AAUW Dialog

Reading about the heinous, two-and-a-half-hour gang rape of a 15-year-old girl at Richmond High School in Northern California takes me back to a sexual assault incident I dealt with a few years ago as a middle school teacher at an upscale private school.

At my school, an eighth-grade girl alleged that three boys had cornered her in a classroom and touched her inappropriately. The school responded by forming a committee of teachers to determine how to deal with the situation. During a meeting, some committee members expressed sentiments that sounded like some of the commentaries I’ve read about the Richmond rape, including that “the girl needs to be more careful about how she acts and dresses” and that “she shouldn’t be so ‘friendly’ with the boys.”

In the end, my school decided to make the boys apologize publicly. That’s right, they gathered all the sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students into the auditorium, sat the girl in the front row, and asked each of the boys to stand up and apologize in front of the student body without directly stating the girl’s name. Of course, in a school with only a couple hundred students, there was no doubt about who was proclaiming to be sorry for doing what to whom. Heartfelt isn’t exactly the word I would use to describe the apologies, and the snickers and knowing glances exchanged between the boys and the audience betrayed any remorse that might have been expressed in their trite statements of guilt.

What I witnessed during this farce of a punishment resonates with the activities surrounding the rape in Richmond. As Kevin Fagan of the San Francisco Chronicle reports, “The scene attracted onlookers, some calling others over by cell phone, and eventually there were as many as ten men or boys sexually assaulting the girl while another 20 looked on, laughing and snapping pictures.” To some, I suppose, it was like a game, more entertaining than the school-sponsored homecoming dance held nearby, with sweaty teenagers trying to steal kisses in the dark corners of the gym.

After their apology, the middle school boys at my school — who I had to look in the face almost every day until the end of the semester while lecturing about poetry and grammar and thinking about what had transpired — were awarded high fives and smiles from their classmates as they returned to their seats. I even saw one girl reach up to give one of the boys a quick back rub. What happened to the girl, the recipient of the apologies? She dropped out of the school shortly afterward. I never saw her again.