One of the two high school students convicted of rape in the Steubenville case has served his sentence and is now
For some, Richmond’s reinstatement to the team earlier this month was a disturbing signal that the celebration of football victories still prevails.
“The message that it sends is that Steubenville High School doesn’t care about rape,” Alexandria Goddard, a social media consultant who helped generate attention to the original case, writes in an e-mail to the Monitor. The district has failed to say specifically what steps it has taken toward “addressing the issue of rape culture,” she says.
On the other hand there’s such a thing as rehabilitation, and remorse, and progress.
Yes but on the other other hand, playing football isn’t a human right. Football is all mixed up with glory and machismo and aggression, and all too often with not giving a flying fuck about some little girl who got drunk at a party.
At a recent meeting of the Steubenville City Council, a local citizen reportedly objected to [Ma’lik] Richmond being given the privilege of participating in football.
Council member Kenneth Davis defended the school’s decision.
“Who are we to condemn this young man, when he stood up publicly with tears in his eyes and apologized?” Mr. Davis said in a phone interview with the Monitor. “I’m not taking what he did lightly, but he was 16…. Football gives you structure in your life…. If I didn’t have football in my life as a kid, I could be a street hoodlum myself.”
Ok wait – what kind of “structure”? If it’s a kind of structure that doesn’t encourage boys to understand that they don’t get to rape people, what good is it?
Words are easy. Words of apology spoken after being caught as a predatory abuser are easy because looking like one is sorry does not mean knowing what they are sorry for.
Patterns of change in words spoken after that are harder. Acting like one is truly sorry and becoming different is harder. Apologies alone are nothing.
And then there’s the Florida State quarterback…
God, it makes me SO SICK.
So, let me get this straight… this kid, who was a football player when he and a teammate raped an unconscious girl and bragged about it, needs to be back on the football team because football gives kids structure without which they stand a good chance of becoming street hoodlums (with whom something like, say, raping an unconscious girl is likely).
Do I have that right? I think I’m missing something here because that just sounds like something someone would pull out of their ass.
This is a difficult one. If the criminal was convicted and did the time, supposedly it does not matter whether he feels or expresses remorse, right? He did the time and he is sprung. The apologists who run the football program are amoral. Football programs are horrible aberrations, and not simply because of the football part. Steubenville HS still does not care about rape. It probably wishes that the whole thing would just go away. Steubenville HS cares about football, which offers such structure as staying/showing up after school to practice, riding the bus with other adolescents to away games, voluntarily risking brain damage, and closely observing cheerleaders. Some young players may absorb ideas derived from playing on a team, that is, teamwork. Otherwise, the structure justification is stupid.
Yay for the citizen who stood up and objected.
Yeah that guy’s quite a ticking time bomb, isn’t he?
Makes sense. See, it’s just false rape accusations that ruin men’s lives forever. Actual honest-to-god, convicted-in-a-court-of-law rapists aren’t harmed one bit.
Street hoodlums frighten white men and are therefore an actual problem.
Anthony K says @6: See, it’s just false rape accusations that ruin men’s lives forever. Actual honest-to-god, convicted-in-a-court-of-law rapists aren’t harmed one bit.
Wow. Yep, that’s sure what it looks like. How are we supposed to deal with convicted rapists once they’ve served their sentences? Is the conviction to some degree permanent, or can the criminal return to some approximation of his pre-conviction life and lifestyle (even if that includes a permissive attitude toward rape), as if he’s just been away on a family vacation or something – they’ll hold his place until he gets back? Why, or why not? It’s a dilly of a pickle, to be sure.
Clair Ramsay @4:
Says who?
I mean, yes, from a legal point of view, you serve your time and the system is done with you.
But that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to wipe the slate clean.
I mean, people dig shit up about what presidential candidates wrote in their college thesis thirty years ago, for which they did not — and should not — serve any jail time. So if somebody commits an actual crime, I’m supposed to forget about it because they served their time?
And you can only imagine the fallout that a second rape victim would experience. “What? You went on a date with a convicted rapist? What were you expecting? #thingsdawkinswouldsay”
So, without football to give your life structure you could become a street hoodlum.
Well, excuse me if my children never, ever fucking play football, because I’d prefer they turn into unstructured street hoodlums than goddamned rapists.
All three points seem correct. In particular, the justification given by Kenneth Davis looks indeed like a cruel joke.
A more difficult question is what should be done in this concrete, individual case. We read that “For some, Richmond’s reinstatement to the team earlier this month was a disturbing signal that the celebration of football victories still prevails”. Well, I can understand this reaction, sure. But should the reinstatement be refused instead? For some, that would be a disturbing signal that – in Blanche Quizno’s words (see #8) – the conviction is “to some degree permanent”. And this is also dangerous, as making it too permanent would be demoralizing and depriving of any motivation to progress.
The question is baffling me and I don’t know what to think. Both options seem problematic. Do you think they had a way of refusing the reinstatement without sending a signal of the second sort?
The point is that athletes are admired. People really, really,really should not want to admire rapists. The fundamental problem is too many don’t care. Which also says more about their attitude to those domestic reproductive organs known as women than we really wanted to know.
Which also doesn’t change Ophelia’s and others’ point that there has to be room for the redeemed. Absolutely. If this guy had gone back to school, eventually become a crisis counselor for, say, jailed sex offenders, or shown other evidence of actual redemption, then certainly he would deserve some respect.
Plopping him straight back on the football team does not suggest that it’s redemption anyone is thinking about.
The Jimmy Swaggart tears are less convincing than a crocodile’s.
And, one more time, this was NOT a ‘little girl who got drunk.’ I may be confusing the incidents (there are so damn’ many) but my understanding is that this victim, like so many others, was deliberately GOTTEN drunk. The ‘party’ was essentially a premeditated harvesting of vulnerable children.
Maybe the concussion issue will eventually lead to getting rid of football altogether (slight hyperbole here). Football is really a pathetic waste of time anyway, it’s not healthy even for kids. To think, more people watch the Super Bowl by far than anything else including presidential debates, no wonder we have so many unsolved problems, most people are watching the NFL or playing the latest Xbox game (of course that last one is in part due to the quality of the candidates corporate America permits).
@9
Yes I was using United States legal considerations.
The correct spelling of my names is Claire (with an e) and Ramsey (with an e).
Claire Ramsey
1. I’m against extra-judicial punishments in general because they’re inherently unequal. A football player rapist is sent home, but the chess player rapist isn’t? What about the rapist who only plays video games with his buds after school? How is he being punished? The answer, of course, is “not at all”.
Is participation in sports some holy thing that can only be done by the pure of heart? Why are we elevating sports participation far above any other activity that someone coming out of the criminal justice system can be involved in?
If you’ve done the time, then you should be allowed to return to society within the constraints of the law — this is the entire point of the rehabilitative part of the judicial system.
Seems to me that some folks here are talking about retribution — which is a very right-wing kind of an attitude. One strike and you’re out. Troubling, frankly. But of course, these are “dumb jocks” we’re talking about, so I guess it’s OK.
What else are we going to prohibit this kid from doing? Riding the school bus? Graduating? Going to college? Getting a job? He’s already going to be a registered sex offender — meaning most careers are legally forbidden to him. Is bagging groceries OK? Digging ditches? Or is it only OK if he’s homeless, getting arrested every 6 months or so for vagrancy? What do you do with someone like this for the next 40 to 50 years or more? Is this kid a “throw-away”? Why not just kill him and have done with it and save us the bother?
2. Yes, football (sports in general) does provide structure. I played football (very poorly) one year, and ran cross country and track. Taught me a lot about responsibility, teamwork, dedication, and all of those other fuzzy “good citizenship” things we’re supposed to be concerned about.
And though it wasn’t a problem for me, you better be sure that the rest of the guys on those teams were paying close attention to their studies — because a D in any subject meant they couldn’t play, and an F meant they were off the team for good (and the one played the next season — football>basketball/wresting>baseball/track).
According to one Kansas study, athletes had higher percentages of days of school attended, graduation rates, and Kansas assessment scores and lower dropout rates than nonathletes. They analyzed data for students in grades nine through 12 for the 2011-12 school year in schools throughout the state. http://news.ku.edu/2014/01/15/study-shows-high-school-athletes-performed-better-school-persisted-graduation-more-non#sthash.3oO0SpP4.dpuf
Not every kid is a self-motivated learner. Schools use extra-curricular activity participation as the carrot to get kids to study just a teeny bit harder. The drop-outs at my school were the kids who didn’t care either about their studies or about extra-curricular activities. Even acknowledging that some schools pressure teachers to grade jocks easier (which is immoral, in my opinion), those kids are also the ones who get tutors and other special help.
How is that a bad thing?
3. Finally, you can bet your bottom dollar that particular kid’s nose is going to be the cleanest nose among all the noses in that town. The spotlight’s on him.
And because the spotlight’s on him, it’s also on each and every member of the team, if not the entire town. Which means their noses are going to be pretty darn clean, too. If he isn’t an object lesson in more ways than one, I don’t know what is.
[Technical aside: I still can’t login to comment from B&W. I can from Pharyngula and a few other places. It’s odd.]
The boys from the Duke false accusation case seem to be doing just fine.
As for Kevin’s remark–I see where you’re coming from. Just consider: the probability that he considers himself the victim of a false accusation, based on the fact that his victim never said “no” (that she was unconscious is irrelevant), is definitely non-zero. Because of rape culture, it’s hard to say whether he or anyone else on his team regards what he did as wrong at all.
Claire, my apologies on the spelling.
For me, the issue is only partly about wishing this guy would pay more of a price than he did — though that is part of it. It’s also about the football program taking a stand and signalling that, just as student-athletes have to meet academic eligibility standards, there is some basic moral threshold that you have to meet to get to participate. I think that’s especially true given that, if I recall correctly, the coaching staff did not exactly cover itself in glory in its response to the crime.
I admit I don’t have a clear idea of where exactly the line should be here, how long he should be barred from football, etc. It just irks me that he’s going to slide back into his former life with what appears to be pretty minimal consequences.
I have never really ‘gotten’ the whole sports thing, especially as a supposed source of training to become a better person. I’m sure that close contact with a group of your peers could help you develop your sense of empathy and far play, and might broaden your view of the world, but I suspect the real reason sports is lionized is because it is ersatz military training. Learning to take orders, executing long range plans, and keeping your body in condition are good, no doubt, but empathy, and helping out someone who is in some way disadvantaged, and other potential goods of group interactions are not as encouraged as they should be, I suspect.
This is the reason why I am opposed to “Dictionary Atheism”. Forming some kind of group to foster atheism while intentionally excluding the fostering of all the other qualities we could use to make this world a better place for humans and other living creatures is a stunting of our potential, and carries with it the high probability that we could end up creating a little army of people who are actually worse human beings than the God-bots we are all so appalled by.
The column I just wrote for Free Inquiry is about that.