The Steubenville
rape case has been bothering me since I first saw one of the horrendous videos
that involved a witness laughing about the victim’s ordeal. I couldn’t even watch the entire video. I have followed the case and cringed at the
continuous humiliation of the victim by everyone from the national news media
to random, anonymous, cowardly commentators on online news stories.
We hear comments like these with every publicized rape
case: What was she doing there? She shouldn’t have been drinking. Why was she walking alone at night? Why was she dressed like that? Why was she at that party? Why was she in a man’s hotel room? I heard she was a slut. She led him on. Why didn’t she fight back more?
This goes beyond rape cases.
I hear victim-blaming all the time from my high school students. For example, a student stole a cell phone and
sold it to another student. When I
discussed the crime with this young man, he still believed he did not actually
steal the phone. He found the phone in a
classroom. It had fallen out of the
pocket of another student. He felt like
taking the phone and selling it was perfectly fine because the student who lost
the phone should have been more careful.
This is one example of many. My
students, and it seems most people in general, truly believe in the childish
idea of “finders, keepers” --an idea that manifested itself in a much more
horrifying manner in the Steubenville
case.
The boys “found” a passed-out girl and invoked their “right”
to “keep” her to do with her as they wished.
Instead of talking about why these boys felt they were entitled to
brutalize and humiliate this girl, we talk about why this girl deserved to be
raped. We talk about how the boys’ lives
are now ruined. They simply took what
was theirs, just like a wallet left behind in a cab, or a phone fallen out of a
pocket. The girl should have been more
careful.
The only way to change this culture of victim-blaming is by
teaching our children that they are not entitled to everything they want. If you find something that doesn’t belong to
you, return it to the owner or an authority figure. Do this in front of your child. If you see someone in trouble, help her. Teach your children to do the same. If your child doesn’t do his homework,
consider taking away his video game privileges instead of yelling at the
teacher for assigning too much work. If
your daughter wants to be on the soccer team, tell her to practice. Don’t call the coach and threaten her if she
doesn’t let your little girl on the team.
Teach your children how to save money for a new toy they want to
buy. These things will help to teach our
children that they are not entitled to do whatever they want or take whatever
they want.
Instead of teaching your daughter to dress like a nun and
not go out at night, teach your son to be the man who gives a drunk girl a ride
home, instead of the boy who takes pictures of her. Teach him to be the man who tells his
so-called friends to leave her alone, not the boy who laughs while they hurt
her. Teach him to be the man that
understands that “finders, keepers” is no moral code.