It’s not often that I brag up anything I read on Yahoo, but this article by Dan Wetzel about what happened in Steubenville was excellent. Here are a couple highlights.

“Rape, experts say, is a crime of power and control more than sex. Underlying all of that is arrogance, and in Steubenville it was taken to the extreme.”

“Throughout this trial, the two defendants and a parade of friends who wound up mostly testifying against the defendants, expressed little understanding of rape – let alone common decency or respect for women. Despite the conviction, the defendants likely don’t view themselves as rapists, at least not the classic sense of a man hiding in the shadows.”

“‘The entitlement we heard during testimony, it didn’t seem like any empathy or support for the victim,’ said Katie Hanna, statewide director of the Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence. ‘To see these things happen and to say, ‘I don’t recall; I didn’t think it was a bad thing; I just thought this was OK.’ It suggests that this was commonplace behavior.'”

“‘Something has gotten in there that said, ‘OK, we need to prevent drinking and driving,’ ” Hanna said. “We need to take it to that level with preventing sexual assault.'”

“A culture of arrogance created a group mindset of debauchery and disrespect, of misplaced manhood and lost morality.”

I really appreciated Wetzel’s point that these were not evil kids, but that somehow, for some reason, they got the idea that what they were doing (sexually violating an unconscious 16-year-old girl) was okay. And apparently the onlookers did too–kids who were conscientious enough to sneak keys away from boys who were too drunk to drive, but not enough to intervene in the rape of an unconscious girl.

Something is very, very wrong in a society like that.

And let’s face it–that society is ours.

So, what happened to our society ? And how do we fix it? I have my thoughts, but I’d love to hear yours.