“My life is over. No one is going to want me now.” That is what Ma’lik Richmond, who is sixteen and was found delinquent (the juvenile court equivalent of guilty) in the rape of a sixteen-year-old girl from West Virginia, said at the end of his trial in Steubenville, Ohio. He also cried. Richmond will be held in juvenile detention for at least a year, and perhaps until he is twenty-one; his codefendant, Trent Mays, who is seventeen, will serve an extra year on a charge of distributing child pornography, for taking and sending around a picture of the victim, naked. The reactions to Richmond’s breakdown, and to the conviction itself, have been divided. There has been a loud yelp not only on Twitter and around Steubenville but also, fairly outrageously, in CNN’s first report, about how tragic this is for those teen-age boys. Poppy Harlow’s exchange with Candy Crowley focused almost entirely on how “two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believe their life fell apart.” Harlow mentioned that the charges were serious and that the victim was young, but talked about the prosecution as a sort of injustice against her, too: “The last thing she wanted to do was sit on that stand and testify. She didn’t want to bring these charges. She said it was up to her parents.” There was no note suggesting that the judge’s verdict might have vindicated that decision, or that maybe sixteen-year-old girls in places like Steubenville would be a little safer now.
Worse, one could take away the impression that a nice girl doesn’t press charges, rather than that nice boys do not, as was the case in Steubenville, take a girl who has drunk too much and bring her from party to party, assaulting her in a car on the way, until they end up in a basement where they strip and assault her again, and try to make her perform oral sex—except that she is not conscious enough—and then take photographs of her naked body. They do not text “yep” when asked if they had sex with her, or “I shoulda raped now that everybody thinks I did,” but “she wasn’t awake enough”—as Mays did, raising the question of whether he didn’t think it could be rape if she was passed out—and then text the girl to complain about being taken off the football team and tell her “I’ll just never do anything nice for you again.” Nice—but nice people at a party watching all this can’t let it happen, let alone send around pictures and videos with brutal captions afterward, and then leave their friend to look through the images as she frantically wonders what happened to her in the hours she can’t remember. And nice policemen and nice football coaches don’t act like they hope it will just go away until bloggers and social media (and the hackers of Anonymous) push them to act. And all of these people cannot then carry on as though the one who caused the trouble was the sixteen-year-old girl who was raped—and who, according to testimony in the trial, has been dropped by her friends, ostracized, and put under every sort of pressure—and not the rapists.
There was a good deal of anger in response to the CNN report, which, again, it fully deserved. A Gawker piece by Mallory Ortberg, for example, made the sensible point that “Their dreams and hopes were not crushed by an impersonal, inexorable legal system; Mays and Richmond raped a girl and have been sentenced accordingly.”
But one can go further. Where is the challenge to the idea that their lives really are “over”? There is something deeply harmful in all of the adults reinforcing the assumption that the lives of teen-age boys are destroyed when a girl says what they have done. There is also something incomplete about just replying that they deserved the consequences (as much as they do). For one thing, it can mean asking a sixteen-year-old to be the one to judge the weight of her own trauma. It isn’t trivializing the seriousness of the sentence to say that teen-agers always think, when one door is closed, that everything is over, and that it’s the job of grownups to explain that it isn’t. A different life is not a worthless one. (Absent parents, not incidentally, are a theme of this story.)
There are more important and complicated questions beyond that, both practical and ethical. Telling those teen-agers that there shouldn’t have been consequences might mean another victim, in another town, years in the future. It also affects what sort of men the boys become, and one has to think that Richmond and Mays, too, have an interest in that. Does it destroy a teen-ager’s life to take him off the path of being an adult rapist? Perhaps it is too abstractly (even annoyingly) philosophical to ask what the “better” life is—one in which you have a remote shot at being in the NFL, or one in which you might be a person who treats others decently? Still, the question is worth asking.
It’s also the premise of a juvenile-justice system. Mays and Richmond were tried by a judge who said, in giving the verdict, “I’m aware this is the first time they have been in trouble with the law. But these are serious offenses. If they were convicted in an adult court of these charges, they would be spending many years in prison.” He recommended that they be put in a youth facility. In CNN’s report, Crowley talked to an “expert” who said that the teen-agers would be “haunted” by being on the sexual-offenders registry for the rest of their lives. That actually depends on a hearing later and how juvenile authorities think they’ve done by the time they’re twenty-one. Those who are agonizing about wasted lives might spend their time on the inadequacy and, in many states, effective abandonment of the juvenile-justice system, and how kids who have done even less than these two are, too often, thrown in with adult offenders and written off. (As Rachel Aviv wrote in The New Yorker last year, “Each year, more than two hundred thousand offenders younger than eighteen are tried as adults.”) But first, they should think about a sixteen-year-old girl walking through a town in West Virginia, wondering if she has any friends in the world.
Photograph by Keith Srakocic/AP.
