At what point do we take a good, long look at our youth and start making the long overdue connection between what they are absorbing through media and technology, the way this has shaped the way they exist, the context as set up by the parental controls in their life, and what they are atually doing?

As we all know, the country has been rocked this week by the production and distribution of a DVD made by a group of boys, featuring scenes where they harass a homeless man, beat up another they identify as being a “loser”, and then sexually assault a mentally challenged 16 year old girl (before urinating on her, and setting fire to her hair). But will we really embrace the reality of this situation, or simply respond by looking for avenues of blame that absolve us from more pertinent social questions raised by the issue?

Part of the problem is that the issue extends beyond the actual criminals who star in the video. The segments posted on youtube.com have received well over 3000 hits a piece, and the distribution and selling of the videos in high schools had been quite successful. This is the problem, here – we find ourselves again playing the blame game of the conceptual distinction between “us” and “them”.

We first find an exploitation between a word's literal meaning, and the social/conceptual meaning as embodied by culture. The media has chosen to run with a deliberate lexicon of conceptually misleading terms, such as the reference to them as a “gang”, and “thugs” - not so that we don't relate ourselves to the incident, particularly, but simply to sell papers by creating emotive responses (maximum social panic). These are known sensationalist terms that activate an innate fear of a problem that became culturally fashionable in the 1980’s, at the time when the world became paranoid of street gangs stealing our reeboks. Through the American struggle against black street crime that has been constantly in the cultural consciousness for the past 20 years (associated heavily with hip hop culture), the approriation of the term to our streets here in Australia (where it also becomes conceptually involved with the Australianised idea of “thugs”) is most misleading in this case. We saw this in the recent case discussed on this site, of the gang-raping of the young girl near Darling Harbour, where a group of painters were turned into a “gang”. Now, the stars of the video are being treated to the same media conceptualistion. The Sydney Morning Herald ran with the headline, “Don’t Identify Thugs: Law Council” (though the Law Council was never quoted using such a term); The Daily Telegraph ran with the similar headline, “DVD thugs shouldn’t be identified”, and referred to the crime being committed by a “gang”; The Age also constantly referred to the crime being committed by a “gang”; and every other news source followed suit. In fact, I searched through 32 sources online, and not a single article failed to base the story around either the term, “gang”, “thugs”, or (as was mostly the case) both.

The first thing I noticed was that the image the initial reports placed in my mind was in no manner congruent to the boys who laughed from the television screens, when I finally saw excerpts of the video. I felt quite stupid, in fact, and confess I imagined a group of hard looking young men in baseball caps, and baggy American sports shirts, nodding their heads in unison to the bass of hip-hop. I asked around, and found nearly everyone who had heard of the story before seeing the pictures (though interestingly enough, it hadn’t occurred to them consciously, until I had mentioned it) had made the same conceptual mistake. These boys are not big, menacing looking street thugs, like characters who have lept out of the latest rap video, or playstation street-crime game. They’re very average-looking - if anything a bit weeny - white Aussie teens (does that mean there are people raping girls in parks who aren’t Lebanese? Who would have thought?!). And nobody has bothered to mention that Werribee is hardly the Bronx, but a normal, respectable, mostly middle-class area. In fact, Werribee Secondary College – where the DVD was mostly distributed and sold – is one of the most respected colleges in Victoria. This isn’t a scene from an American gang story – this is a disturbing distortion of adolescnt morality that has happened in a most everyday, seemingly “normal” setting. These are not “those” kids. They’re “our” kids. And look at what they’re doing. 

It is unfortunate that today, a Muslim cleric gave a sermon suggesting that women who do not cover themselves are partly responsible if they are sexually assaulted – but in another way, it is quite timely. There is a valid problem, of course, in the Mulsim culture around this issue – that’s the irony, it is something that exists in both the Eastern society and the West (albeit, for many different reasons). And yet, The West is all too eager to exploit this fact, by madly finger-pointing and persecuting Islaam, whilst completely ignoring (which is in some ways, the point of it) that the same problem very much exists within our own culture. A single Mulsim leader suggested that sexual assault is the result of women who invite it – and that’s disgusting – but we will now respond by conceptually amplifying this to justify our concept of the broader Mulsim community, and just at the time where we are wondering "Where does this come from?" we get to blame a Muslim cleric for inciting rape (even though it has nothing to do with rich white boys in Werribee). The cleric's views do represent a valid problem, don’t get me wrong; but we'll ignore that this is a separate problem to what we see in Werribee, and we’ll ignore the symbolism in the fact that, already, many Mulsim leaders have come out against the sermon (and in fact, the sermon was leaked by disgruntled Muslims). That doesn’t mean there isn’t any need for those within the culture who do not share those opinions to step up to the problems of their own culture. There is still members of our culture that are in no way a direct part of the social problem, or in any way ideoloigcally agree with what is happening. I don’t. Chances are, neither do you. But that doesn’t mean we are not an active part of our own culture, and play a role in it as a part of it. We still have to step up to it. And some of us do. But then, so do many within the Muslim culture, and too many in our culture ignore this when assessing such situations like the one that made our news, today (although I should add that Nine’s reporting on the matter was surprisingly one of the most balanced stories – actually placing emphasis on showing Muslim leaders rejecting the cleric’s ideology – I have seen involving the Muslim issue, in I don’t know how long).

And all this, while a group of ordinary everyday Australians have not simply suggested that women are to blame for rape, but have actually gone out and committed rape – against a disadvantaged teenage girl. Furthermore, they’ve filmed it, packaged the material alongside a variety of other crimes, and sold it to other teenagers. And those teenagers are buying. Whilst it doesn’t excuse the cleric's views, this is quite logically more abominable than this sermon - but will the outrage be proportionate if we compare the two? And what will that outrage centre around? We will be outraged by “them” (in the case of the cleric, who will become a representative of Muslim culture), but we will not be outraged by “us” (with the boys representing the culture they come from – ours). In fact, the boys will become another “them”. When, exactly, do “we” ever do anything wrong? Never, it would seem.

What is also really at the core of this, is that the broader teenage community happily lapped it up, and chose, as consumers, to engage in the material. It’s all very easy to identify causes in a single group of boys, and to single them out as an isolated case of dysfunction (creating a “them”) – but the implications are very different when considering the broader interest in the film as entertainment, by everyday schoolkids (at one of the most respected colleges in Victoria). You can’t single those kids out – there’s too many, from a variety of schools and backgrounds. And we will ignore this, and lighten the relevance of this component of the event, because again, it keeps us further away from entering the mindset of “us”. But it isn’t just a few bad boys – it’s an entire cross-section of an everyday community of teenagers. There has to be a correlation in explaining how such an incident occurs that extends beyond specific causal factors that can be seen to be shared by a small, close-knit group of boys.

But it has now started to become evident there is a reluctance to incorporate this factor into our assessment of what this story “means”, and we find it in today’s reports. Self-protection is an ugly thing, when it comes at the hands of a social problem that results in the extreme degredation of a helpless 16 year old mentally challenged girl, and homeless people – but that is exactly what is kicking in. We often prefer to perceive the implications choosing possible solutions and causal factors that eleviate any need to assess what “we” are doing, or are in any way responsible for. It costs us any real solution, of course. In the end, another group of thugs will be dealt with, and no pro-active connection will be made to any broader social problem that urgently needs addressing.  Which means, of course, that this will happen again, and whatever is developing in society that causes a mindset within the young that either commits these acts or enjoys them (because the question isn’t really about the ability to perform these acts, but the mindset that condones or normalises them in any way) will go ignored, continuing to fester and create a generation with values that contradict the idealistic way we tend to view our society.

The schools themselves have already gone into PR overdrive, and McKillop Secondary College’s principal Rory Kennedy came out with a response that, whilst being disgusting, will no doubt be a familiar response in the convenient conceptual division between those who produced and starred in the video, and those who distributed, sold and purchased it for entertainment. The Age quoted him as assuring us that “the bottom line for McKillop is there were no McKillop students involved in the production of it. Our sympathies are with the young girl in the video.” So sympathetic, he excuses those who were actively involved in the spreading of her victimisation as entertianment, and those who happily forked out money to enjoy it – for no other reason, of course, than self-protection (in this instance, the protection of a school involved in the mess). He also excused those students by declaring they’re involvement was “unwitting”, and returned to the factor he was really making clear as part of his damage control, that he felt “very confident there were no McKillop students involved in any acts against her.” One wonders the nature of such “confidence” (in the school’s reputation, of course), and if the investigation of the incident by such schools is in any way compromised by this – the need to protect the idea that “we” did nothing wrong, and cannot be held in any way accountable.

Even more disturbing is the report that Seven had managed to interview the parents of those involved in the actual acts filmed, and that those parents had defended their sons’ actions as good old Aussie humour. The victim’s father told The Age, "I was told by Channel Seven that the two parents of the two boys that made this laughed it off and said it was just a bit of fun.”

Boys will be boys, right? People need to lighten up, right? They were just doing it for fun, which excuses the act based on intention, right? Wrong - but we will discuss the nature of such ideological influences being supported, generated and affirmed within our culture, in just a minute. Suffice to say, anyone who was a part of my former site should be able to think of an example where the assault of women was justified through good-natured Aussie larrikinism.

 

First, let’s turn to what also presented itself today in the press, because what we find brings to light an interesting moral confound. The president of the Law Council of Australia, Mr John North, came out to talk to the media, and while he didn’t call them “thugs” (as widely reported), he did express dismay at the media’s choice to show the boys involved, without any pixilation of the images.

So, should the media have plastered those images across our screens and papers?

North’s point was that “children should have a chance to put that behind them in the future ... because it's universally recognised that naming and shaming people, which would result if an adolescent was named in court for these crimes, has had no benefit in the future and does not help with rehabilitation”. And this is very true. If we are to really aim for a society free of such problems, then law and punishment has to move beyond, as North put it, “Retribution and revenge”. It has to see the healing of these people, the eraddication of their problem, as a desired goal (in other words, “rehibilitation”).