Kevin Libin, National Post · Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2010
There might have been some bizarre things about what happened in the baseball diamond behind Clarence Sansom Junior High on Monday. But certainly none of them were, it turns out, nearly as shocking as Calgarians had been led to, and were apparently prepared to, believe. Actually, they may not have even been that bizarre.
News broke in local media that there had been an “attack” on a 12-year-old girl. Witnesses were “horrified.” She was “possibly raped,” said reports, while a crowd of youths looked on indifferently, recording the act on their cellphone cameras. A nearby resident, who watched the incident from her home, reported that the girl had been screaming. “I didn’t believe my eyes,” a “shaken” Rasheda Bee told the Calgary Herald. A teacher inside the school called police, who arrested a 16-year-old boy and reportedly seized phones from the onlookers.
The episode was “sick and shocking,” one prominent columnist wrote on Twitter. The city’s most popular morning talk-show host suggested the case would put the “justice system on trial” as to whether it could hold the “kid who raped a 12-year-old” accountable for the crime.
The story, in hours, was on national news channels. Alberta’s Premier weighed in. “It’s absolutely disgusting,” Ed Stelmach said. “It’s incomprehensible, if it’s true, to have someone watch something like that happen.… I just can’t believe that somebody would just stand idle and not do anything to save a person in a situation like this.”
He was careful: “If it’s true,” he emphasized.
It wasn’t.
The account of the random girl raped on a public schoolyard while a gang of amoral tweens nonchalantly collected footage for YouTube had veered so far from reality so quickly that police rushed to hold a news conference on Tuesday morning to clear things up. This was not standard practice, says child abuse Staff Sergeant Leah Barber. Usually police wait until after they lay charges to go public. But it was necessary.
The story was this, Staff Sgt. Barber clarified: The girl had met the boy online and arranged to meet him at the schoolyard. She brought her friends, and he brought his. The two had been drinking. They had sex.
After interviewing the witnesses, including the girl’s friends, she said there were no reports of any violence, no restraint, no one being forced to do anything against her will. Most kids “meandered away to give them some privacy, I guess,” Staff Sgt. Barber says.
Police confiscated one cellphone; no photos or video were recovered. The girl was checked at the hospital and released. Charges of “sexual interference” — commonly called statutory rape — are pending, because the girl’s age, relative to the boy’s, means she cannot have legally consented to the sex.
“It is kind of unfortunate that this has been portrayed as a random, violent attack,” Staff Sgt. Barber says.
With its lessons of youth’s moral depravity and the menace of digital technologies, the original version of the story accommodated perfectly one of today’s most pervasive moral panics, says Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the U.K.’s University of Kent and author of Culture of Fear.
“There’s an incredible appetite for new kinds of victims and new kinds of crimes,” Mr. Furedi says.
Adults have been suspicious of the deviance of youth since at least the ’50s when teenagers first emerged as a distinct, exotic subculture (think about panics over rock ’n’ roll or “Reefer Madness”). As online social networks and cellphones emerged as the primary site of unfamiliarity between parents and their children, Mr. Furedi says, the technology itself becomes threatening. Witness alarming media stories in recent years that imply dangerously rampant cyber-bullying in schools, despite major studies showing that today’s youths are less bullied and more tolerant of diversity than they were just 20 years ago. As for claims of youth’s moral apathy, the adult teacher and neighbour apparently believed a crime was occurring, but did not personally intervene.
“The adult world is quite estranged from the way that kids use digital technology, and always expects the worst, even though what kids are doing is pretty much what we were doing when we were kids. But they’re doing it online instead of offline,” Mr. Furedi says.
That a 16-year-old boy would try bedding a 12-year-old girl undoubtedly upsets parents, but it is hardly shocking: A third of U.S. teens have sex by the Grade 9, reports the American Public Health Association, while girls doing so by age 12 are typically with partners at least five years their senior. And by the time U.S. kids hit Grade 8, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, half of them have tried alcohol and 20% have got drunk. There’s no reason to believe Canadians are much different.
Perhaps the one remarkable thing about what went happened at those bleachers on Monday, and what set off the confusion, was that the two kids apparently had no qualms about having sex in public. This, Mr. Furedi suggests, may be the influence of adults, particularly those indulging in shameless exhibitionism on reality television, and those who watch it, obliterating traditional divides between private space and public. If that is indeed the case, he says, there’s certainly no reason to panic about it.
National Post
News broke in local media that there had been an “attack” on a 12-year-old girl. Witnesses were “horrified.” She was “possibly raped,” said reports, while a crowd of youths looked on indifferently, recording the act on their cellphone cameras. A nearby resident, who watched the incident from her home, reported that the girl had been screaming. “I didn’t believe my eyes,” a “shaken” Rasheda Bee told the Calgary Herald. A teacher inside the school called police, who arrested a 16-year-old boy and reportedly seized phones from the onlookers.
The episode was “sick and shocking,” one prominent columnist wrote on Twitter. The city’s most popular morning talk-show host suggested the case would put the “justice system on trial” as to whether it could hold the “kid who raped a 12-year-old” accountable for the crime.
The story, in hours, was on national news channels. Alberta’s Premier weighed in. “It’s absolutely disgusting,” Ed Stelmach said. “It’s incomprehensible, if it’s true, to have someone watch something like that happen.… I just can’t believe that somebody would just stand idle and not do anything to save a person in a situation like this.”
He was careful: “If it’s true,” he emphasized.
It wasn’t.
The account of the random girl raped on a public schoolyard while a gang of amoral tweens nonchalantly collected footage for YouTube had veered so far from reality so quickly that police rushed to hold a news conference on Tuesday morning to clear things up. This was not standard practice, says child abuse Staff Sergeant Leah Barber. Usually police wait until after they lay charges to go public. But it was necessary.
The story was this, Staff Sgt. Barber clarified: The girl had met the boy online and arranged to meet him at the schoolyard. She brought her friends, and he brought his. The two had been drinking. They had sex.
After interviewing the witnesses, including the girl’s friends, she said there were no reports of any violence, no restraint, no one being forced to do anything against her will. Most kids “meandered away to give them some privacy, I guess,” Staff Sgt. Barber says.
Police confiscated one cellphone; no photos or video were recovered. The girl was checked at the hospital and released. Charges of “sexual interference” — commonly called statutory rape — are pending, because the girl’s age, relative to the boy’s, means she cannot have legally consented to the sex.
“It is kind of unfortunate that this has been portrayed as a random, violent attack,” Staff Sgt. Barber says.
With its lessons of youth’s moral depravity and the menace of digital technologies, the original version of the story accommodated perfectly one of today’s most pervasive moral panics, says Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the U.K.’s University of Kent and author of Culture of Fear.
“There’s an incredible appetite for new kinds of victims and new kinds of crimes,” Mr. Furedi says.
Adults have been suspicious of the deviance of youth since at least the ’50s when teenagers first emerged as a distinct, exotic subculture (think about panics over rock ’n’ roll or “Reefer Madness”). As online social networks and cellphones emerged as the primary site of unfamiliarity between parents and their children, Mr. Furedi says, the technology itself becomes threatening. Witness alarming media stories in recent years that imply dangerously rampant cyber-bullying in schools, despite major studies showing that today’s youths are less bullied and more tolerant of diversity than they were just 20 years ago. As for claims of youth’s moral apathy, the adult teacher and neighbour apparently believed a crime was occurring, but did not personally intervene.
“The adult world is quite estranged from the way that kids use digital technology, and always expects the worst, even though what kids are doing is pretty much what we were doing when we were kids. But they’re doing it online instead of offline,” Mr. Furedi says.
That a 16-year-old boy would try bedding a 12-year-old girl undoubtedly upsets parents, but it is hardly shocking: A third of U.S. teens have sex by the Grade 9, reports the American Public Health Association, while girls doing so by age 12 are typically with partners at least five years their senior. And by the time U.S. kids hit Grade 8, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, half of them have tried alcohol and 20% have got drunk. There’s no reason to believe Canadians are much different.
Perhaps the one remarkable thing about what went happened at those bleachers on Monday, and what set off the confusion, was that the two kids apparently had no qualms about having sex in public. This, Mr. Furedi suggests, may be the influence of adults, particularly those indulging in shameless exhibitionism on reality television, and those who watch it, obliterating traditional divides between private space and public. If that is indeed the case, he says, there’s certainly no reason to panic about it.
National Post
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