Spring Break
Questioning human nature in light of gang rape
Robert Sanchez
Issue date: 11/2/09 Section: Forum
It is Saturday night, Oct. 24, around 9:30 p.m. A 15-year-old high school student waiting for her father to pick her up after the homecoming dance is invited by a classmate she knows to join a group of students drinking behind one of the school buildings.
After an unknown period of time, as many as 10 men - ranging in age from mid-teens to mid-20s - begin raping and beating her, continuing for more than two hours.
Close to two dozen people are thought to have witnessed the brutal gang rape. Most ignored it. Some stuck around and watched for a while. Others decided to join in. A few allegedly recorded the attack with their cell phones and posted it on the internet.
But none of these witnesses called the police, or reported it to the half dozen officers and school administrators who were monitoring the dance nearby.
Only after a woman heard two people bragging about their roles in the rape did the police find out about the attack.
When I read about this in the Gazette-Times on Tuesday, buried in the Nation & World section, I felt sick to my stomach and I felt a growing rage. "Again!?!" I screamed to myself, remembering similar stories I had read over the years.
I feel sick writing about it now and my anger, still burning, is like coals banked by a need to abstract and analyze. It is so hard to look the horror of this straight on, yet I don't want to look away. Looking away is probably one reason things like this continue to happen.
We justify and generalize and make excuses. We deceive ourselves, telling stories that these things are abominations and aberrations, the result of a human nature which somehow does not apply to us.
I am not a student of anthropology so I may be using this term in a less technical manner; by human nature I mean the artifacts of our shared evolutionary history, those genetic memories that drive responses like fear and "fight-or-flight."
We may or may not be God's chosen creature, but regardless a creature we remain, a primate who suffers from the sort of monkey madness that allows rape and war and subtle social cruelty to persist. Perhaps groups of people who live like Buddhist monks suffer the effects of this madness to a lesser degree through the practice of mindfulness and the control of their external experiences, but this human nature applies to us all.
After an unknown period of time, as many as 10 men - ranging in age from mid-teens to mid-20s - begin raping and beating her, continuing for more than two hours.
Close to two dozen people are thought to have witnessed the brutal gang rape. Most ignored it. Some stuck around and watched for a while. Others decided to join in. A few allegedly recorded the attack with their cell phones and posted it on the internet.
But none of these witnesses called the police, or reported it to the half dozen officers and school administrators who were monitoring the dance nearby.
Only after a woman heard two people bragging about their roles in the rape did the police find out about the attack.
When I read about this in the Gazette-Times on Tuesday, buried in the Nation & World section, I felt sick to my stomach and I felt a growing rage. "Again!?!" I screamed to myself, remembering similar stories I had read over the years.
I feel sick writing about it now and my anger, still burning, is like coals banked by a need to abstract and analyze. It is so hard to look the horror of this straight on, yet I don't want to look away. Looking away is probably one reason things like this continue to happen.
We justify and generalize and make excuses. We deceive ourselves, telling stories that these things are abominations and aberrations, the result of a human nature which somehow does not apply to us.
I am not a student of anthropology so I may be using this term in a less technical manner; by human nature I mean the artifacts of our shared evolutionary history, those genetic memories that drive responses like fear and "fight-or-flight."
We may or may not be God's chosen creature, but regardless a creature we remain, a primate who suffers from the sort of monkey madness that allows rape and war and subtle social cruelty to persist. Perhaps groups of people who live like Buddhist monks suffer the effects of this madness to a lesser degree through the practice of mindfulness and the control of their external experiences, but this human nature applies to us all.
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Stephanie Anderson
posted 11/04/09 @ 8:25 AM PST
You know what I would have done? You know what a normal, compassionate, law-abiding citizen would have done? The same thing that ultimately helped the girl get medical treatment and alerted the police to the matter: CALL 9-1-1. (Continued…)
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