Atty: Attack by broomstick-wielding football players charged with rape didn't constitute ...

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Public Safety

School system attorney: Attack by broomstick-wielding football players charged with rape didn’t constitute sexual assault

By Dan Morse and Donna St. George
Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Lawyers for a Maryland school system argued this summer that a violent locker room attack by football players wielding a broomstick and charged with rape did not constitute a sexual assault.

“This is a male-on-male incident. There is no indication that this was motivated by sexual desire,” an attorney for Montgomery County’s public schools told U.S. District Judge Peter Messitte. “They weren’t yelling sexual slurs about maybe homosexuality or things like that.”

The assertion was made during a July hearing over the school system’s motion to dismiss legal claims filed by families of victims of the 2018 assaults at Damascus High School. The families allege that school officials should not have allowed the Damascus locker room to go unsupervised because they were aware of earlier sex assaults among boys’ sports teams at Damascus and nearby high schools, and because one of the attackers had demonstrated a propensity for sexual harassment and violence.

The lawsuit rests heavily on Title IX, a broad education law that in part is designed to protect students against severe sexual harassment. Designating the attacks as nonsexual, according to the school system attorney’s arguments in federal court, would move the case away from Title IX and dismiss a key claim made by the victims’ families. The attorney, Sean O’Hara, noted that in the families’ own legal claims, the motivation for the attacks “was to scare, intimidate, and control.”

His reasoning was rejected by the court. ... “I don’t buy that argument at all,” Messitte said from the bench. “As a matter of law, I’m not prepared to say that this is not sexual.”

{snip}

The afternoon of Oct 31, 2018, as junior varsity players were getting ready for the season’s last day of practice, the lights in the freshman locker room suddenly went dark. The single entrance was guarded, and four players set upon their teammates, according to prosecutors’ statements. The assailants pulled down the pants of one boy and pushed the broom handle several times through his underwear and into him while he screamed, prosecutors said. Two other boys were pinned and jabbed in their buttocks with the handle, and teammates knocked the fourth victim to the ground and stomped on him as he fought off the broom.

{okay, that's enough}

By Dan Morse
Dan Morse covers courts and crime in Montgomery County. He arrived at the paper in 2005, after reporting stops at the Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun and Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is the author of "The Yoga Store Murder." Twitter https://twitter.com/morsedan

By Donna St. George
Donna St. George writes about education for The Washington Post, where she has been a reporter since 1998. She previously worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times. Twitter https://twitter.com/donnastgeorge

[Hugh_Lebowski]

1. Is this 'motivated by sexual desire' bit actually part of the law in play?

Seems a bit, uh ... subjective, if it is in fact part of the law.

Not to mention "the motivation for the attacks “was to scare, intimidate, and control.”"

Sounds like many rapes, in fact.

I suspect this argument is not going to fly.

[Bev54]

2. Rape is not about sexual desires as much as it is about power and control and violence

That has been known for years and yet we still have idiots that think it is about sex.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

3. I'd bet money that it occasionally happens as a result of sexual desire

Personally I find this (oft-repeated to the point of being presented as axiomatic) hypothesis that it's ALWAYS about power ... to be not really that well proven.

Not that you said that, but some people insist it is always true.

It is OFTEN about power and control, but I'm quite sure it's not ALWAYS true, as some people claim.

And I'm not sure where the desire to say it's always about that ... stems from. As if it's not JUST AS EVIL if you're driven by sexual desire?

The law, OTOH, should CERTAINLY NOT be written as such, because it's just as awful no matter the motivation.

[Jilly_in_VA]

4. I was listening to one of my podcasts today

and they happened to be talking about the different kinds of rape. If I remember correctly, they are:

1. Power/control rape (probably most common)
2. Anger/rage rape (the rapist is angry at women, or gay people, or trans people, etc)
3. Sexual desire rape (fairly uncommon, according to the podcasters)

The podcast, incidentally, is Crime Junkie, and the podcasters are quite interesting. One is a professor of criminal justice. Each week they discuss a different case, and this week's case was the Pettit family of Connecticut. I commend it to you if you are interested in such.

There was a case similar to this a few years ago in Hamilton County, TN. One victim suffered such severe injuries that he had to have a temporary colostomy and nephrostomy for awhile because the broomstick rape ruptured his bladder and colon. He could have died but he was in such severe pain when he got home that his mother took him to the ER immediately. Unfortunately (IMNSHO) the perps were kept in juvenile court, but the basketball coaches and (I think) an assistant principal all got fired.