Missing Vermont Girl Found Dead; Rape Apology and Victim-Blaming Commence

[Trigger warning.]

This is just a brutally sad and upsetting story. The 12-year-old girl, Brooke Bennett, who was the focus of Vermont's first Amber Alert, has been found dead, and her uncle, Michael Jacques, is the primary suspect, based on the testimony of a 14-year-old girl (also related to Jacques) who was also victimized by him as part of a "sex ring." Additionally, Brooke's former stepfather, Raymond Gagnon, has been charged with obstructing justice for conspiring with Jacques to alter Brooke's MySpace page "to make it appear that the 12-year-old had discussed a secret rendezvous shortly before she disappeared."

I feel, as ever, equal parts reluctant and compelled to use this tragedy to make a point—I worry that I must come across as just utterly heartless; a girl is dead and all you can talk about is the shitty news coverage. I guess I just need to say I'm not unaffected by these tragedies. The truth is, deconstructing how we collectively talk about the victims, and how that may be associated with creating victims, is the way I deal with it. It's a teaspoon: The more people who refuse to accept a child "has sex with" an adult, the more people who won't turn a blind eye to abuse and justify it with rationalizations of a consenting child, the more people on juries who will convict sex offenders, the fewer survivors who will question whether they are somehow responsible for their own victimization. At least, that is my fragile, desperate hope.

To that end, there are two serious problems in the linked story.

In an affidavit unsealed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Burlington, the FBI said an unidentified 14-year-old girl told investigators she was present on June 25 when Jacques tricked Bennett into thinking she was going to a party and took her to his Randolph home to be initiated into a sex ring.

The teenager said she was led to believe Bennett "would have sex with adult males" during the initiation. The 14-year-old said she herself had been having sex with Jacques since she was 9, as part of the sex ring.

A 14-year-old cannot legally consent to sex with an adult, no less a 9-year-old. And the casual passive voice here is just disgusting: She'd been having sex with the alleged child rapist and murderer, as opposed to he'd been allegedly repeatedly raping her for five years. Or sexually assaulting. Or assaulting. Or any other word that conveys that a child cannot consent to "have sex with" an adult.

Gary Finch, Bennett's homeroom and math teacher last year, said she was an energetic and enthusiastic learner whom he loved having in class.

…Finch said that when school started last fall, Bennett was nervous about transferring from her small elementary school to the high school.

"She conquered that," he said. "She didn't conquer this."

I imagine that Finch was saying that ruefully, broken-heartedly, rather than trying to suggest Bennett should have been able to "conquer" being kidnapped and killed. I want to make clear my gripe isn't with him—it's with the AP and its decision to place that quote, without any of the qualifications I've just made, at the end of the story, making its last line, and the lingering sentiment with which a reader is left: "She didn't conquer this."

In a perfect world, that might not be a problem, but in the extremely imperfect world in which we live, victims are blamed for their own victimization—and media outlets cast 9-year-olds as consenting seductresses, ahem—so there will be many people who read this story and read the line "She didn't conquer this" even as they're wondering what this girl did to get herself raped and killed.

Some of them will be overt victim-blamers; others will merely be well-meaning parents, sick in their guts at the hint of the thought they won't let themselves fully consider, wondering what they should do to make sure the same thing never happens to their daughters, possibly focusing, as is so very easy to do, so hard on the fallacious thought that rape is preventable by the victim that they inadvertently plant in their children the seeds that will blossom into flowers of guilt, should they ever have the dire misfortune of being victimized. And guilt, shame, feelings of responsibility for one's own abuse—these are the things that make crimes go unreported.

She didn't conquer this. A dangling suggestion that it was conquerable.

How simple. How dangerous.

[H/T to Shaker Stephanie.]