Jock Shock

...If they destroyed property, their parents paid for the damage, and no legal charges were brought...

...First and most successfully, it is a crime story, often brilliantly rendered by a writer who boasts an Edgar Prize among his credits...

...Her parents allowed her to roam the neighborhood and make friends without their constant oversight...

...Too many were prepared to believe that Leslie Faber (the victim's pseudonym) had "asked for it," or was "flirtatious," while rationalizing the boys' behavior as simply a case of overheated testosterone...

...Others fondled her breasts...

...He makes no attempt to conceal his sympathies, and his contempt for the miscreant athletes seems warranted by any standard except their own, twisted, sexual code...

...What convinced her to proceed with the case was Leslie's plaintive, and utterly juvenile, request: "Please call their mothers and tell them they're bad boys...

...A broomstick was inserted in her vagina, as was the barrel end of a full-sized fungo bat...

...Leslie, the second adopted child of a family that couldn't have children, was diagnosed as moderately retarded...

...She wanted the things other girls her age wanted: friends, romance, sports, a life away from her parents...

...That high-school football players can behave like boorish jerks will come as no surprise to anyone who received a normal American public education...

...Their coaches took the view that what the boys did outside of school was none of their business—unless underage drinking, the one offense that could bring suspension from sports, was involved...

...While the priorities of these communities may be distorted by their athletic passions, there is no evidence that gang rape by high-school ball players is a routine occurrence...

...The freedom she en-joyed—which earlier generations of retarded children were denied— speaks to the very best in America's reform impulse...

...He is completing a history of Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty...

...On this occasion, however, a different sort of diversion would be provided...

...They would afterward brag about their exploits— ideally, in the girl's presence...

...But the real lesson is nothing more complicated than the importance of adults' setting down rules and enforcing them...

...The fathers were intensely involved in their sons' lives, particularly when it came to sports...

...Leslie was not packed away in an institution, nor was she kept isolated at home...

...Finally, the boys enacted the traditional athletic ritual of placing one hand over Arch Puddington works for Freedom House in New York...

...Four were convicted of sexual abuse...

...The rest either watched with varying degrees of enthusiasm or, in a few cases, got up and left, propelled by a vague apprehension that events were about to spin out of control...

...But there is also no denying that many high-school and college athletes today believe they are above the law: They assault and beat women, steal cars, rob stores, attack strangers over petty insults...

...They wrecked houses, defied teachers, and behaved like monsters towards girls...

...But he reserves his most damning judgments not for the jock culture, but for Glen Ridge, which he portrays as the nightmare reality behind the American dream...

...Less convincingly, it is a work of engaged social science, in which this one deeply disturbing incident is expanded into a modern morality drama in which the villains are male athletes in particular and suburban America generally...

...Only a few of the 15 boys had actively participated in the sordid encounter...

...The schools maintained a "no fail" policy of automatic promotion, ensuring that athletes with failing grades would retain their eligibility...

...The response of Glen Ridge was certainly deplorable, but was it different from other communities confronted by crimes, especially sexual assault, involving teenagers...

...their parents were churchgo-ing people who could be counted on to come to a neighbor's aid in a crisis...

...A journalism professor at Columbia, he covered the Glen Ridge case for Newsday over a six-year period, during which he talked to just about everyone involved in the affair except the defendants and their families...

...The complexities of raising a mentally handicapped child in an era in which rights and choices have been greatly enlarged is, in fact, one of the sub-themes of Our Guys that Lefkowitz handles with impressive nuance...

...The relationship between team sports and sexual assault is, in fact, a serious, though complex, subject...

...The chosen of the town did not dissent from the American dream," Lefkowitz notes, with obvious disapproval...

...They came from apparently stable two-parent families actively involved in the civic affairs of Glen Ridge...

...three of them were sentenced to relatively light terms in confinement, which they began serving only this June, after their appeals were denied and over eight years after the incident occurred...

...Yet the portrait of the defendants is not without its complexities...

...She was then coerced into performing a series of acts that, while subsequently characterized in the press as sexual in nature, were more accurately described by a New Jersey prosecutor as an "obscene science experiment...

...After which, she was told to go along home, with a warning that if she talked about what had taken place, her mother would be told about the dirty things she had done...

...her IQ was measured at 49...

...But certainly not immoral—or illegal...

...There are many American communities, from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, to Midland, Texas, where the most sacred ritual is the Friday-night high-school football game...

...Generations of young people in Glen Ridge learned from their fathers and from the civic and social elite of the town that there was one supreme goal in life: achievement...

...Almost to a man, they later testified that the girl had "asked for it" and had actually enjoyed the degradation...

...Lefkowitz believes this was precisely the problem...

...She was egged on to insert her fingers in her vagina...

...At school, she played on sports teams and had teachers and counselors who obviously cared for her well-being...

...The female police officer who initially interrogated Leslie about the basement assault found it difficult to determine whether Leslie, with her ability to give a carefully detailed account of the encounter, could have been capable of giving consent to a sex act where physical force wasn't employed—the key question in deciding whether to charge the boys...

...She had a normal physical development, could swim and play basketball, and had a remarkable ability to recall minute details of important experiences...

...Lefkowitz is particularly incensed at the town's even-handedness in apportioning blame and sympathy after the incident was made public...

...Eventually, word did filter out to the authorities...

...Lefkowitz's theorizing about suburban American decadence detracts only a little from what is otherwise a remarkable journalistic accomplishment...

...There are other instances in which a community preferred to believe that a rape victim's behavior provoked the assault rather than accept the guilt of a group of "fine young men...

...Nor were the parents unloving or disengaged...

...In the Central Park jogger case, in which a young white woman was raped and beaten nearly to death by a group of minority youths on a "wilding" spree, many black New Yorkers openly supported the defendants while spreading the most scurrilous lies about the victim...

...She performed oral sex on one boy...

...JOCKSHOCK An Impressive, Flawed Account of Teenage Rape By Arch Puddington On March 1, 1989, a group of some 15 high-school athletes from Glen Ridge, New Jersey, assembled in the basement lounge at the home of Kyle and Kevin Scherzer, twin brothers known equally for aggressiveness on the playing field and loutish behavior everywhere else...

...Indeed, the next Monday, word spread throughout Glen Ridge High School that something exotic had taken place at the Scherzers' house over the weekend, involving a local girl, a bat, and a broomstick...

...One of the boys lured a mentally retarded teenaged girl who lived in the neighborhood to the house, promising a date with an athlete she particularly idolized...

...From junior high on, the boys who ended up in the Scherzer basement committed one misdeed after another without ever incurring serious sanctions from parents, the schools, or the community...

...Some of the jocks were talking about a repeat performance, only this time, they hoped, the affair would be videotaped...

...But none actually believed that what had been done to the girl was wrong or degenerate...

...The boys often gathered at the Scherzers' on a weekend afternoon for a few beers, some video games, perhaps a pornographic movie (a favorite pastime of the jock clique...

...Eight of the boys would be charged with various offenses...

...Painting with an absurdly broad anthropological brush, Lefkowitz believes the fault lies in male values transmitted from fathers to sons...

...And with good reason...

...In a sense, raising Leslie presented a greater challenge than would a child with more severe disabilities...

...When administrators tried to crack down, the parents would invariably object to whatever measures were proposed...

...Gripping and full of justified passion, Our Guys is capable of making the reader literally tremble with rage...

...But Lefkowitz is clearly wrong in his assertion that America failed Leslie Faber...

...When combined with the attitudes of aggression instilled on the football field, Lefkowitz says, maleness becomes virulent...

...Fortunately, Lefkowitz the crime reporter predominates...

...Their ultimate thrill was an exercise called "voyeuring," whereby one boy would escort a girl to a bedroom for a sexual encounter—almost always oral sex—while his buddies watched from a closet or window...

...That this enhanced freedom may have contributed to her vulnerability to predators (there had been an earlier incident involving a mentally disturbed boy from outside Glen Ridge) does not in any way mitigate the crime committed against her...

...Teachers, presumably believing their administrators wouldn't back them up, turned a blind eye to thoroughly disgraceful conduct (one of the Scherzer twins masturbated in class, while other jocks and their girlfriends could be found writhing on the classroom floor in simulated sex acts...

...If a culture is measured by how it treats its weakest members," he announces, "the Glen Ridge case, first to last, revealed American culture at its basest...

...But the jocks in Glen Ridge High School's class of 1989 took teenage barbarism to a new plateau...

...In fact, in its treatment of the mentally retarded, America has done rather well, not only in providing education and social services, but in expanding the options precisely for children like Leslie Faber, whose handicaps are not so severe as to require constant adult supervision...

...At the same time, she was trusting and extremely immature...

...Bernard Lefkowitz's Our Guys is really two books...

...Gross, yes...

...The Scherzer twins, Chris and Paul Archer, Richie Corcoran, and the rest of this uncontrolled herd are an easy target for a writer of Lefkowitz's abilities, and he can't resist the impulse to linger over every act of adolescent insolence and misogyny that presaged the fateful basement incident...

...Lefkowitz reserves part of his indictment for American society in general...

...If there is an overarching lesson in this case, it is the tragic consequences of the abdication of adult responsibility, something of which Glen Ridge was no more or less guilty than the rest of our society...

...He identifies an overemphasis on sports as the source of Glen Ridge's tragedy...

...another in a sick symbol of male solidarity...

...If the standards that until recently were considered the norm throughout America had been upheld, the Glen Ridge rape would almost certainly never have taken place...

...The ringleaders of the assault—the Archer brothers and the Scherzer twins—sought her out precisely because they knew she was "not normal...

...Lefkowitz exaggerates...

...That is reason enough to warrant a harsher prison sentence than the one they received, and makes Glen Ridge deserving of severe judgment...

...School officials were particularly culpable in their refusal to articulate clear moral judgments and their willingness to make accommodations for those implicated in the assault...