I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who watched with morbid fascination last month as the rape trial of Owen Labrie, a soccer captain and straight-A student at the elite St. Paul’s prep school in New Hampshire, unfolded day by day in the national media.
It was a tale worthy of the sleaziest soap opera, or maybe a twisted prep school reality TV show. Labrie participated in a longstanding tradition at the school, the “senior salute,” during which senior boys prey on younger girls, hoping to “score” or “slay” them — to go as far as they can, in other words, with the prize being all the way to intercourse.
Labrie’s target was a 15-year-old first-year student, who described in many hours of painful testimony how he lured her, largely through emails, to participate in the “salute” with him. The two met on the rooftop of a campus building, and then Labrie led the way to a maintenance room to which he had the key. There, according to New York Times reporter Jess Bidgood, “he began to grope her; he bit her chest too, she said, and tried more than once to remove her underwear. I said, ‘No, no, no, keep it up here,’ said the girl, signaling above her waist. ‘I tried to be as polite as possible.’ ”
In her testimony, according to Bidgood, “She described Mr. Labrie ‘scraping’ the inside of her body with his hands. Moments later, she said, he penetrated her, and with both of his hands visible near her head, she added: ‘It had to be his penis.’ Her voice shook as she described the encounter escalating. ‘I wanted to not cause a conflict,’ she said. It began to hurt, she said, but she did not know what to do: ‘I felt like I was frozen.’”
There is something deeply disturbing about a culture in which a girl feels she has to “be as polite as possible” as she tries to resist a sexual assault, so as not to “cause a conflict.”
Bidgood reported that Labrie claimed that “while his encounter with the girl…had included rolling around in their underwear, kissing and touching, it had not involved intercourse. ‘It wouldn’t have been a good move to have sex with this girl,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t have been a good choice for me.’ ”
Very true, Mr. Labrie, it would not have been a good choice for you; but was it a good choice to target such a young girl, still below the age of consent? Was it a good idea to isolate her in a dark room, and go so far in your assault that you admittedly — and oh, so prudently — put on a condom?
After a week of high-profile testimony, the jury of nine men and three women found Owen Labrie not guilty of the charge of aggravated sexual assault. They did find him guilty of three misdemeanors related to the girl’s age and his penetration of her, as well as of a felony charge involving use of a computer to lure a minor. He will have to register as a sex offender, and he faces up to seven years in prison on the conviction related to computer use, as well as a year on each of the misdemeanor convictions.
Although the convictions will no doubt be appealed, this is pretty tough stuff for a boy who was, until that fateful moment in the maintenance room, on his way to Harvard (Harvard rescinded its acceptance of Labrie after the assault charges were brought against him).
I wonder what will become of the unnamed girl, now 16 years old, whose young life has surely been forever altered by this devastating experience. According to RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, she is among the three girls in a hundred who are brave enough to report an assault and see her accusation through to trial.
Given the painful detail in which she was forced to recount the assault on the witness stand, it’s easy to see why many young women would rather just swallow their pride and anger and stay silent. Nearly three-quarters of all rapes committed are never reported, and on prep school and college campuses it’s hard to get an accurate sense of statistics, since so many “date rapes” are mediated or referred to campus officials rather than to police.
As reporter Jess Bidgood observed in The New York Times, “missing from the trial” was “testimony about the definition of consent or about how victims of rape and the accompanying trauma typically behave: A possible government witness prepared to speak on those matters was stricken from the list after a defense motion. It was a case with conflicting stories and, as is common in such cases, a focus on the credibility of the female accuser.”
We’ve seen many, many such cases unfold by now, where handsome, likeable men are defended against the charges made by women who are portrayed in the media as weak, weepy, inconsistent, incoherent raging harpies. From Bill Clinton to Bill Cosby, the men just seem to be able to walk away, defended by a culture that is tolerant of “boys being boys,” and intolerant of women (or girls) who don’t want to get with the program.
I’m going to make a leap here, from the elite campus of St. Paul’s in New Hampshire to the parched, war-ravaged villages of Iraq and Syria. There the terrorist Islamic State organization has revived the practice of slavery, and developed a sophisticated and extensive administrative structure to abduct and hold captive as sex slaves thousands of women and girls from the Yazidi ethnic minority. This has also been happening in Africa, with the Boko Haram kidnapping and enslavement of women and girls.
Although there’s a big difference between a brief fumbling encounter between teenagers in a broom closet and the systematic kidnapping and sexual enslavement of thousands of women and girls, what relates these two stories is the callous disregard the men involved appear to hold towards the women they target. In Women’s Studies parlance, the women and girls are objectified and dehumanized, their right to consent completely stripped away.
I want to live in a world where this kind of treatment of women would be unthinkable to any man. Women, the bearers and nurturers of life, deserve to be respected, no matter their age or their ethnic background. It’s as simple as the most primary biblical commandment: ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’
Owen Labrie, I don’t think you would have liked it had a senior tried to assault you in a closet when you were 15. Nor would the “masters” in the Islamic State scenario have liked to be kidnapped, tied up, gagged and raped repeatedly at the tender age of 12.
We humans can be better than this. Each generation has the potential to reject the bad habits and cultural constraints of the past and evolve toward our better natures. Mr. Labrie, you told the jury you were thinking of becoming a minister. I believe you still could grow to merit such a responsibility, if you can find it in your heart to accept your own culpability and learn from your mistakes. Let us hope that you bring many young men along with you in your journey towards redemption.
___________
The weekly EDGE WISE column is curated by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D., associate professor of comparative literature, gender studies and media studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and the Founding Director of the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers. Women writers interested in publishing in EDGE WISE can find writers’ guidelines on the Festival website, or may submit queries or columns to Jennifer@berkshirewomenwriters.org.
