demented, the kings of nowhere..
I am not sure how far this story is really spreading beyond Melbourne, but here I think we are just stunned by the horror.
Some young men from Werribee and Geelong, out to the south-west of the city proper, found a young woman with a mild developmental disability on an MSN chat room. They enticed her to meet them at a Werribee shopping centre. Others came from the shadows. A dozen of them brutalised her, and humiliated her, and abused her sexually. They set fire to her hair three times. They also pelted taxi drivers with eggs, and attacked a homeless man with flares, and fought with each other.
Just another outbreak of human viciousness – except that they did it to make a video. They wrote the title on her bare chest. Then they made up a pseudo-professional cover which had some of their names on it – if you make a film, you get famous, right? – and thanked a mother for lending them the camera.
Then they sold the DVD for $5 around the local schools. Various parents saw this thing, and it kind of floated around the community. They put pieces of it on YouTube, but no-one complained.
It took at least four months before the story surfaced. Recently, some of the students were expelled from school. The principals are going to have to explain the timing very carefully.
Eventually a sister of a schoolkid who had the video was disturbed enough by the pictures to take it to Today Tonight, a current affairs show with its own reputation for trash. It ran the story on Monday night, without video scenes. It did run some footage on Tuesday, with a crimestoppers strapline to help people identify the teenagers. They only told the police after they first went to air.
This morning the girl’s father wept on the radio. I heard him.
“It’s a horrible, horrible thing that’s happened to my daughter,” he said.
“I’m appealing to any parent whose son or daughter might be in possession of this video. Your son and daughter will be seeing something that should never happen to any young girl.
“We’re going to be living with this forever.”
Three parents have already called the police to interview their sons – presumably to try and create some distance between them and the core perpetrators.
How can they think they wouldn’t be caught? What kind of zone are they living in, where committing a vicious crime, showing yourself on camera, distributing the images and naming yourself is not expected to lead to a long time in prison?
Aside from the sheer brutality of the crime, there’s something scratching at the inside of my head about the nature of media. They seemed to think that making a film about it made them immune.
Some sort of atavism, a charm that protects them from bullets. You can commit a real crime but you are safe if it’s on television. But the whole point of the images is the fact that they are real.
Maybe it is simple. Maybe they are simply so detached from the larger society that they think their power makes them immune. The cover line said:
“—- the movie is brought to you by the teenage kings of Werribee. No one messes with us, we only mess with them.”
Everyone is recycling the same facts about this. The Age account is comprehensive.
October 26th, 2006 at 3:08 am
Kings of their own cesspits. Hopefully the footage provides clinching evidence if (when, I hope) rape and sexual assault prosecutions go ahead.
October 26th, 2006 at 11:01 am
David, I think it might even be a bit worse than thinking they wouldn’t be caught. I think they might think they haven’t done anything wrong. Subcultures are weird and powerful beasts that can blind one to wider views. Their members are so focused on each other and on the group values that they kind of don’t register what the ramifications of their behaviour might be in the wider world. Certainly the older I get the clearer it becomes to me that the values and conventions of any subculture one identifies with — family, peer group, biker gang, workplace, whatever — tend to outweigh any other set of rules or form of authority.
October 26th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
Yeah it made me pretty sick when I heard about it on the radio.
You really do have to wonder about the mental state of these kids and also question their parents’ child rearing skills.
No one that I knew as a kid would have even thought of doing something like that, let alone video recording it and distributing it through the community.
October 26th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
Unlike Chris I don’t think it has much to do with parents’ child rearing skills. Any parent knows there is more going on in their children’s lives than they know, and they have to work hard to get a handle on it. I think these events are not so much a reflection of the particular but of the general. This stuff happens in Iraq, it happens every night on tv, or in the cinema. We now live in a society more like a medieval cess pit because of influences like the media. The magistrate who did not gaol Kochie and co over what ever the scandal was a few months ago, has the bear some of the blame for this, as much as Today Tonight, the parents, the children. I can hear the bell tolling now, unfortunately ….
October 26th, 2006 at 5:45 pm
Teenage boys are feral, and I would like to think that I wouldnt have done this, but I know boys who might have. You know how it works, one boy makes a statement, the next tries to trump it, and it races quickly to the lowesr point
I wonder if the fact it was seen through a lens made it more distanced, and they could convince thamselves they were only playing.
October 26th, 2006 at 5:51 pm
Little rotters.
No respect.
Elymian is correct, of course. One starts, and everyone thinks they have to impress their mates and join in.
October 26th, 2006 at 6:11 pm
Was there a mainstream media event this year where a woman had a penis insinuated in her face? Some sort of “reality” programme as I recall it.
A “values” discussion probably emanated following the event, but is there a possibility to that mainstream broadcasting of sexual bullying simply adds to the cache of this sort of abbhorent behaviour?
The programme was maybe even broadcast by a network obsessed with marketing to the age group and demographic who are responsible for the Werribee freak show? Just a loose group of ideas and musings, and an agreement with the comments above too – teenaged boys led by a moron will behave moronically.
October 26th, 2006 at 6:17 pm
Trackback
October 26th, 2006 at 6:40 pm
The Werribee incedent had nothing to do with the child-rearing skills of the parents. Being in a school near the area, I can bet that roughly 50% of the teenage boys would have no problems with doing something like this. On a side I don’t think whether they would have been caught would have been anywhere near the brains of the idiots that did this, which is probably an issue that the education and police departments need to work on. And anyway way did take 4 months for this to come out?
October 26th, 2006 at 11:16 pm
Imagine it was YOUR son who did this stuff? I would just be so horrified and… gawd. This stuff affects many more than just the victims. My trust in the police died five years ago – and I was naive to keep it for the previous years. I read somewhere (sorry cant find the link) that parents of these boys claimed the media OVER REACTED.
Good grief. Way too awful for me to think about for long.
October 27th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
A wake-up call to anyone who thinks that misogyny is the sole province of Muslims in this country. The joy on those boys faces was highly disturbing.
Like you, I really can’t comprehend the mindspace that they were in – thinking they would not be discovered after making and distributing a DVD of their activities. If the Police are serious any parents who are found to have had knowledge of this crime and not reported it should face heavy sanctions.
October 27th, 2006 at 8:29 pm
‘Certainly the older I get the clearer it becomes to me that the values and conventions of any subculture one identifies with — family, peer group, biker gang, workplace, whatever — tend to outweigh any other set of rules or form of authority.’
But of course, PC, you can always say no, even to family. (Seems to be the main message I took away from ’70s Catholicism – protest!! Go figure.)
For everyone who says no and appeals to another source of authority, there’s always another twenty who wish they were brave enough to do the same. Sometimes they even tell you later on.
The whole thing reminds me of To Die For – as Nicole Kidman’s newsgirl character says to the teens she incites to murder her husband, ‘you’re not real unless you’re on television.’ Or words to that effect.
October 27th, 2006 at 9:31 pm
I don’t think it’s just teenagers. I think human beings will just try to get away with things. people are mainly sheep.
without a strong lead telingthem, no its not ok..people just go along with the group. which explains a lot of things happening in our world at the moment
October 29th, 2006 at 4:35 am
Its strange that the kids parents complain that the media are blowng this out of proportion when these kids were creating and working hard at spreading their own media.
October 29th, 2006 at 11:10 am
[...] If you don’t think the Judeo-Christian traditions have any form in treating women as unclean instruments of Satan, as Daryl Kerrigan would say, yer dreamin’. The same day, there was a report on a new Victorian survey on attitudes to violence, including sexual violence, and the release by Werribee schoolboys of a DVD of them sexually assaulting and urinating on a young girl. And it’s well worth reading this excellent recent essay on Orcinus on the growing misogyny of the Right and its relevance for non-Muslim society. [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
[...] 2006 Werribee gang rapists – a dozen of them – lured a 17-year-old girl with an intellectual disability, raped [...]