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Originally Posted by The article
However, police said they are considering several charges, including furnishing alcohol to a minor, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, use of a minor in a sexual performance, solicitation of a child to engage in sexual conduct and possession of pornographic work involving a minor.
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First off, these charges don't sound like things you and I would normally think of as "Sexual Assault" (forcible sexual contact). I've become rather cynical of late with the news business, and this looks like someone playing off the Duke Lacrosse thing and the whole "won't somebody think of the childruuun!" thing.
Ok, boys and girls, time for Cynical Siggy's Story Time!
Sounds to me like the girl involved had a friend who had graduated from her High School and was now at MSUM. This friend (either a female friend or a boyfriend) knows of a party, or possibly just an informal get-together, that's going on one weekend and tells her to come. The girl goes and has a few drinks. Some people start playing drinking games and she joins in. The game eventually turns into "I never" or "Truth or Dare" and the girl is probably fairly gone by this point (she's sixteen and has been playing drinking games with college kids, who may not even know how old she is, all night). Well, since it's truth or dare, things tend to escalate quickly, and
someone at a college party
always has a camera. Possibly even a video camera. At some point the girl gets dared to do something biological to the guy she's been making out with all night. The video camera has been on long enough that no one is even paying attention to it by this point, and the amateur videographer gets some well-shot footage of the event.
The party breaks up and everybody goes home. The girl may or may not have wound up spending the night with her male friend from the party, but whatever happens, winds up going to school on Monday and telling all her friends about the great party she went to that weekend. One of her friends, or just someone eavesdropping, gossips about her to someone who's a bit more of a goody-two-shoes than is probably good and blabs to someone in the high school administration, who calls the police (teachers are mandatory reporters on anything even remotely sounding like abuse, which to some people, a sixteen-year-old having sex or giving a BJ is).
The local news gets ahold of the story and runs like mad, and the damage is:
- A teenage girl gets her reputation smeared all over town (Mankato is small enough that everyone's going to know who it was whether the news station "protects her identity" or not) over something that would barely have raised comment if she had been in college, or even if she had just been more careful about who was around when she told people.
- A teenage boy gets sent to jail, probably forcibly sodomized, permanently stigmatized, and required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life because he got a little bit of action from a teenage girl and they just happened not to be on the same side of the magic birthday.
- Another teenage boy goes to jail for "possession of child pornography" and possibly "manufacturing child pornography," almost certainly gets forcibly sodomized (repeatedly) and is lucky if he gets out of jail alive, and has to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life because he was holding a video camera at the wrong party.
- A fraternity chapter loses its charter because 1/4 of its 23 members were at the wrong party, whether they were involved in the planning of the party, lived in the house where the party was held, or even knew this particular girl was at the party or not. (1/4 of the chapter membership is often all it takes to have any happening considered "a chapter function.")
- A national fraternity gets sued because 6 guys from a 23-man chapter were at a party where something happened that made the news.
This is all purely speculative, but I've been friends with too many prosecutors and too many police officers - and met
far too many reporters - to believe that my cynical story is any further from the truth than the local news report of a "sexual assault at a fraternity house" which makes a really flashy headline.
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