Steubenville

I just watched a twelve-and-a-half minute video from YouTube and it made me angrier than I have been in a long time.  It was of a high school boy making tasteless jokes about the girl who was raped repeatedly at a party he was at in Steubenville, Ohio.  The case made the news and has started a national dialogue about teenagers and alcohol and rape.  The boy in the video clearly does not understand how horrific the experience was and will be for the victim.  He is a teenage boy callous in the way that many teenage boys are—in the way that I probably was as a teenage boy at an all-boy school, playing on the football team.  His main refrain, “She is so dead,” is delivered each time with a laugh and something approaching admiration, (though for who or what I cannot say.)

My high school days are long past and I no longer make rape jokes or call people “faggot,” but I certainly used to when I was 16.  This is not something I am proud of.  I am sure my parents and teachers would have characterized me as a good kid, and I WAS a good kid.  But I also laughed at jokes about rape.  At sixteen I did not have enough experience of the world to understand just how awful a thing rape is. 

And there were not enough adults in my life helping me to understand. 

Now I am 47 and I am the father of a 13-year old daughter.  She is not yet drinking alcohol or going to parties where boys are drunk and adult supervision is lax or non-existent.  But she will be at some point in the not-too-distant future.  And watching that video just now has scared the shit out of me.  It made me commit to opening a discussion with my daughter, no matter how uncomfortable it might make us both.  I need her to know just how shitty boys can be sometimes.  A little bit of naiveté can, in this domain, wreak lifelong damage.

Much of the national reaction to this case has tacitly apportioned some of the blame to the victim for getting so very drunk at a party with football players.  Of course I don’t want my daughter to get that drunk as a teenager (or ever, really).  But I also don’t want her to feel like any girl or woman EVER has the blame for getting raped.  I want her to see the “What was she wearing? Why was she so drunk?  Why was she at that bar at 2 am?” line of questioning for the bullshit it is.  Blaming the victim of a rape in any way serves only to relieve men and boys of the responsibility to control their own actions.

Just as the massacre of 26 children and teachers in Newtown has pushed the discussions of gun control and mental illness to a new, harder-to-ignore, level I hope this case in Steubenville will push the discussion of rape out into the open and get us as a nation to look more closely at how we talk (or don’t talk) about dignity and respect and rape with our middle school and high schools sons and daughters.

Excellent commentary on the reaction to the Steubenville case by blogger Lauren Nelson

Good article by Kim Simon on teaching our boys to be kind.

GOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLL!

Every Fall since 2004 I have taken my class for an overnight trip to Camp Hazen in Chester, CT. In spite of the demands this trip places on my time, my noise tolerance, and my sleep needs, I look forward to it every year. There are generally somewhere around 15 students—all of them eleven or twelve years old—and two adult chaperones. The kids look forward to the trip for months.

And why wouldn’t they? They get to have a giant sleepover with friends they have known well for seven years—more than half their lives. Also, the excellent staff of this YMCA camp leads my kids through some fun and challenging group-building activities, plays new and entertaining games, and belays as my kids attempt to scale a 50-foot wooden tower with all sorts of interesting and challenging elements.

I look forward to the trip each year for reasons that are somewhat different from the reasons my kids like going. I get to spend some time with my students where I am not the only adult responsible for them, I get to spend two days in a beautiful autumn setting by a lake with many trails through the woods, there is a full-time supply of coffee, and I get to see my kids in a setting that shuffles their well-established social deck in a way that gives some kids who don’t usually stand out a chance to shine.

I just returned from this year’s trip and I am happy to say it was just as good as it always is. My students did amazingly well. They treated each other with respect, they were committed to working their way through challenges together, they pushed themselves to go past their points of comfort on the climbing tower, and they had a lot of fun. When we got back to school after the trip the kids all spiraled away with their parents, dazed, tired, satisfied, and happy.

As I drove away yesterday I had a special reason to feel that this was my best trip yet to Camp Hazen. And in the end it wasn’t the kids that pushed this one over the top to make it the best. Of course, they were a big part of my happiness over the trip. As I said, they treated each other well and worked hard to stretch themselves, and these things always make me happy. But what really made this particular trip stand out for me was the final attainment of a private goal I have had for seven years.

I don’t know how common this is, but have you ever had a goal that to the outside observer looks entirely stupid, but to you means something for reasons probably opaque even to you? This has been the case with me for seven years now. I’ll just explain, since no amount of contextualizing will make this goal sound anything other than pointless. For seven years I have been trying to kick a football through a rectangular opening 30 feet up a wooden climbing wall at Camp Hazen. As with any good pointless goal, there are ground rules that have developed over the many years of trying:

I must use a football,

I cannot punt the football,

I must use my heel to make a small indentation in the grass and then stand the football up on its end and kick it from that position,

Someone else must be there to witness it,

I must let other people try if they ask, and

I must NOT let on how important it has become to me.



So, after approximately 40 attempts on my first day at Camp Hazen this week, I put the ball through the opening. It was a football, kicked cleanly from the tee I had made with my heel, and witnessed by a student. The only thing is, before I kicked it through I let on to this particular student how important this stinkin’ goal had become to me. He didn’t question this at all—he just watched, collected errant tries, and cheered me on. He seemed more excited when it finally went through than I did. Though I will admit to jumping up and down with my fists in the air once or twice, maybe…

We had an hour to kill after lunch and before we drove back to school, so I went down to the soccer field with some of the students. The boy who witnessed my kick sidled over and said, “Think you can get a ball to go from inside this soccer goal all the way to the other goal?” Without even considering the question I said, “Of course.” Thus began the next quest, but this time everyone knew what I was up to when I collected a tennis racket, baseball bat, soccer ball, tennis ball, and football and started kicking and throwing and swinging away.