And In This Corner, Parents Of The Rapists

Three boys arrested, charged with sexual battery, dissemination of child pornography and possession of child pornography. They are sixteen years of age, all three. And they are violent, obnoxiously disgusting sexual predators. What else could they be, how else describe them for taking advantage of a young girl of fifteen who, at a party, drank alcohol and lost consciousness. She was with friends.

The friends were there at the party, witness to the three boys taking Audrie Pott to an upstairs room in the house where the party was being held in California. Three boys and one girl with no one to protect her from malign intent and the boys assaulted the inebriated girl.

It is a ritual that has been repeated countless times. Hers is not the only death, nor even the latest, of a young girl committing suicide, resulting from rape and public shame.

Boys, hormonally-charged and societally-entitled to explore, to adventure into those fabled realms of the forbidden. Once forbidden, that is. That status is no longer the case. Now, if the opportunity presents itself, as it did with Audrie Potts, one takes immediate advantage. And then flaunts the advantage. There is no shame, no second-guessing, no post-mortem regret.

Post-mortem. As in after death. Audrie awoke in her friend's bedroom. She looked at herself. There, on her intimate body parts were drawings and words leading her to the inevitable conclusion that she had been sexually assaulted. Words to a new pop-culture song celebrate raping women who are unable to resist; take them while they're drunk, they'll be none the wiser.

Audrie became wise, too late. She was mocked at school, and become painfully aware that there were photographs of her being circulated among her schoolmates, acquaintances, those whom we like to call our friends. "I have a reputation for a night I don't even remember and the whole school knows", she wrote to a friend via Facebook.

Presumably, it was not one of her friends who chose to be a drag on the party atmosphere and interfere to save Audrie from the life-changing atrocity that she would soon be exposed to. Eight days of humiliation at school, of being an object of gossip and contempt. And it represented a shaming situation that the young girl could no longer tolerate.

Telling her mother that she couldn't deal with it anymore, yet balking at informing her mother what was involved, she was driven home from school, after asking her mother to pick her up. That inability to penetrate the focus and depth of her fifteen-year-old child's distress no doubt haunts her parents, Sheila and Larry Pott.

Sheila Pott, mother of Audrie Pott, who committed suicide after an alleged sexual assault, stands by a photograph of her daughter and message board during a news conference Monday. (Eric Risberg / Associated Press / April 15, 2013)

 

They have filed a lawsuit Monday against the three suspects and their parents. Good idea, that is, to file a lawsuit co-jointly against the perpetrators of their child's criminal assault, and the parents of those 'boys-will-be-boys' sexual predators. Where were the parents in their children's critical upbringing; did they not teach by example how to respect the human rights of others?

Where was their conscience? Why are there now so many young psychopaths who prey on others? Why are young girls committing suicide because they have been hounded through social media by their peers as a result of their having been raped and humiliated? Where is the compassion? Where is the shame in committing such crimes?