Last August, a 16-year-old girl was raped in Steubenville, Ohio. Monday, two high-school athletes, Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, were convicted of committing that rape.
The case had gotten national attention, partly because of its gruesome nature and partly because of speculation that city officials helped to cover it up.
Pictures of several different assaults against the 16-year-old girl quickly popped up on social-networking sites and in tweets from those attending the parties; the assaulters came to be known as the “rape crew.”
Monday’s conviction was heavily covered by national media and on the Internet. Unfortunately, many people seemed to sympathize not with the victim but with the rapists.
One such instance comes from a report by CNN’s Poppy Harlow:
“Incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart,” Harlow said.
The framing of the case as a tragedy that ruined two young men’s lives is insensitive and backward. The conviction wasn’t something that happened to them. Their lives didn’t simply fall apart. They made a decision to rape a girl, and their conviction was a direct result of that decision.
They are not the victims.
