There are a lot of people who don't know that the word "strategy" is part of my email address, but it seems to me that someone at St. Paul's School does.
Having read the statements at the St. Paul's website about the trial and its result, my suspicions are confirmed that the administration of St. Paul's School wants the world to believe that Mr. Labrie is an anomaly instead of a product of his environment. I'm sure that many female students at St. Paul's and other boarding schools have had experiences like those of the victim in this case; some of those young women might even have had those experiences with friends of Mr. Labrie who participated in Senior Salute.
The victim who finally filed charges against Mr. Labrie was fortunate enough to have parents who supported her and who helped her to do the right thing. Many victims of sexual assault are not that fortunate; either they already know that nobody will help them and so they don't tell anyone about what happened or they try to tell someone and are blamed.
It's right there at the St. Paul's website that the school promotes sexual abuse, including the sexual abuse of minors; it didn't take more than a few minutes for me to find those promotions the last time that I wrote about this case. I also don't know how many more times the school's post-verdict statement about the victim could have included words starting with "com."
When I was in my late twenties, a psychiatrist who had a lot of experience told me that people who were high achievers before they had mental health problems tended to have a difficult time reconciling something like having been in the mental hospital and needing recovery time with the identities that they had had before mental health problems disrupted their lives. She said that people who had had lower expectations for their lives before having had mental health problems tended not to be as despairing about their futures after being diagnosed as were people for whom just not getting into any Ivy-League-level school was synonymous with abject and humiliating failure before they ever got diagnosed with anything. (She didn't say it quite like that, but that was the idea, which I understood.) What she said corroborated my experience of how I felt during and after being in the hospital for the first time as a teenager who had graduated from high school a month before I turned 17. One year I was getting envelopes of (mostly) acceptances from prestigious colleges and the next I was being admonished every day because I "couldn't" sit through the hospital's group activities that required me to make collages and sing along with a music therapist who had everyone sit in a circle while she hit a drum and then asked each person in the circle to repeat to her a cheerfully uttered one or two syllable word.
Nobody had forced me to try to get admitted to the hospital; those places are notorious for being a lot easier to get into than to get out of. Once I got there, I didn't know that the way that I was treated was the way that every patient gets treated; horrified at being treated like a total moron, I alternated between yelling "There's nothing wrong with me" and assuming that my life was over. The yelling didn't help me to get out; it took me a couple of months to realize that quiet despair read to the hospital staff as health, especially from a female patient, and that if I wanted to get the chance to end my ruined, moron-mental-patient life I should stop arguing so they would let me out. As soon as I got out, I tried every way that I could think of to kill myself (I didn't really know how; my high-achieving life hadn't been about suicide) until a Tylenol overdose landed me back in the hospital a few months after I left the first time.
Thus began the stigmatized, nearly impossible life of someone who has a psychiatric history, which set me up for the atrocities that are happening to me today. It is easy for the failure of the mental health care system to be blamed on the many people whom it harms: "They're just too mentally ill to be helped" may not get said in so many words as much as it did 20 years ago, but that excuse is as much a part of that system as ever. The cultural stigma that causes people to abuse those with psychiatric histories, and my severely damaged self-esteem, were much harder to get over than the initial mental health problems that I had. There were many things at which I could have succeeded and didn't even try to do, because I thought that I couldn't do them. Lacking a positive, personal identity, I also became much more susceptible to pop culture messages that glorified nihilism; the years of my late teens and early twenties were also the years of what was then called "grunge." I eventually got over thinking that the things promoted by grunge were glamorous. The psychiatric stigma continues to be a problem; I have documented the abuse to which I have been subjected for the past five years because of that stigma.
My opinion about jails is that they are places that don't have to be and should not be as terrible as they are. I think it's a depressing sign of how advanced our society isn't that jails are as bad as they are, particularly for people who started life with nothing and worse than nothing and were as programmed as anyone could be to serve time in them. Unfortunately, jails are unlikely to get fixed in the near future, and I'm not sure that the immediate future of Mr. Labrie should include jail time. I am entirely sure that the conglomerate should STOP PROMOTING CRIME.
The Labrie case is not like what happened at Duke University, or what happened to Tawana Brawley, or what happened at the University of Virginia. For a group of men to gang rape someone, for some of them to hold her down so that the others can rape her, for them to stand around laughing and making jokes about her and egging each other on, to watch her bleeding and crying and passing out while they high-five each other; I wouldn't care if all of those men went to jail for a long time.
One of my WordPress blogs that WordPress destroyed had my theory about what happened to Ms. Brawley, which was that the man who orchestrated her abduction and gang rape was someone who knew a lot of security guards. She was a young teenager who visited her incarcerated boyfriend. Probably, a security guard at the jail saw her and deduced that her being young, black, female, probably poor and visiting a boyfriend in jail made her an easy target. The plan was quickly made to abduct her that day, and when they had finished with her they left her in the street. The suicide of one of the criminals involved which occurred after the investigation of the crime began was explained away as having nothing to do with the investigation. Several of the criminals provided an alibi for each other as having gone shopping together during the time when the alleged crime occurred. She was publicly branded a liar, and the evidence-tampering that later got the men who raped Crystal Mangum acquitted and her publicly branded a liar was that much easier to do. It is a lot of pressure to live with to be first gang raped and then publicly branded a liar who's trying to destroy the lives of better people than you are for no reason.
Mr. Labrie's friends are probably all already at college, about to begin their second year. Although none of them seemed to be enough of an influence to dispel the power of rape culture at St. Paul's School before Mr. Labrie committed crimes, and some of them might even be wiping their guilty brows in relief that he got caught and they didn't, his cohorts in jail are unlikely to improve his value system or his ability to deal with life.
I don't know how I could have been more miserable during the years after my first hospitalization, when all of my friends from high school were in college or otherwise doing well at the kinds of places where I had thought that I would be and doing the things that I had thought that I would do. They were meeting people and gaining independence. I was living with my parents, working at the kinds of jobs that, before being in the hospital, I never would have considered as being more than something to do to make money during summer vacation and holidays. Suddenly those jobs seemed like they were the best I'd ever be able to do; the stigma of mental illness decimates your own and other people's perceptions of what you're capable of, no matter how capable you ever were. I lived with those beliefs and fears about myself for years, and consequentially also lived in the poverty and frequent isolation that enabled the conglomerate to turn me into a chronic victim of voyeurism, decades after the first of my many hospitalizations that started in 1992, a year after I graduated from high school.
The shame of my menial life faded as the years passed. Through observation and interaction, I learned that everyone is a person, and that neither having a psychiatric history nor falling off the accelerated academic track that I had been on since elementary school meant that I had been thrown to a location outside the human race where I should accept constant disrespect and consider being condescended to as my only "nice" alternative to being screamed at and more than I deserved from people going out of their way.
My high school friends and other past friends aren't to blame for what I went through during the years after high school. Many of them tried to help; there was only so much that they could do, since none of us knew that the mental health care system and society's burdening stigma were ruining my life much more thoroughly than any actual, ongoing mental illness ever could have. After years of dealing with that system, I am much more adept at getting something positive from it while not being harmed by it than any teenager or even adult unfamiliar with the system could be, although the conglomerate's persecution of me has required that I use every last personal skill that I have ever acquired, and sometimes even those aren't enough to prevent a crisis created by the system and its dependence on abusing its clients to avoid having to do the work of really helping them.
If I understand the world in ways that many people who have had more consistently privileged lives don't, much of that has to do with the years that I spent not being one of them. I experienced and also witnessed in the lives of people around me the constant injustices inflicted on people who are poor, including society's and their own low expectations for them. I also spent a lot of time being very screwed up by everything that had happened to me; it took years of gaining confidence in the world to which I had been consigned to realize that I wasn't worthless and could make my own decisions to try have a better life, no matter how little support I had for what I wanted to do and be.
I'm no rape apologist. That doesn't mean that the one male student at St. Paul's School who chose the one girl of last year's Senior Salute targets who had the courage to tell her parents and whose parents knew what to do should be St. Paul's and the conglomerate's whipping boy. Send him off to jail, pretending that he was just destined or raised to be an extra bad person, while the conglomerate and its hyperprivileged affiliates continue to promote sex crimes? That's the plan, isn't it?
I don't think that's what should happen.
Why not do this:
-Probation for 2 to 5 years
-Individual counseling every week. One of the reasons that the conglomerate hates me is that I have talked about how overmedicated people are, and medicating people who aren't mentally ill is a lucrative business. Every week, there's another ad for a pharmaceutical product that encourages people to do something bad to me. Most of the medication which I have ever been talked or forced into taking has done no good and a lot of harm. It wasn't a chemical imbalance that led Mr. Labrie to his acquaintance with the legal system; it was the conglomerate, and all of the corrupted things and people that led to the conglomerate's formation.
-Group counseling that educates men about appropriate interaction with women
-He will have to be registered as a sex offender; it seem as if that's already been decided, and I don't disagree.
The right care and discipline, even at this late stage, could produce a thoughtful man who will be a productive member of society.
If, by a miracle, my thoughts about this case are implemented, might I suggest that Mr. Labrie not apply at Subway when he applies for work. I'm sure that it's a lie that the Subway administration didn't know that the Subway spokesperson was a criminal.
Copyright L. Kochman, August 29, 2015 @ 11:44 a.m.
