TRIGGER WARNING: SEXUAL ASSAULT, RAPE

From Dec. 2013 until March 2015, crimes of sexual assault against two teenage girls at Venice High School in California went completely unnoticed. The assaults finally came to the attention of prosecutors by administrators at the school, and 12 teenage boys ranging from ages 14 to 17 were arrested for committing the assaults, ten of those on March 13. Police were notified by school administrators March 10 concerning the assaults, which launched the investigation and resulted in the arrests over two years after they began.

Eight of these arrests were made on the school’s campus. The ninth student was arrested off campus, and tenth, eleventh and twelfth students had turned themselves in to the police later in the day that the original arrests were made. While there are fourteen suspected students, police have only found and prosecuted twelve of them.

“Any type of issues pertaining to sexual misconduct on any of our campuses will not be tolerated. It will be dealt with seriously. Anything that amounts to a violation of the law will amount to an arrest,” said Unified School District Police Chief Steven Zipperman, according to CNN.

The investigation led to the discovery of at least one photograph of the acts. Students of Venice High School claim there are more pictures going around, but they are being reminded that this is a crime due to the victims being underage.

“Some of these were forced sexual acts, sexual assaults. Others were consensual with individuals who are too young to give consent,” said Andy Smith, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Commander.

Those who were arrested have already been charged with lewd acts with a minor and sexual assault and while the ages of the victims were not given, they were assumed to be under 14 at the time the acts took place, which is California’s legal age of sexual consent. It has been confirmed by sources that the girls were pressured by their attackers with damage of reputation to coerce them into the nonconsensual acts. Photo and video evidence show that several boys, while they were not directly engaging in the assaults, were present and not preventing the acts from happening.

Cases of sexual assault similar to this one are, unfortunately, not uncommon in high school. These crimes are committed by those ranging from students to authority figures. An art teacher at Badger High School in Wisconsin was recently accused of sexually assaulting a student on school property in March 2015. Additionally, in 2009, a 16-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by more than one person violently.

While these cases were not found to have been distributed through distributed media massively, there are others like the Steubenville High School case, in which the assaults on a 16-year-old girl were recorded and documented the events on social media.
This, along with the Venice High School case, arises questions on whether social media is an advantage or disadvantage to assault victims.

“I think there are pros and cons to the social media aspect. On one hand, there are plenty of petitions and online organizations that can give people more of an outlet to voice their opinions and stories and start spreading the word,” said Josh McCormack, junior. “However, online, people run the risk of cyber abuse.”

Although social media can be a great advantage to raising awareness about assaults such as Steubenville High’s, the victims of these acts become a joke. One example of this is when, in 2014, a 16-year-old girl that only calls herself Jada within the media was drugged and raped at a party by some peers at her school. Her unconscious body was photographed and put online – where, instead of help, she got a hashtag called #jadapose. #Jadapose went viral on social media sites like Twitter, and most of the tweets were attached to photos of people replicating the pose Jada was in the time the photograph was taken.
Jada also suffered cases of victim-blaming, a situation where the victim of a committed crime is blamed for the crime itself. This form of humiliation is commonly used on sexual assault victims like Jada, statements ranging from saying types of clothing should not have been worn to claiming the victim should have enjoyed it. Victim-blaming is also essentially a form of normalization regarding assaults.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” said McCormack, “and a way for the person responsible for the action to save his or her skin.”

While the last two missing Venice High suspects have not yet been found and arrested, police already have stated the students potentially face charges from the L.A. Unified School District. This is regardless whether or not they are pursued for actual charges and juvenile court or not. They have not yet been expelled from the school, a decision made by the Board of Education.