Wait, is this really a question?
by David Atkins
Yes, in the year 2012 this was one of the featured blog posts in the New York Times yesterday:
Parental Quandary: When Young Boys Joke About Rape
Two readers wrote to me recently with similar quandaries: young sons, around middle-school age, uncomfortable with the language that’s beginning to surround them at school.
For D., it started with an idyllic-seeming school gathering: one house, hosting an ever-changing pack of fifth graders and assorted parents weekly, and welcoming her son, who was new to the school. The second time her son went to the group “play date,” D. walked over to join in.
She arrived just as a large group of fifth graders came bounding in from school — and that’s when D.’s story becomes a quandary. “Three fifth-grade boys ran up the stairs and announced that they had passed a bunch of high school girls on the walk over and told them they were going to rape them.”
D., startled, said nothing — she didn’t know the boys, and wasn’t the host — but one boy repeated the remark several times.
When we got home, I was talking to my son, doing the usual play date debrief, when he mentioned that while the boys were playing upstairs, one was on the top bunk on top of another pretending to rape him and the other boys were laughing at them.
M.’s story was similar: her son, whose part Asian heritage makes him one of the few minorities at his new school, tells his mother that his classmates tell both boys and girls, “I’m going to rape you,” and “throw around the N-word as if they own it.” (None of the boys are black.)
Yes, kids say a bunch of really stupid and insensitive things that tend to shock adults. But can it even be a question to ask if joking about rape or using the n-word are ok? No, it definitely shouldn’t be.
I have to admit, I’ve played my share of online real-time videogames with screaming 15-year-olds who virtually teabag defeated opponents. I laugh at anyone who claims that playing videogames makes a person inherently more violent or likely to do violence. I’m not at all disturbed by the virtual violence in a game, because it can be cathartic and there’s no impulse to act violently in real life afterward.
But the language used by these kids both inside and outside the game is appalling. Offensive language about rape, race and sexuality are used constantly, with apparently no adult intervention of any kind. Not two minutes goes by without some kid calling another player a “faggot” or “ni**er” and threaten to rape said other random person. Every time I hear it, I have to ask myself: where are the parents? Where are the school officials? Doesn’t anyone out there care that this sort of language is being used so casually?
I suppose this could be just a case of an out-of-touch guy in his thirties shocked by the exploitation of the latest taboos. But there’s something very different about the language of rape first and foremost but also slurs on ethnicity and sexuality. It’s one thing to use formerly more taboo words like “fuck” and “shit.” They’re decontextualized, and lack direct sexist or racist threat. The language of rape and ethnic or sexual slurs is something else altogether.
This stuff is part of what drives the homeschool movement–both liberal and conservative. I got away with all sorts of foul language as a kid, but joking about rape and race was appropriately taboo. If “socializing” kids means putting them in environments where such things are widely accepted even in parental presences, then it’s no surprise that many parents are choosing to opt out of socializing venues where such things occur.
And if it’s a question that’s debated openly in parenting forums in the New York Times, we’re in a lot more trouble as a society than I’d like to admit. Or maybe I’m just an old fogey already at a mere 31 years of age.
.