Plenty of questions but no easy answers in wake of gang rape

Brutality of the incident at Richmond High is hard to fathom.

The sense of horror seems to be fading at Richmond High -- the Northern California school that made news around the world this week after a 15-year-old girl was gang-raped outside a campus homecoming dance while a crowd of students watched but did nothing to intervene.

Local school board members in this East Bay city near Oakland want to promote safety measures -- fences, lights, security cameras -- on the drawing board for years, now about to be delivered.

Richmond High students want outsiders to stop calling them animals and savages. "We feel like they're blaming the school," an angry senior complained at a school board meeting I attended Wednesday night. "It wasn't nobody's fault," she said. "People shouldn't be pointing fingers."

And school officials are making sure to emphasize the tragedies that didn't happen.

The homecoming dance "was a success in terms of safety because nothing happened at the event," a campus police officer announced. "We have a safe environment at Richmond High."

And I wondered if that made the students feel better, as I surveyed the secluded swath of campus where the sophomore girl was raped and beaten for two hours last Saturday night while the partygoers danced in the gym.

Police said as many as 10 people participated in the attack while 20 others watched -- jeering, taking photos and messaging friends to join them.

The sideshow went on until almost midnight, when police were called by a girl whose boyfriend had turned down the invitation to come have sex with "a drunk girl." Officers found the victim cowering under a bench, half-naked, intoxicated and semiconscious.

The girl was hospitalized for four days. Five suspects face felony charges.

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I've thought about the theories offered by experts this week to explain the brutality of the attack and the onlookers' passivity.

They blamed music and video games that glamorize violence; desensitized men who treat women like pieces of meat; the disengagement of young people in a world ruled by technology, where real life is what's on YouTube. Or the powerlessness these disenfranchised kids feel in their violent neighborhood and fractured families.

All of it rang true to me. But it wasn't enough, so I headed for Richmond High and found students struggling to understand how their campus had become the latest example of urban depravity.

Their theories are drawn from campus gossip and what their own lives in this working-class town have taught them.

The troublemakers at Richmond are emulating what they see in popular culture. "A lot of them, they don't think they're going to be successful," said junior Olachi Obioma. "They've already been judged, so they go with that. They drink, they smoke, they pop pills. It's the 'bad boy' culture. That's how they see themselves."

And the girls are saddled with similar pressures. "It's our mentality that's wrong," said junior Kami Baker. "Look at our pop culture. The way the girls dress, the way the guys use them for sex and the girls keep going back. . . . It's hard for some girls to rise above that."

Kami is a friend of the girl who was raped. The last time she saw her, they were dancing together at homecoming. "She looked so happy, so pretty" in a sparkly purple dress, dangling earrings and silver heels.

"People are saying it's her fault because she got drunk. But that could have been me. They beat her up and no one did anything to help her."

Explain that, I asked the students I talked to. And their explanations were as good as the experts':

The kids who watched were scared to tell, afraid that "snitching" would make them targets.