Lord of the Flies

In a poor black neighborhood of West Palm Beach, a horror story:

After dark on June 18, the police say, as many as 10 armed assailants repeatedly raped a Haitian immigrant in her apartment at Dunbar Village and then went further, forcing her to perform oral sex on her 12-year-old son. They took cellphone pictures of their acts. They burned the woman’s skin and the boy’s eyes with cleaning fluid, forced them to lie naked together in the bathtub, hit them with a broom and a gun and threatened to set them on fire.

Neighbors did not respond to her screams, and no one called the police. The victims ended up walking a mile to the nearest hospital afterward.

[On Wednesday, a grand jury indicted Avion Lawson, 14; Jakaris Taylor, 15; and Nathan Walker, 16, on charges in connection with the case that include eight counts of sexual battery by multiple perpetrators, two counts of kidnapping and one count of promoting sexual performance by a child. The three teenagers, who will be tried as adults, face life in prison if convicted.]

The police have said that Mr. Lawson’s DNA was found in a condom at the crime scene.

What kind of culture produces such boys? [Answer: a culture where men live by the depraved values celebrated by hip-hop music. You raise generations to venerate that kind of morality, and this is exactly what you can expect.] What kind of broader culture allows the weak to live terrorized by the strong in this way? Well, that's a harder question. What obligation do the rest of society have to save the poor from themselves? And how do we do it?

I think about this, and have a different answer each day, it seems. It applies to our mission in Iraq, too: what are the limits of humanitarianism? What are our obligations to others? Who are our neighbors? I will say with regard to this Florida story that whenever I hear Al Sharpton and his ilk going on about what a great injustice it is that so many black men are in prison, I think, just who do they think are being protected from these predators? Mostly black people.

I tell you this, and I'm not proud of it: if vigilantes tracked down the boys who assaulted this woman and her son and shot them all, there's a part of me that would say good.

And I would be quite wrong to say that, let me be clear. But this is something I personally struggle with when confronted by examples of the strong abusing the weak, especially children. Reading this story today made me reflect on something that explains a lot about why I reacted, and do react, with such strong emotion to the Catholic sex abuse story -- and why, in the main, it cost me my Catholic faith. I don't think I've ever talked about this. Maybe I should.

Some people have been bold enough to ask me over the years if I had been molested as a child. I wasn't, but it's not an unreasonable question. But something did happen that could easily have gone that way, and only know, over 25 years later, is it becoming clear to me how much that one incident affected my thinking and feeling.

I was 14, and went with a school group on a weeklong summer trip to the beach. Teenagers are cliquish and cruel, and though I had always been a popular kid throughout grade school, for some reason the ringleaders in the in-crowd in the grade above mine decided I was going to be one of their marks on this trip. I walked into a hotel room where a lot of them were hanging out, just to see what was going on. Suddenly, egged on by the older girls, a group of the older boys grabbed me and pinned me to the floor. They told me they were going to take my pants off and embarrass me in front of the girls. I don't know that I've ever been so scared in my life. I was pinned and couldn't move my arms to fight, and anyway, they were all bigger than I was. The group was having great fun watching me beg, in my terror.

Here's the thing: there were two adult women in that hotel room, mothers of my classmates. They watched all this go on. I screamed at them, begging them to help me, to make the boys let me up. These two women literally stepped over me as I was pinned to the floor, and left the room rather than tell the bully children of the in-crowd to let me go.

It wasn't long after that that they did let me go. They never took my pants off, and I doubt they ever really considered it. The point was to have some fun humiliating the geeky kid.

Honest to God, I have never forgotten what it felt like to be helpless in that hotel room, set upon by a mob, with the two adults who were there to maintain order choosing to turn their backs on what was happening. It changed a lot of things about my way of seeing the world. When I started school that fall, I, who had already been marked by that incident as a target, was tormented (the word is not too strong) by that crowd for the next two years, until by the grace of God I had the opportunity to leave my town and go to boarding school. And I was not the only victim of that crowd. I could see that these preppies and jocks were never going to stop, and nobody was ever going to make them stop. They were going to get away with it. And that injustice was something I couldn't live with.

I don't think about all that much anymore, which is no doubt why the connection between that incident at the hotel room and my visceral rage over the Catholic sex scandal didn't occur to me until fairly recently. Too much has happened since then, and to be honest, if not for all that teenage fear and loathing, I don't know that I ever would have been spurred to achieve things professionally, to put distance between myself and my hometown. I do believe, though, that any deep bonds I had with the place where I grew up were largely dissolved by that experience. I found it emotionally impossible to love that place after that, probably because in a small town, cliques of elite thugs can often run things as they see fit. As much as I see virtues of small town life, there really is no escape if you are an outsider. You just have to gut it out.

I didn't see it back in 2001, when I first began to investigate and write about the Catholic sex scandal, but I feel pretty sure that I emotionally identified with the victims, unconsciously, because I knew both what it was like to be bullied to the verge of a sexualized (if not sexual) humiliation, and because I knew what it was like to watch those who knew that what was going on was wrong, and chose not to exercise their power and authority to stop it. Perhaps it was inevitable that I would walk away from the Church, just as I left my hometown, because I lacked the power to make things right, and make the perps pay, and also lacked the power to live with the trauma so close and unresolved.

For me, it was easier to see the town more clearly, and to love it, from a distance. And so it was with me and the Church. You can say that my view of my hometown as a teenager was warped by my high school trip experience, and thereafter, and you would be right. There is a lot more to that place, and any place, than what happened to me. I could see that more clearly once I got out of there, and time passed. But a logical explanation about how you shouldn't judge a place by the actions of a few, however reasonable, did not make it possible for me to live there, nor would it have done at that time. And so it was with the Church and sex abuse. These things go beyond rationality sometimes -- and that by no means, by no means, makes them less real.

Anyway, any time I hear about the strong victimizing the weak, especially kids, I have to struggle -- and I mean struggle -- to remember that my master is Jesus Christ, not Dirty Harry.