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Supporters of the Duke University
lacrosse team are in a celebratory mood. The team excelled in
last month's NCAA tournament. And just last week, the prosecutor
who filed rape charges against three of the team's players was
himself put on trial, accused of ethics violations in pursuing a
case fraught with problems.
The young men who narrowly lost to rival Johns Hopkins in the
NCAA championship game are indeed gifted and resilient athletes.
But praising the players as "outstanding" and "upstanding" young
men, as the Duke Lacrosse Booster Club did in a full-page
advertisement in The New York Times, is a reminder of just how
low the bar has fallen when it comes to acceptable male
behavior. Legal vindication is not moral vindication, no matter
how hard a PR campaign works to make it so.
We may never know everything that occurred on the night of March
13, 2006, when the Duke lacrosse players threw a team party at
an off-campus house. But what we do know is troubling enough.
Photos taken at the party show two young women, hired to perform
by the players, dancing at the center of a group of largely
drunken and leering men. The North Carolina attorney general's
report details how one of the lacrosse players held up a
broomstick during the night's events, suggesting that the women
use it as a "sex toy." Another player sent a chilling group
e-mail just hours after the party, musing about bringing in more
"strippers" and cutting off their skin while ejaculating.
Witnesses reported hearing racial slurs lobbed by partygoers.
To be fair, individual acts do not implicate the entire lacrosse
team. Misogyny is not illegal. And none of these ugly events
constitutes a criminal act. But they stand as a testimony all
their own, a window into a world where "good" men engage in
troubling -- and sometimes troubled -- behavior.
The statement that "boys will be boys" has become an all-purpose
justification for male behavior that is boorish, bad and at
times even brutal. The degradation of women has been normalized
for so long that it seems we have ceased to see what is right
before our eyes.
Yet the words and images that came from the residence of the
captains of the Duke lacrosse team demand to be addressed, as
does the prosecutor's possibly criminal mishandling of the case.
They speak volumes about the climate in the players' house. So
what does our silence in the face of these truths say about us?
We talk endlessly, exhaustingly, about "moral values." But we
talk little of valuing women, particularly when they are
young, poor and black, as were the women hired by the Duke
lacrosse players. Nowhere was this more apparent than at the
news conference two months ago when North Carolina Atty. Gen.
Roy Cooper dismissed all charges against the players, taking the
opportunity to muse about the mental stability of the young
woman at the heart of the case. Later that week, when the mother
of one of the lacrosse players appeared on "Good Morning
America" and
insinuated that the accuser ought to lose her children, she left
little doubt about who was being tried in the court of
public opinion.
Every public rape case exists in two spaces: In the practical,
"law and order" world, where it works its way through an
imperfect system; and in the public imagination, where it exists
symbolically, a Rorschach test of our values and
beliefs. It is not only the specifics, but also the symbolism,
of the Duke case that remain troubling. Both serve to remind
those who come forward with rape charges that they may pay a
steep and very public price for the chance to be heard.
Millions of rape victims, most of whom never report the crime --
much less see legal justice -- must have watched silently as
this case unfolded, thinking about how they might have fared
under such scrutiny. That the accuser gave conflicting
statements to the police is not unusual. A victim's statements,
particularly in the wake of a traumatic attack, can be confused
and inconsistent. Memory is resolutely imperfect over time and
under the duress of repeated questioning.
Our cultural response to rape leaves its victims in the cruelest
of double binds: They must choose between coming
forward, which carries the risk of being blamed, and remaining
silent, which carries the risk of isolation. It is a silence
that damages more than the victim. It strikes a blow to our
public safety as well, because unreported sexual violence allows
perpetrators to violate again.
The myth of the "false report" of rape must be replaced by this
truth: It is underreporting, not false reporting, that poses the
greatest risk to our families and our communities. It is silence
that is the enemy of change.
Anne K. Ream is a Chicago-based writer and founder of
The
Voices and Faces Project, a national documentary initiative.
Her op-ed first appeared in the Chicago Tribune on June
17, 2007.
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