A little over a year ago, two high school football players from Steubenville, Ohio, were found to have raped a 16-year-old girl who was too drunk to resist them. Photos of the rape were posted on social media, and lots of people knew it had happened, but because the two boys were high school football stars in a town that treasured its high school football seasons, nobody reported the crime or tried to come to the girl’s aid.
Now comes Ohio’s attorney general, Mike DeWine, who holds indictments from a grand jury naming the superintendent of schools and several other people who weren’t at the drinking party where the rape occurred. Michael McVey, the superintendent, was one of four adults charged. A very personal account of the indictment can be found in the New York Times. Mr McVey faces several felony charges, including obstructing justice and tampering with evidence, in connection with a possible cover-up of the rape.
Editorial
By indicting the superintendent in this case, even if he’s never convicted, Mr DeWine is sending an important message to adults in positions of trust everywhere. I’m not sure we can say something like, “Every adult who hears a rumor about something bad that might have happened at a party off-campus must report the alleged incident to the police in order to avoid lawsuits,” but there has to be a happy medium between that and saying, “It’s OK to ignore reports of rape that you hear, as long as the people accused are high school football stars.”
Don’t forget, this sort of thing has been going on for a while. Drunk girls are treated as conquests, and high school athletes, particularly those on good football teams, are treated as jocks entitled to their prize or their rite of passage into “manhood.”
This poor attitude will never change, as long as the adults these boys and girls respect allow the cycle to continue or dismiss it as a way to bolster the competitiveness of male athletes. In Steubenville, according to the Times reporter, a few of these adults all but told these boys their rape would be OK. By covering it up, if that’s what they did, they have sent a message to all boys that as long as you don’t get caught or as long as you know someone you can trust to keep important evidence away from the proper authorities who will look out for the public interest, it’ll all be OK.
Mr DeWine’s message is different, and we hope that’s the one people get: Wherever you are, whenever it is, if you allow a girl to be abused or the boys who abused her to get away with it, you’re on a slippery slope to a dangerous world of misogyny, sport worship, and crime that we can’t tolerate.
In fact, just the opposite is needed in Steubenville, a blue-collar town hit hard by the recession. We need to communicate to students a belief in their desire to learn, not to conquer; in their desire to share joy with other young men and women, not to inspire fear in those men and women they live with; and in their desire to accept responsibility for their own actions, not to assume it will be “taken care of.”