I can't understand how 10 men could sit idly by while a young girl was being raped, much less join in. I had hoped there weren't this many inhuman people in the world.
Posts: 4655 | Registered: Jan 2002
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posted
I can't make myself click on the link. But there is evil in the world, and this sounds like an example of it.
We can try to do our best to increase the sum total of good in the world, to try to heal the world, and to overcome evil when we encounter it. I have no other answers.
Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
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posted
You know how bullies identify one kid as "other," and everyone picks on them? And afterwards, a lot of the kids feel ashamed about what they did, but in the heat of the moment next time, they do the same thing again? That's what I think happens in cases like this. One of the cool kids starts picking on someone, and you go along with it, initially because you don't want them to turn on you. But you get swept up in it, and it's fun, and you manage to disassociate who you're doing it do from a real person, from humanity at all. She's just one more lesser animal that squeals when you torment her, and hey, what else could you do that would make her sob even more? And then she gets away, or someone starts to feel sorry for her and lets her get away, and you start to come back to your senses, and hey, you just commited an atrocity and if there's any justice in the world you'll be locked up for the rest of your life. And you probably find awy to feel defensive about it, because otherwise you couldn't live with yourself.
I'm not a psychologist, or an expert by any means. But I've seen the creation of the other in people, from both sides. And it's the only thing I can think of that explains how humans can do things like this to each other.
Posts: 7954 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
It might be a similar effect, but there's a heck of a long way from mild teasing to raping a child. I can kind of see what you are talking about once the mod mentality sets in, but why in the heck would it even get that far to begin with? I just can't comprehend it.
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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ElJay, from the considerable amount I know, you're pretty much right. I'm really horrified that it's likely that most of these guys aren't particularly evil at all.
It's amazing and often terrifying what you can do with the proper application of tension.
I do a lot of commuting by train. On the platform I get off on, there's a set of double doors that lead to the stairs. Soemthing I started noticing maybe 10 years ago was that, very often, people will only use one of these doors. You'll get a whole mess of people lining up to get through one door, while the second door remains closed. If someone opens the door, however, people immediately start using it.
Having the sort of brain I do, this became something I devoted a lot of thought to. I've become convinced that what I call the Two Door problem is likely the central issue in public morality.
Here's why I think it's relevant here. If just one of the these guys said "What the %$^# do you think you're doing?", this never would have happened. For that matter, if one (or more likely two) of these guys didn't start things down that road, it wouldn't have even occured to any of the others.
It's a matter of surface tension. All other things being equal, most people go along with it. It takes a certain type of person, or a certain type of situation, to deliberately break the surface tension.
In the Milgram experiment, this was one of the biggest things that kept people from complying. If you broke the tension, say by having another "teacher" refuse to continue or by having one researcher disagree with the other, nearly everyone stopped. You open that second door and people are going to go through.
These guys likely had been drinking. The girl shows up and a couple of them start treating her roughly. She gets scared and acts on her fear. For most of the guys, they are being presented with a uncertain situation. First off, you don't have a script for this. You look around, and no one seems to be speaking up (of course not, they're looking to see if you're going to speak up), so you think that they don't have a problem with it. Also, the girl is acting like a victim, which provkes both a protecting response and a abusing/dominating response. These conflicting responses set up even more conflict in you.
The thing about psychic conflict is that it's generally a scalar, not a vector. That is, it's builds up as a force, but there isn't a directional component to it; the way that force flows is generally decided by factors other than the conflict itself. It's like, there's this pool of water welling up, but what determines where it flows is how the ground lies. Effective methods of attitude change have to do two mostly separate things: 1) cause a welling up of tension and 2) guide it into or dig a channel for it to run into and down.
In an unfixed situation, it's entirely possible for members of a mob to demostrate uncharacteristic selflessness and heroism as well as otherwise alien savagery. It depends on the channels the tension-caused energy gets into.
In this case, the environment set up the smoothest path for dealing with the tension as going along with what the active, powerful people were doing to the largely passive victim, seemingly with the approval of everyone else in the room. So, you want to do bad things to the girl, which causes another conflict with your basic empathy and "we don't do bad things to people" rules. The answer to that is as old as humanity itself though. You just turn the girl into a thing and not a person at all or that she somehow deserves what was happening to her.
And all of that happens without the people being consciously aware of it. I'm willing to bet that most of the guys involved in this rape are thinking to themselves "How the heck could I have done something like that?"
---
I've been told that a big key to understanding me is that I'm more than slightly obsessed with the Two Door problem.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
I agree with what's been said thus far, and yet there are those who habitually rape and abuse children, whether by themselves or in groups of people, and unfortunately, it's not uncommon.
I don't see how mob mentality can account for that.
And for the record, I'm also not clicking on that link. I don't need that stuff floating around in my brain.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
For those who are hesitant to click on the link, it really doesn't give any more details than are in the title/first post.
Posts: 1547 | Registered: Jan 2004
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quote:Originally posted by ricree101: It might be a similar effect, but there's a heck of a long way from mild teasing to raping a child. I can kind of see what you are talking about once the mod mentality sets in, but why in the heck would it even get that far to begin with? I just can't comprehend it.
It is a long way, ricree, but I thought it was a way to answer the title question. blacwolve said she couldn't understand, so I wanted to give her something she might be able to relate to. Besides, who said I was taking about mild teasing?
Posts: 7954 | Registered: Mar 2004
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Recently, here in Perth, an 8 year old girl was raped and murdered in a disabled toilet at a shopping centre by a man in his early twenties. Early twenties.
The world is becoming a sicker place. At least in the society I live in. Posts: 1138 | Registered: Nov 2005
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Obviously, phrases like "long way" are subjective to the point of uselessness, but I don't think it is all that long a way from teasing to rape/abuse. Teasing (and I don't mean joking among friends) is abuse. It sets the roles of power and casts both victim and abuser. The first defense of the bully is "I was just teasing. Sheesh, can't you take a joke?" I've seen playground teasing become violence enough times to know that kind of teasing is just the first steps down the road of cruelty. The only thing that prevents it from becoming something far worse is circumstance, not inherent difference.
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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posted
The link isn't graphic at all. All of the disturbing information is presented in my original post.
Posts: 4655 | Registered: Jan 2002
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posted
"It might be a similar effect, but there's a heck of a long way from mild teasing to raping a child." No, there is not. Firstly because bullying is not mild teasing, which would be normal behavior, but an aggressive power-struggle that has led to more than a few murders and suicides.
And secondly, they are both motivated by a need for the feeling of power.
Finally, and most importantly, many, if not most, violent criminals were either bullies our bullied in school.
Posts: 1332 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
And their school is providing them with free legal advice. Because what's really important is that they make sure they're there for the poor gang rapists.
Posts: 4655 | Registered: Jan 2002
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quote:I do wonder what we're not hearing that necessitates her being in the care of CPS.
Letting an 11 year old go unattended to a college apartment late at night may have been enough to provoke a CPS investigation. Or she could be staying at a trauma center for counseling. Or she could be back home but under CPS care to monitor her well-being.
Or they could have found something unrelated when they went to inform her parents.
Lots of possibilities, but usually the details aren't reported.
Edit: And I want their rights respected, because the followers are far more likely to confess and I want that admissible.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
"And their school is providing them with free legal advice." That is pretty standard, actually.
"Because what's really important is that they make sure they're there for the poor gang rapists." Yes, it is very important to ensure that all accused criminals, particularly in severe cases like this, are well represented.
Posts: 1332 | Registered: Apr 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Pelegius: "And their school is providing them with free legal advice." That is pretty standard, actually.
"Because what's really important is that they make sure they're there for the poor gang rapists." Yes, it is very important to ensure that all accused criminals, particularly in severe cases like this, are well represented.
You misunderstand me. I'm not upset they have legal advice. I'm upset that their school is providing it free of charge. The issue is not the legal advice. I want them to have legal advice. I'm upset that their school is providing it.
Posts: 4655 | Registered: Jan 2002
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posted
Schools provide free legal advice by default, because its often hard to find out who the unjustly accused are without a trial, and because students rarely have easy access to legal advice.
A school can't give free legal advice to only some people and have it mean anything (noting the obvious conflict of interest scenarios like students in a legal wrangle with the school).
What if it turns out all or some of the accused people are innocent?
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:Schools provide free legal advice by default, because its often hard to find out who the unjustly accused are without a trial, and because students rarely have easy access to legal advice.
Also, it isn't really free. Part of that tuition the students are paying likely goes towards it.
It is a good thing too. Just because police arrested the 10 students doesn't mean all of them actually are guilty. And it would be pretty unfortunate if an innocent student got lumped in and received the severe punishment for rape simply because he could not afford the legal advice necessary to prove his innocence.
Posts: 8120 | Registered: Jul 2000
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posted
I was unaware that this was standard practice for schools. It seems like a very odd standard practice to me, I'm not quite sure why the school would feel that it's their responsibility, but apparently they do, and that's their perogative.
As I was not aware that this was standard practice for schools my problem was entirely with what I percieved as preferential treatment in this particular instance. I was not, as so many seem to assume, upset that they were recieving legal counsel.
Posts: 4655 | Registered: Jan 2002
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posted
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, schools have traditionally viewed themselves as at least partially stand-in parents for their charges, and especially as stand-in support networks. Part of this is the availability of legal help. It looks like the Purdue Student Government provides some of that at Purdue (schools with law schools have much more of it than schools without).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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