Letters to the Editor
-
Maybe the womens team knows they are innocent
Maybe just maybe the womens team knows the mens team so well that they know that they could NOT have committed the crime they are accused of. So much so that they believe they are INNOCENT and not just Not Guilty. We should all be so fortunate to have friends, family and colleagues who would attest to our innocence when we know we have been wrongly accused. ~Beth
-
Minority pack mentality
The pack mentality of the women's lacrosse team might well be seen as a response to the initial pack mentality evinced by 'radical' elements at Duke, represented not just by undergraduate students but by national figures like Houston Baker, who assumed the players were guilty right away and made strident assertions that they BELIEVE the woman. They believe her on principle, and by the same logic they seem to regard the actual guilt or otherwise of the players as a technicality given that they are white male athletes and even if they didn't do it, everybody knows that these privileged assholes would do it if they thought they could get away with it. Yes, its hard for women to bring charges of sexual assault in a justice system that has traditionally been prejudiced against them, but in redressing the balance a lot of activists seem to be blindly recreating the same injustices they think they're fighting, and ignoring the fact that questions must remain about the veracity of the alleged victim's story because women do make false accusations of rape sometimes. There's been at least one such case at Duke in the last few years. If you're a white male working in the humanities at Duke there are many situations in which you're not only not privileged, but a member of a despised minority. The wall of silence presented by the Duke lacrosse team, and the pack mentality described by the writer of this article, are at least in part a response to the inarticulate rage of self-segregating minority groups who act like the inability of nonminority individuals to understand what their problem is is a symptom of their privilege and there's no point in explaining it to us. Such an attitude may not be unwarranted, but often its an easy way out of honestly examining the roots of your own anger.
-
It all comes down to whom you believe...
Are the male Duke Lacrosse team guilty of bad taste, vulgar behaviour, and drunken debauchery?
Yes.
Are the three accused males guilty of rape?
No.
It will take some time, but the trial will bear this out.
The female Duke Lacrosse team have apparently arrived at the same conclusion.
The three accused members of the Duke Lacrosse team are experiencing a 21st century lynching by the press. This article is a prime example of the pack metality of guilty until proven innocent.
-
So the whole team feels the same way?
Most people do not seem to understand that this article was not about the facts of the rape case, it was about the whether the public statement made by women's Lacrosse team was proper (not legally, but socially and morally) or whether it was an ill-advised behavior induced by pack pyschology.
First, if it were their individual opinion expressed in a personal forum, that would be proper, but the Lacrosse girls are doing it as a "team". So we are supposed to assume that the entire team thinks and feels the same way. Really? So this did not put any peer pressure on any of the members of the women's team? Not even one of the girls had the slightest doubt about the innocence of the accused? It is hard to swallow. This is pack mentality at its worst, regardless of who is innocent and who is lying.
Second, the situation is of course about gender. Only one in ten among rape victims report being raped to the police. Only one in ten of those reported rapes end in a conviction. 99% of all rapes goes unpunished by our society. Rape is such a difficult thing to talk about and social pressure and shame makes it all the more difficult. Can you think of any other criminal activity that is so consistently overlooked? I doubt it.
Third, the situation is political and racial, no matter how much we try to ignore it. This is the reason why there is character assasination on both sides. Hence all this knee jerk outrage against the injustice suffered by the team, or the knee jerk support for the alleged victim. Dear outraged reader: Where is your sense of justice, when so many poor people are being not just falsely accused but also sentenced to death because they cannot afford a decent lawyer (as we now know looking at the DNA evidence)?
If the team were mainly black and the woman was white, today's "they are innocent" chorus, would be singing to a different tune. Or maybe they would choose to be quiet. The character assasination directed at the alleged victim also reminds some people how it was practically legal to rape a black woman because she was not even considered a human during slavery. It reminds us how little we have come in some respects-that somehow rape is still more acceptable if the victim is black.
Because it is, isn't it?
-
The Lacrosse Women were being blamed for the actions of the Lacrosse Men.
Now Sally, of all the wierd, hysterical letters here, I'm going to have to say that yours takes the cake. So you're saying we're all getting it wrong about the message on the headbands. You're saying that what it means is that the women are pronouncing themselves innocent, rather than the men because when they wear the team insignia there are more than a few people who think the women's lacrosse team was involved in the alleged rape and that the women feel so harrassed as accused rapists that they all got together to scribble "innocent" on their headbands?
Good God, what are you smoking?
And Sally, my advice still stands: If the female lacrosse team at Duke really supports the male team 100 percent, then the next time the boys want to have a circle jerk with live dancers, then the female lacrosse ladies ought to step up and do the nekked pole dancing. That way, it's all in the family and if anything like rape occurs, they can all claim everybody is innocent because they support each other. Right? Anybody?