UNITED STATES
The Philly Post
Stephen Silver
The high-profile Steubenville, Ohio, rape case ended last weekend with guilty verdicts for both defendants—leading to one of the more embarrassing segments in the history of CNN. Both, as well as other stories in the news, are symptomatic of a tendency I’ve noticed a whole lot the last couple of years: In cases of high-profile sex crimes, way too many people have way too much sympathy for the perpetrators, and not enough for the victims.
The Steubenville case, which has been in the national news for months, concerned two members of that town’s vaunted high school football team, in August of 2012, sexually assaulting a girl who had passed out. The case kicked off a widespread firestorm that included appearances by the hacker collective Anonymous, and a whole other debate about whether another case of an untouchable football program led to the covering up of horrible crimes. if you’re not familiar with the case, this New York Times piece is a good primer.
The two defendants, Ma’lik Richmond and Trent Mays, were both convicted, and while both must register permanently as sex offenders, because they were tried as juveniles neither is likely to serve more than two or three years of time in detention. …
Now we have controversial comments by Rabbi Hershel Schachter, a top Talmudic scholar and Rosh Yeshiva at New York’s Yeshiva University.
Rabbi Schachter, in a speech made at a London conference in February and reported by Paul Berger in the Jewish newspaper The Forward last week, suggested that Jewish communities should set up independent panels, comprised of Torah scholars, to weigh claims of child sexual abuse, to determine their veracity before the decision is made to proceed to the police.
Why? Because apparently Schachter is worried about Jewish convicted offenders going to prison, where they could end up “in a cell with a shvartze, in a cell with a Muslim, a black Muslim who wants to kill all the Jews.” Schachter went on to admit that a student confided in him years ago about being abused, after which he referred the student to a psychologist, and did not contact authorities.
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