Alleged rape in Minnesota should horrify every father

Minnesota football team walks out on practice
02:16
Story highlights
Issac Bailey: Minnesota football players allegedly
gang-raped woman. As a dad I'm horrified at
thought young men stood by
He says story is of a young woman treated as
disposable piece of trash, not human being.
Mistreatment of women an epidemic
Editor's Note: Issac Bailey has been a journalist
in South Carolina for two decades and was most
recently the primary columnist for The Sun News
in Myrtle Beach. He was a 2014 Harvard
University Nieman fellow. Follow him on Twitter:
@ijbailey . The views expressed are his own.
(CNN) — I made my son read the 80-page report
about an alleged gang rape at the University of
Minnesota in September. In an age in which we
are putting into the White House a man who
casually bragged about sexual assault, fathers
hoping to raise boys who become men who treat
women as equals don't have the luxury of
looking away when the horrific happens to a
female stranger instead of a well-known loved
one.
That we had that luxury for so many years is
among the many reasons awful things keep
happening.
I'll leave the legal wrangling to others, whether
there should have been criminal charges, or if
the alleged victim should prevail in civil
proceedings. And I don't believe this means the
young men involved are monsters.
As a father, though, I'm horrified that none of the
young men -- alleged perpetrators, between 10
to 20 of them -- thought to use his power to
protect the victim, or if that's too paternalistic,
protected his teammates from themselves.
As a father, I'd be horrified if my son put his or
his friends' own momentary self-interests above
common decency, no matter what I know about
the potentially corrupting power of crowds