Finding a deeper lesson in high school gang rape

In last Saturday's column, I relied on teenagers at Richmond High to help me understand how gang rape became a spectator sport on their San Francisco Bay area campus. They explained that bystanders who watched the assault on a 15-year-old girl outside their homecoming dance last month may have been too afraid to intervene. Or they didn't feel compelled to help because the victim wasn't in their clique. Or they were simply paralyzed by shock, fixated as if the violent scene was a snippet from a reality TV show.

This week, the adults weighed in via letters, e-mail and phone calls. They singled out neglectful parents and inept school officials; rap music and "race-mixing," video games and violent TV.

And while many readers blasted the kids for selfishness and "lame excuses," others took a broader view:

The rape -- and the troubling indifference by student witnesses -- are the product of long-simmering immorality, indulgence and insensitivity.

"We live in a world where too many people try to do whatever they can get away with," wrote Rosemary Carter. "All standards, morals, ethics and diligence have been thrown aside. . . . There is no institution that hasn't been corrupted," she said, from schools, to the family, to the financial system.

"How are children supposed to learn to value themselves and others? I can understand how they could be confused."

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When a public tragedy like this occurs, it is our instinct -- our responsibility, even -- to try to understand it. We look for clues to its cause, its meaning in personal stories, official actions and social forces.

Are the kids deranged? Did the school do something wrong? Is this just a reflection of a violent culture?

That process is going on now in Ft. Hood, Texas, in the aftermath of Thursday's deadly base attack. The Muslim background of the presumed killer has emerged as a salient factor because religious and political views may have prompted the massacre.

In the Richmond gang rape case, I was surprised that so many readers made race the subtext. And they took me to task for not mentioning the race of the victim or her attackers.

"The discomfort you folks feel in acknowledging racial attacks on whites prevents you from writing the facts," one reader's e-mail said.

I admit to feeling "discomfort" as I tried to get a grip on the racial dimensions of the assault. The victim was white; her attackers were described to me by students as mostly Latino, with one black and one white.