Today’s New York Times features a story about a horrific crime: 18 boys and men raped an 11-year-old girl. The reporting is awful. Look at this:

“It’s just destroyed our community,” said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.” 

Later in the piece Ms. Harrison is also quoted as saying, “Where was her [the victim’s] mother? What was her mother thinking?” Well, fuck. Definitely this piece could not have stood without these enormously relevant quotes from a random Cleveland resident, perhaps the best source there has ever been in the history of journalism. Reporter James C. McKinley Jr. doesn’t even bother to include a man-on-the-street comment from a (wo)man on the street who thinks it’s sad that the girl has to live with this the rest of her life or who wonders what the rapists were thinking. Perhaps Cleveland, TX is a hellscape populated entirely by victim-blamers, and he couldn’t find anyone who’d say that. Even if that is the case (and I doubt that is the case), I can’t understand why the reporter didn’t include a single quote from someone who works at a Texas rape crisis center or an academic who studies sexual assault or SOMEBODY, come on. 

The residents of Cleveland are not alone in making offensive comments. McKinley writes several of them on his own:

How could their [Cleveland’s] young men have been drawn into such an act?

They [Cleveland residents] said she [the victim] dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s.

She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground.

No, I think THEY, teenage boys, would hang out with a CHILD at a playground, a place generally intended for and occupied by CHILDREN. Then Mr. McKinley rounds off the piece with some vague classist intimations: “There are pockets of poverty, and in the neighborhood where the assault occurred, well-kept homes sit beside boarded-up houses.” Apparently the three main causes of sexual assault are 1) inappropriately attired little girls, 2) inattentive mothers, and 3) poverty. 

The police became aware of this crime because the rapists recorded footage of the attacks on their cell phones, and that footage was circulated among students at Cleveland Middle School. Now, are child pornography charges being brought? Has the Cleveland Independent School District reacted to this in any way? Have they diverted children who saw footage of their friends and neighbors and probably older brothers raping their classmate to counseling? Has this been discussed in school assemblies? This and other questions, in “Topics Not Broached By This Amazingly Shitty Article.” 

I don’t mean to lay all the blame on one reporter. His editors are also fuck-ups. Here’s a petition about it.