WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — When I read the report from the investigation of the gang rape and assault of a mother and son in West Palm Beach's Dunbar Village housing project, nausea danced in my stomach.
The details of the 2007 crime — rape, sodomy, incest forced at gunpoint, attempts to destroy DNA evidence by dousing the victims with chemicals — are no easier to digest today. And the recent guilty plea by the youngest of the accused offers no insight into what wraps itself around the minds and hearts of boys so young that makes them capable of acts so heinous.
Sixteen-year-old Avion Lawson pleaded guilty to 14 charges — one for each year he'd been alive when he did the crime. The other defendants were 15, 16 and 18.
A month after the Dunbar attack, police arrested a 14-year-old for raping a woman in a Mangonia Park parking lot while other teens watched, yelling, "Me next!" Then on New Year's Day 2008, sheriff's investigators said that a gang of boys, one only 13, raped two teenage girls on the banks of a suburban Boca Raton canal.
In "Transforming a Rape Culture," contributing writers, including Myriam Miedzian, agree that rape is epidemic in the U.S. because our society encourages male aggression and supports violence against women. Miedzian, author of "Boys Will Be Boys: Breaking the Link Between Masculinity and Violence," says teaching empathy to boys — particularly fatherless boys — is key to ending this epidemic.
She is a founding director of Prepare Tomorrow's Parents, a not-for-profit organization based in Boca Raton that addresses violence by working to bring parenting, empathy and nurturing skills education to school-age children. It is modeled after Roots of Empathy, a Canadian program proven to reduce aggression in children.
"Boys have an enormous capacity for caring, affection and empathy," said Miedzian, "and it's repressed to a large degree in our society because it's considered unmanly."
Boys who rape, she said, "have a lot of anger. They might have watched a lot of porno online and their empathy side has been killed off, repressed. They think this is fun." In fact, investigators and prosecutors in the Dunbar Village rape case say they were struck by the teens' lack of remorse.
Most U.S. cities have not implemented the program. We'd rather invest in courts and jails than prevention.
So we are doomed to continue raising generations of boys who lack empathy. Boys so confused by a society saturated with sex and violence that they believe the two go hand-in-hand. An Associated Press study found a 40 percent increase in sex offense cases involving juveniles over the past 20 years. The trend, however, is hardly new.
In 1989, 13 teenage boys lured a mentally impaired 17-year-old girl into a basement in Glen Ridge, an affluent New Jersey suburb, where five of them forced her to perform sex acts and raped her with a baseball bat, a broom handle and a drumstick. Eight watched.
A Time magazine article published that year reported the number of arrests for rape by boys 18 or younger had risen nearly 15 percent. Why? The entertainment industry's obsession with sex and violence. The article stated: "The result ... is adolescent males who are desensitized to women's pain and suffering. It is an infectious malaise that not only enables attackers to do as they will but also allows bystanders to watch and do nothing, and still others to hear of brutalities and not be horrified.
"That psychic numbness, predict experts, will have consequences far beyond the increasing victimization of women. If young people do not have a feeling of connectedness with other human beings and if they have no empathy, guilt, shame or sense of responsibility, then ultimately the value of human life will be lost."
That 20-year-old prediction has become a reality. Isn't it finally time to do something different?
Rhonda Swan is an editorial writer for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: rhonda(underscore)swan(at)pbpost.com.