Aug. 11, 2006, was a sweltering Friday night in the midst of a long, fatally hot summer. A 16-year-old girl reported that she was raped that night, in a storage shed off a dirt road in my hometown of Arlington, Tex. Nobody was ever prosecuted for it, and nobody was punished except, arguably, her: By the end of the fall semester, she had disappeared from our high school, leaving only sordid rumors and a nascent urban legend.
I never saw her, the rising junior-class cheerleader who said she had been assaulted by two senior boys after a party. I only heard about her. People whispered about her in classrooms and corridors as soon as school started that year. The tension in the school was so thick that the gossip about what had taken place trickled down even to the academic decathletes and debate nerds like me, the kids who could only speculate about what happened at the parties of athletic seniors. I was a 15-year-old rising sophomore, and even I formed a notion of what had happened, or what was said to have happened.
Leaving school one autumn day in 2006, I stood at the top of the concrete stairs at the back exit, with the senior parking lot spread out before me, cars gleaming in the still afternoon sun. Several of them bore a message scrawled in chalk-paint: FAITH. They looked to me like gravestones, brief and cryptic in neat rows.
The next day, people whispered about the word in the halls. It was an acronym, I learned, meaning “f--- Amber in the head,” or “f--- Amber in three holes,” which I awkwardly explained to my parents when they asked me one evening why so many cars around town were thus marked. The idea struck me as brutally, unspeakably ugly, and it was the ugliness that came to mind each time I saw some rear windshield dripping the word in streaky chalk at the local Jack in the Box or Sonic Drive-In. Eventually I heard the girl had recanted her allegations and then had gone away; the writing on the cars, too, went away, and the question of what had happened that night. — www.washingtonpost.com/...
I am going to stop and suggest you read the entire story, meticulously and beautifully reported by Elizabeth Bruenig.
This story is valuable because of the light it sheds on this specific case of sexual assault. At the same time, it minutely examines several broader issues. How wealth confers immunity on some. How some adults enable the victimization of children and cover for predators. How our institutions are stacked against poor victims. How our society weaponizes shame to silence victims and protect sports figures, even in high-school. How the most vulnerable women (but also some young men) are targeted by predators, specifically because their stories are less likely to be believed.
These are all messages that we should examine, absorb, and use to inform the way we read all such stories. Most of all, we need to remember the message we are sending to young people about what is and isn’t acceptable behavior, and about what they can get away with.
So this brings us back to Brett Kavanaugh. Getting to the truth behind this accusation is important, not only because we cannot have an unrepentant attempted rapist on the highest court in the land. But also because we need our children to know that they cannot expect impunity for their actions towards the vulnerable. That they cannot expect their highly placed friends to get away with sweeping such credible allegations under the rug. Even, and especially if their highly placed friends are senators on the judiciary committee.
We must get to the truth, because of what it means to our institutions and our society going forward.
— @subirgrewal