victim's fault. They have to build walls between this little girl and their own little girls and sisters and mothers and lovers and friends, and so they do it by pointing out the things she should have done, and by making the boys not rapists, but good boys who made a bad choice because a little girl allowed it, or cooperated in it, or enticed them to do it. It makes them feel safer to think that this couldn't happen to someone they know, because someone they know would never make the "mistakes" that force other people to victimize them. Well, I have news for you: if you are an adult and know six women, you know someone who's been raped. If you know thirty-three men, you know someone who's been raped. If you are a college student and have five female friends, you know someone who's been raped. And only three in five of those rapes will have been reported. (NCIPC) Partially because of the attitudes of people like this, who attempt to control the uncontrollable by making it the victim's fault.