I haven't been following the Steubenville case closely, but from what I've read here on Daily Kos and the NY Times this case doesn't seem all that unusal to me...which is in itself a monstrous tragedy.
And not just for the girl, but for the boys too. Our culture, especially the jock-culture is teaching young men that this is ok behavior...if you don't get caught...or if the coach can fix it. The real tragedy here is routed in human biology. Male sexuality gets set kind of in stone when they are in their teens, unlike female sexuality which is more fluid*. Young men who are sexually abused by pedophiles become pedophiles. Young men who start out with non-consensual sexual experience become jerks on one end of the spectrum and sexual predators and rapists on the other.
So a young man who believes its ok to try and have sex with a drunk girl, or that you can keep badgering a girl into having sex or that anything you do is ok so long as you don't actually beat the girl up -- those young men are going to be stuck with that as part of their sexual makeup probably for the rest of their lives.
It is not enough to decry this behavior and throw these two boys in jail. We have to start educating about consent before children become teenagers. By Junior High or Middle School there needs to be a graphic, explicit education program for all our children about what consent is, what non-consent can look and feel like, and how to approach sexual experience in a healthy, consensual fashion. Forget just abstinence-only education which is leaving our children completely unprepared for the realities of the technical side of sexual experience. Currently we leave them without any way of understanding or navigating the emotional and psychological aspects of it either. We don't even pay lip service to it.
Until we do young women are going to be raped and young men are going to be emotionally deformed into predators and nothing will get any better.
* If you'd like more information on human sexuality check out "Sex at Dawn" by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha