Cultural chaos in action?
You may not have heard, but over the weekend, a 15-year-old California girl was brutally gang-raped after leaving a school dance alone. She reportedly was met along the way home (or wherever she was headed) by a boy with whom she was acquainted who invited her to a secluded, poorly-lit courtyard where he and some of his friend were drinking. She reportedly went with him, got extremely drunk, and then was victimized terribly by several young males (I can’t bring myself to call them “men”). She survived the attack but remains hospitalized. One suspect is in custody, but at least six other suspects remain at large.
Now obviously, nobody’s to blame but the rapists, but the only possible way for any good to come out of this horrible attack is to point out to other girls and young women how dangerous it is, given that rapists are out there, to put yourself in a situation like the one in which this victim apparently put herself. Had she refused to go along, she very well might’ve been forced, which also points out how dangerous it is for a young woman to be walking home alone at night, especially by poorly-lit and lightly-traveled routes. But those are points I’ve made time and time again, in famous cases like Natalee Holloway’s and less-famous cases like this one.
My main point here is how I think this grotesquely-violent attack likely was influenced by the “cultural chaos” about which I wrote in my recent column “Cultural Chaos Compounding Crime.” I predict that the young males involved have had very little time spent on their moral development (same goes for the multiple onlookers who reportedly watched but did nothing to stop or report the attack — and don’t give me “bystander effect” psychobabble based on the famous Kitty Genovese case; these onlookers reportedly were entertained by watching this attack). I predict that most of them had at least one absentee parent and didn’t get much emphasis on right & wrong from their remaining parents, nor from spending time in church, nor from their schools. I predict that they’re all highly self-focused, with a malignantly-narcissistic sense of entitlement to get what they want from people, including girls and women, even if it means they have to take it. I predict that they all were raised by parents who modeled and/or fostered selfishness by being selfish themselves and/or by overindulging their children. I predict that the rapists didn’t really think about the victim as a human being, just as an object for their amusement, which reflects two things: 1) a cultural desensitization to which I think certain kinds of media have contributed (see the column), and 2) the devaluation of women in our culture.
(I didn’t go into that second one in the column, so please give me a moment to do that here: Violence against women used to be seen as more egregious than violence against men, but I think that formerly-elevated status of women has been eroded significantly, in part due to the fact that some feminists have considered the double standard an insult, i.e. perceived that women were considered to be weak and in need of male protection. Personally, I don’t think that was it; I think there’s another reason why most societies in human history have been reluctant, for example, to send women into military combat. If you just look at it logically, I think women are the more valuable half of the human race. I mean, a man can father as many children in the space of a week as a woman can reasonably expect to ever have in her lifetime, so from a “propagation of the species” perspective, each woman is more important than each man, i.e. we could make it as a species with far fewer men, but with far fewer women, we’d be in trouble. Sorry guys, it’s true. OK, back to the point now).
I also predict that each and every one of the males involved in this disgusting gang rape has been in trouble with the law before and suffered few or no consequences, so once again, surprise, surprise, the society sends the message that bad behavior will be tolerated, and voila, bad behavior escalates into horrendous behavior. And there you have it, sadly, “cultural chaos compounding crime.”
Might it have been avoided if the perpetrators’ parents had practiced the first three pieces of advice that I gave in my follow-up blog post (two posts ago)? Quite possibly. Might it have been avoided if the victim’s parents had practiced the fourth piece of advice that I gave in that follow-up post (basically, had they taught their daughter how to recognize the kinds of situations and especially the kinds of people to avoid)? Maybe. Who knows? Maybe they did. Maybe she didn’t listen, or maybe she just made a horrible error in judgment, or maybe she was in fact forced to the location of the rape. Might it have been avoided had society come down harder on the perpetrators and gotten them off the streets for significant periods of time after previous offenses? Almost certainly!
Nobody in his/her right mind wants to tolerate crimes like this, but if we really want to prevent them, then we have to stop tolerating the precursors of them, the more minor offenses that escalate into crimes like this — unlike the appalling onlookers at this horrific gang rape, we won’t ignore a severe crime like this one, but too often, our society is standing by as a passive onlooker when the precursors of severe crimes happen. There are definitely roles for parents, schools, and churches to play in combating cultural chaos, but the society at large could go a long way toward restoring some order out of the chaos by taking a much firmer stand against violence, much earlier in people’s lives, much earlier in the evolution of violence from low-grade offenses into what I’ve called “grotesque” violence — violence like what happened to this poor girl in California. Wonder just how chaotic things will have to get before we do that.
