The first thing I want to let you all know is that I’m going to be expanding my work at Babble to the Kid pages as well as the Baby pages! I couldn’t be more excited about this because, as my son gets older, the process of parenting him is less about preventing him from falling off of things and more about teaching him about the world around him. Thinking about how to explain difficult things to a child has made me reflect on my own perceptions in new ways. I look forward to writing more about all of that in the coming months.
For my first Babble Kids post, I tackled the Steubenville, OH rape case, in which a girl was raped by two teenage boy while other kids shared the incident over social media. It’s appalling on every count:
I’ve been reading about the rape of a young girl in Steubenville, OH with horror and incredulity. The New York Times ran the story a few weeks ago and details have been emerging steadily ever since, thanks to a social media trail left by witnesses. The articles portray a night of teenage debauchery, drinking, and party hopping. One young girl was so incapacitated by alcohol that she couldn’t respond to conversation, dragged from party to party by two teen boys who went on to sexually assault her while other teens photographed it, videotaped it, joked about it, and spread the story on social media in real time.
I am the mother of a son and a daughter. As I read this story I flashed on two horrific images – my daughter drunk and violated and my son as a rapist. I’ll be damned if I let either image become reality.
Read the whole post over at Babble Kids!
What is going on on this earth? Why?