Opinion: No Fault, Even for Rapists

The conviction of two Steubenville High football players for rape and posting images of that crime has received analysis from seemingly every angle. The more salient among them have focused on the culture of permissiveness that, allegedly, the football team's coaches, if not the entire town, provided for its best players. The punishment that should have been meted out to those that aided and abetted such conduct from 17-year-old Trent Mays and 16-year-old Ma'like Richmond is best reserved for another column.In the 24-hour news cycle we have become accustomed to analysis from almost every possible angle. But many of the national media outlets have been taken to task for their coverage of the verdict. An exchange between CNN correspondent Poppy Harlow and anchor Candy Crowley seemed to express sympathy for the then-just-convicted Mays and Richmond. After Crowley had focused on the defendants "sobbing," she then asked Harlow about the "lasting effect" on the perpetrators. Harlow's response:"I've never experienced anything like it, Candy. It was incredibly emotional — incredibly difficult even for an outsider like me to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believe their life fell apart."Harlow and Crowley have been, rightly, raked over the coals for focusing on the perpetrators and not the 16-year-old girl who was raped. On the checklist of human life, you don't get to put an X next to "good person" no matter how good your grades are, no matter how talented you are at sports, if you also have to put an X by "rapist."Many people, with far clearer heads than Crowley or Harlow, expressed shock that journalists for one of the most well-known, global networks would focus their attention on the perpetrators’ "promising futures" instead of the victim.Should we be surprised that we've gotten to this point? We should always be disgusted when these crimes are perpetrated, we should always shake our heads when seemingly prominent journalists flip the narrative and sympathize with violent-sexual criminals, regardless of their age. But we shouldn't be surprised that the no-fault, excused-riddled culture of the United States has led us down this sordid path to a point where we focus on perpetrators suffering for their actions instead of the victims suffering from those actions.We live in a society so full of moral equivalence, where no one is at fault for anything, are we honestly surprised at Crowley's or Harlow's comments?I'm not saying that life isn't full of nuance. There are valid explanations for why someone would be unemployed. There are valid explanations for why someone might be homeless. There are even valid explanations for why someone would commit a variety of crimes – stealing to feed your family and the like.But those legitimate excuses have broadened to give an out to those who should be without excuses, and without any of our sympathy. Because at some point we, as a society, have to sit down and ask: What in our collective human experience would lead us, or anyone, to believe that someone who would sexually assault someone else, while the latter were passed out, is deserving of sympathy? And we, as a society, have to come to the very swift conclusion that there is nothing.We can't live a world that sees a 17-year-old go on a shooting rampage, kill three of his peers, display no remorse, be ruled mentally competent, mock the victims' families in the most offensive terms and then have people express any level of sympathy for that person.Scorn, exclusion and punishment are the ways any group gets conformity to its norms. We can't weaken those basic tools by constructing narratives that give a lifeline to those who engage in such crimes.We have to get to a point in this country where we ignore, if not openly eviscerate, the constant bleating of “But they were good students!” when two rapists take advantage of a teenage girl.Frank Bumb is a 2012 graduate of the Scripps School of Journalism. He currently lives and works at a newspaper in South Carolina.