Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Rape as punishment.

"One youth told the victim, now 16: 'I can't help you now, I'm with my boys.'"

How utterly depressing is it to read something like that?
The Daily Mail are running a particularly disturbing story today of a young girl who was attacked and gang raped by a group of young boys, some as young as 13. This vicious and repugnant attack was a 'punishment' because the girl in question is supposed have insulted the girlfriend of the gang leader. A supposed bitchy remark led nine boys to attack, kidnap and systematically abuse this girl in the most heinous way possible.
You have to wonder what kind of fucked up mentality exists in the minds of these youths that makes their sense of entitlement gallop headlong down the path of sexual violence. That a supposed slur could lead them to think violating another human being so disgustingly is the fitting response. Is human dignity so cheap? How is it even possible that rape, the ultimate degrading experience for anyone, was the first course of action these boys took. Where did they learn that? How could they do such a thing?
I really really hope their parents are proud of the young people they have raised. I hope their mothers and fathers look their sons in the eyes and ask them what they thought they were doing? Fuck them and their gang culture, fuck 'frontin' and disrespectin'. These little shits acted like a pack of feral dogs and they need to be made an example of. No woman needs to be 'put in her place' this way. No real man would even think of acting this way. Where do these brats learn how to behave? It's disgusting and it's depressing and the more I read about our 'civilised Western world' the more depressed I become.

Labels:

19 Comments:

Blogger morgor said...

ugh.

Can't really add anything to that.

These things tend to happen in very large cities don't they.

I'm glad I spent my adolescence in the countryside.

10:11 a.m.  
Blogger fatmammycat said...

There's plenty of shit happening down in the coutryside too if our courts are anything to go by.
But gang culture seems more prevalent in the cities and I just wonder at the mentality of it. What the fuck possess a group of boys to even think like this?

10:20 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It really is a disgusting devolution in societal terms - but monkey see, monkey do, I suppose.

10:20 a.m.  
Blogger fatmammycat said...

But what are they seeing that makes them think it's okay to do something like this. Is it our culture or lack of family or what? I find it really hard to understand why a group so young would decide gang rape is a way to 'get back' at a girl from a supposed comment. It's so vicious and personal and demeaning. Over a comment about another girl?

10:54 a.m.  
Blogger Unknown said...

The comment was made to the girlfriend of the 'gang' leader, "disrespectin" him. So it's the primitive, time-honoured way of putting a woman in her place. It's what happened in Bosnia, Rwanda and now in Hackney.

I know how I'd handle it if it happened to one of mine. Socially I don't know how it should be handled - it's a major social and parenting failure.

While they are assured jail time "Judge Joseph ordered pre-sentence reports, adding: 'They are very young - I want to know what's been going on in their backgrounds.'"

11:28 a.m.  
Blogger fatmammycat said...

I think they boy saying he couldn't help her as he was with his boys was the most revealing. Her humanity or his pity was second place only to his fealty to the gang. He must have known what he was doing was wrong, but it still didn't matter. That's what I find most disturbing.

11:46 a.m.  
Blogger Unknown said...

The 'gang' violence in Limerick has a similar warped logic - everyone outside the gang is fair game for killing or brutalisation.

12:04 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

FMC: i'd assume they see degrading violence in whatever form every single day around their estate, rape is just the logical next step.

They know it's not ok to do this, the same as they know it's not ok to stab someone, doesn't mean that they will stop and think of the consequences tho.

12:05 p.m.  
Blogger fatmammycat said...

That's very depressing though Sheepie, isn't it?
Conan, I was listening to some chap talk on the radio about the turfs wars in Limerick and thinking about that poor man Shane murdered over the weekend because he looked like someone else. They couldn't even be bothered to make sure they had the right man. It's really fucked up how cheap life has become.

12:10 p.m.  
Blogger Twenty Major said...

Kill them.

12:43 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Found it hard to even read that story. Made me feel sick. Somehow a custodial sentence just wont cut it as far as I'm concerned. They will come out worse then they went in (if that is possible). More apt would be to have their foreskins torn off and be sown into a bag with some piranha and then thrown into a river.

1:15 p.m.  
Blogger Megan McGurk said...

That boy's chilling quote is one of the foundational rules of "Guyland" according to Michael Kimmel's research. In Guyland, it's bros before hos, always.
It's a mistake for anyone to read this as some isolated incident.
We live in a rape culture.

1:21 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This appears to just be the peak of a mountain of wholly unacceptable behaviour which escalates from bad-minded teasing, bullying, intimidation to physical violence and assault which seems to be an essential part of social interaction for so many teens.

It's so common that it is blending into the background until a particularly bad event like this happens.

Neither is it confined to particluar social 'classes' or groups - it's all over...

Please, PLEASE put me in charge...

2:13 p.m.  
Blogger James McInerney said...

In the mid-1990s the crime rate in the US was going through the roof, when suddenly is started to go down and down and down. While everybody was busy saying that it was because of policing, or policy X, Y or Z, the truth is that it was because 25 years earlier, the Roe versus Wade ruling introduced abortion into the US, making it possible for women from disadvantaged backgrounds to afford abortions.

This meant that there was a reduction in the number of children that were born into disadvantaged situations - broken families, etc.

25 years later, this manifested itself in a reduction in the crime rates in the US.

Now, these are facts. How you interpret them is part personal and subjective. How you deal with the issue is another thing.

All people are not born equal - people born into a disadvantaged area such as Hackney have a higher probability of growing into a criminal and as you can see, into a complete thug and knacker deserving of imprisonment (naturally, there are loads of people from Hackney that are completely honest and caring, but I am talking about probabilities). They migrate from their useless families (which are at a higher incidence in disadvantaged areas) into their worse gangs and their alliegance is to this gang (as evidenced in the newspaper article).

It all wrong, wrong, wrong. What happened in Limerick to Shane Geoghegan is part of all this. It will get worse until you reduce the number of people that are born into fractured families, disadvantage where they see criminality as an appropriate behaviour, etc.

I'm not advocating abortion for poor people, by the way, incase anybody thinks I am.

3:46 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This makes me want to vomit.

I agree with Dr. James that children growing up in dysfunctional families with parents who never had a chance themselves only makes this problem worse. It's not the poverty per se, it's the culture.

6:02 p.m.  
Blogger Andraste said...

Sickening.

The parents should do jail time.

6:25 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

if only karma would kick in and the perpetrators each got gang raped in turn, then maybe they would have sympathy for what they put the poor girl through

8:48 p.m.  
Blogger laughykate said...

That is so incredibly fucked up. What kind of punishments will they be looking at? Have any of them shown any type of remorse or have they become mini-heroes ?

9:12 p.m.  
Blogger fatmammycat said...

Docky, that's is an very interesting view point and worth mulling over some more.
It's a horrible horrible thing what thrse boy did and what is worse is they 'why' they did it. You can be sure there are young people reading about it or who know them thinking they did right by their actions. Respect is such a warped concept to so many. The idea that respect is something to be earned and not just bestowed is an alien concept.

9:06 a.m.  

Post a Comment

<< Home