What Kavanaugh and Judge did at Georgetown Prep is not unique to elite prep schools

[NewJeffCT]

I posted this the other day and got no response to it, but thought I'd post it again now that more about Kavanaugh has come out.

I grew up in a small town in Connecticut and went to public school there. It was a mostly white working class/blue collar town at the time and I graduated HS in the mid 80s. Out of around 400 kids total in the high school, I doubt more than a dozen kids were non white. So, about 100 kids per class, and somewhere around 50/50 boys to girls. Today, the town still has the blue/collar and white working class element, but nowadays is a lot more diverse both racially and economically - just checking the numbers from the State Dept of Ed website, the high school now has somewhere closer to 550 kids and maybe 135/140 are not white and the town now has a white collar/middle class/upper middle class element as well)

1) While not as violent as holding girls down and covering their mouths, coerced sex was pretty common at high school parties where I grew up. I was too shy and not cool enough to be invited to these parties, but I've heard the stories from enough reliable kids (boys & girls) that I'm certain the stories were true. I believe at least one girl did file a police report years later because it made the local newspaper, but I have no idea the resolution and I've mostly lost touch with all but a couple of kids from my high school except for the occasional "Happy Birthday" on Facebook. (Too many of them seem to be the Deplorable/Trump supporter types, it seems.)

2) When I was in middle school (Grade 6-8), a bunch of boys in town on a Catholic Youth basketball team (not associated with the school, but a lot of the basketball jocks were on both teams) lost a New England tournament championship game because they were hung over from too much drinking the night before the championship. So, drinking and drugs were pretty common as well.

3) Several years after graduating at a class reunion planning meeting, I found out that a girl I had graduated with had been pregnant when she marched for graduation. She then said that high school administrators at the time gave her trouble for being visibly pregnant, until her mom brought up the fact that she was a nurse at a local hospital and least 9 girls from my class came in and had had abortions. That stunned me at the time - 10 pregnancies out of somewhere around 50 girls in the class.

4) A lot more recently, in another town in Connecticut that is a working class town (Torrington), two 13 year old girls accused a couple of high school football players of either rape or sexual assault. The two girls were bombarded with attacks from classmates and others in town (including a lot of other girls) both in person and on social media. The two boys were later convicted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrington_High_School_rape_case

So, there is no way in my mind that this is something unique to expensive prep school kids - this is a problem across all income levels and in public and private schools.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. Male supremacy affects us all, everywhere.

[blm]

2. Any town USA

Thanks for saying what needs to be said. Jeff.

[NewJeffCT]

3. Yes

it can happen anywhere

[malaise]

4. USA?

Please- wherever you find the jock culture. The thing is that the parents of kids from the elite schools make the problems 'go away' with generous donations.

[NewJeffCT]

5. Sometimes, yes

but, it's also possible the girl, or girls, that were attacked have parents with deeper pockets and/or better connections.

And, things are not always swept under the rug:

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/05/nyregion/14-choate-students-expelled-in-inquiry-into-cocaine-arrest.html

Choate is the school where JFK and a few other Kennedys went, as well as Adlai Stevenson, Michael Douglas, Glenn Close and Ivanka Trump.

[malaise]

6. True n/t

[cwydro]

12. Many jocks without rich parents get away with it too.

Look at any top football schools, and oh yes, the many criminals who have played, and are playing even now in the NFL and NBA.

Interestingly, most of those crimes are crimes of violence against women also.

Different rules for not only the rich, but top (male) athletes as well.

[malaise]

14. Absolutely

Patriarchy is a disease

[EricMaundry]

7. Elite scumbags

Protected by their privilege.

[NewJeffCT]

8. it's not just the elites

there are boys in high schools all across the country that are doing similar and getting away with it, and there have been boys getting away with it for decades. It's happening at public schools and private schools all over.

[Johnny2X2X]

9. Agree

I grew up in the 80s, alcohol was very prevalent among all economic levels for teenagers.

And the idea as a teenage boy was that drinking with girls might cause them to lose their inhibitions. We were that stupid to think that a couple of wine coolers was going to help cause some type of orgy, but we never thought about using alcohol to incapacitate someone or to make them lose control. And we weren't looking to take advantage of any situation, but there was this thought that alcohol would help us lose our virginity. Mostly, getting drunk with the girls we knew was about laughing a lot or doing something stupid like skinny dipping at the most. I remember drinking a few wine coolers with my sophomore crush and then us kissing for like a half hour on a walk, we ended up dating for a year, not sure we would have gotten together had we not both been a little uninhibited that night. It's part of our culture for young people to experiment with alcohol and sexuality together, good kids can keep it innocent enough.

But we all heard stories about other groups of kids where it was something different. Where girls were pressured into drinking more than they could handle, where they would end up waking up half clothed. Where they would do things that were embarrassing. Or worse, where they would wake up not remembering anything but knowing they had been raped. There are predators from a lot of socio-economic backgrounds, sounds like Kavanaugh and his friends were some of the absolute worst kind.

I still remember a girl in my high school who the story went got drunk and had sex with 3 or 4 dudes. It never occurred to me until many years later that she was probably the victim of rape.

[milestogo]

10. Getting girls drunk and abusing them sounds like a lot of college fraternities.

[NewJeffCT]

11. and that's why frats are going the way of the dinosaur

I think a lot of colleges don't have them anymore, or only in a limited fashion

[milestogo]

13. I think that is as much because of the young men who have died

because of the drinking as anything else.

[dem4decades]

15. Kavanaugh and his buddy Judge remind me of the two shitheads from "Scent of a Woman".

Not taking responsibility for anything they do, always getting bailed out.

Where's a Pacino character when you need one?

[customerserviceguy]

16. You point out an uncomfortable truth

Before AIDS consciousness really took hold in the heterosexual community, the sexual revolution unleashed in the 1960's kept building and building into something monstrous. I went to college in 1974, and once we were all free from parental restraints, all kinds of incautious things took place. They were fueled also by the television shows, and especially the motion pictures of the day. I remained a virgin through my one quarter at a fraternity, but didn't make it through my freshman year with that status.

To my credit, I only had relations with the woman I later married (and divorced ten years later), but even in the age of AIDS, I still engaged in unsafe practices after the divorce. While waiting for the results of an HIV test in 2005, my sex life flashed before my eyes, until the results came back negative. Since then, I've been with one and only one woman. A lot of my peers were way more "active" than I was, and I thought nothing of it.

I'm wondering if the weaponization of teenage/young adult sexual practices of the time, as despicable as they look in hindsight, will come back to bite us in the ass. How many Democratic Senators, Representatives, and other elected officials were at parties where what now looks taboo, was going on, and said or did nothing about it? If "sowing wild oats" is a disqualifier for high office, how many of our male Democratic figures would pass the 2018 test?

[NewJeffCT]

18. That is also true

I think first Herpes and then AIDS have changed things a lot - Kavanaugh grew up in a different era coming out of the 60s and 70s. Not excusing attempted rape at all, but I remember stories of my high school and how in 8th grade the captain of the basketball team was found naked in the showers of the locker room with the captain of the cheerleaders, having sex. And, this was 8th grade.

Contrast that to my daughter, who is now a junior in high school and her, and many of her friends, have hardly even gone out of dates and many are also reluctant to get their driver's licenses as well. When I was in high school, it was a big thing that as soon as you turned 16, you would start driver's ed and sign up for your driving test. While I think kids are still out having sex, I think kids nowadays seem to not be in quite as much of a rush.

Or, maybe that is because I grew up in a working class/blue collar town and now live in an upper middle class white collar town and it's a difference in expectations?

[customerserviceguy]

22. I don't think

that the blue-collar/white collar thing has too much to do with it. Maybe your kids and their friends are not in a rush, because they were brought up by parents scared to death of STD's and pregnancy, and made sure they had proper instruction, not only on methods of avoiding these things during sex, but on how to not get into the situation in the first place. My high school drama group was well known for having a disdain for the casual sex that we assumed was taking place all around us, and while I didn't necessarily go along with their opinions, hanging out with them meant less opportunities for hanky-panky.

Also, I think that expectations of young people have changed in the last thirty years, yes, movies still depict teens involved in sexual activity, but not so much of the exploitative kind, like "Porky's" and even "Revenge of the Nerds" had.

[bucolic_frolic]

17. It's an educational muddle

Educating about sex, morality, legality is neglected, perhaps because there is no agreement about so many things: when to educate, where (church or school, home or classroom), how (physical parts, morality, spirituality). It varies state to state in public and even private schools, surely, and some kids are street-wise advanced, others lag in development. Our kids are exposed to adult themes before they're educated about much of anything. So yes, the pattern you describe plays out all across America.

Looking back I would have been better off with more worldly education - classics, literature, civics - instead of the compartmentalized subjects and cookie-cutter presentations given in 7 or 8 classes a day. Too many subjects, too little depth, too little responsibility - and I was one of the ones who turned out sane.

I've heard college tales too, and I'm glad to have avoided Greek life. I do wish I had gone at post-secondary education more slowly with a definite plan instead of being rushed through.

[GoCubsGo]

19. Yep. The name "Owen Labrie" should sound familiar to most here.

If not, look it up. That shit even goes on in the most prestigious prep schools, like St. Paul's.

[NewJeffCT]

20. I didn't say that it didn't go on at elite prep schools

look at the link I posted above where 14 kids were expelled from Choate in Wallingford, CT for cocaine trafficking. The point of my OP was that some posters over the past week or two have made it sound like what happened with Brett Kavanaugh at Georgetown Prep and Dr. Ford from Holton Arms was exclusive to elite prep schools. But, it is not exclusive to that kind of setting. It is a problem at all schools - public, private, wealthy, poor, middle class and everywhere else. (i.e., I used to cover high school and college sports as a hobby/part time job in the early to mid 1990s and many schools would bend over backwards to protect the star athlete if they did anything bad, even if the school was located in a poor urban setting.)

[Nitram]

21. What is different about the elite prep schools is that their graduates will go on to become

judges, lawyers, and corporate CEOs. They will gain positions from which they can exert tremendous power and influence. And they will support each other in that quest for more and more power and money.