Cheering for Rape
May. 9th, 2011 05:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deirdreI have really mixed feelings about the Rakheem Bolton case.
He was arrested for raping one of the cheerleaders, plea bargained to a misdemeanor charge, then was able to play again. If someone does meet criteria for being able to play after an arrest, I think they should be able to play.
...And the cheerleader quite understandably didn't want to cheer for her rapist. And was fired from the squad.
I'm very much in favor of letting people get on with their lives after they've paid their debt to society. (Well, technically, he's possibly still on probation; he almost assuredly was when the cheerleader getting fired occurred.)
But I'm also very much in favor of not erasing the victim as was done all the way up to the US Supreme Court.
The victim should not be the person who has to pay, and especially not $45 grand. The school should have worked out how to accommodate her wishes without compromising the game or the squad. Some ways of doing it might be having only some of the squad cheer for each person or eliminate the personal cheers altogether.
The real failure seems to be the handling of the criminal complaint more than the follow-up civil action. Regardless, the outcome for the woman in both cases was horrific.
And while we're talking invisible, this is a more literal instance.
He was arrested for raping one of the cheerleaders, plea bargained to a misdemeanor charge, then was able to play again. If someone does meet criteria for being able to play after an arrest, I think they should be able to play.
...And the cheerleader quite understandably didn't want to cheer for her rapist. And was fired from the squad.
I'm very much in favor of letting people get on with their lives after they've paid their debt to society. (Well, technically, he's possibly still on probation; he almost assuredly was when the cheerleader getting fired occurred.)
But I'm also very much in favor of not erasing the victim as was done all the way up to the US Supreme Court.
The victim should not be the person who has to pay, and especially not $45 grand. The school should have worked out how to accommodate her wishes without compromising the game or the squad. Some ways of doing it might be having only some of the squad cheer for each person or eliminate the personal cheers altogether.
The real failure seems to be the handling of the criminal complaint more than the follow-up civil action. Regardless, the outcome for the woman in both cases was horrific.
And while we're talking invisible, this is a more literal instance.