Hmmm....I thought the article was somewhat unfortunate.


I blame 'report what you've got, not what you don't'. A syndrome that easily affects inexperienced or poor reporters. The reporter did not (get to) speak to the girl or her custodians. So he focused on what he did get. Which is the story of the locals, the account of himself visiting the trailer, etc. Some relatives of the perpetrators tell him that the girl lived in ill-disciplined circumstances. So the reporter dutifully sets about to gather imagery, quotes, evidence, of the girl's ill-discipline. It is the method of Dan Brown / Conspiracy theories / Discovery Channel. Take an assumptuion, then set about trying to find clues that confirm it. The more of these you can gather, the more the premise must be true. Whereas one ought to critically asses the premise by trying to find reasons why something isn't true, not solely why it is.

I also think the reporter lost track of the difference between establishing the opinion of the people involved, to represent that from a distant, descriptive perspective, with presenting the opinion of persons involved from their perspective. The latter is not without use, but can easily go astray, as perhaps happened here.


Still, the subtext of the article to me reads 'outrageous crime, little girl gang raped, how did we get to where this not only happens, but is considered normal. What makes this community tick.'

There are eightteen men involved. Most shocking to me, something I'll never get used to, is that these perpetrators did not seek to hide their crime, what's more, they taped it and proudly showed it around. Many more people than the perpetrators have seen the video, are aware of what happened. Dozens of people have watched a video of an eleven year old girl being gang raped and thought this was normal, thought this was cool.

That is the story I think the reporter sat about trying to uncover. 'Who are these people, why do they think all of this is more or less normal'.

Sadly the final product is a bit sloppy, to the point where it is not readily distinguishable from a mysogonist piece. It reads like a story directly out of Paris east, or a Catholic boarding school a Pakistani mountain village, where a massive abuse case is foremost considered in terms of the possible detrimental effect on the small, inward-looking society. I do not think the article is meant as such. But then, I am not sure how much that is me assuming the article is not meant as such, based on me assuming that the reporter assumes that the reader shares his opinion that a gang rape of an eleleven year old is wrong, and that he therefore omits dwelling on the obvious in what is a very short piece. But that is a whole lot of assumptions.



Also, the brothas are not guilty!! http://www.chron.com/video/?822833886001