Kids are growing up fast, it seems…

This is a horrible story and a part of me doesn’t even know how this kind of thing happens.

Three boys, ages 8 and 9, were being held Monday in a detention center on charges of kidnapping and raping an 11-year-old girl near a suburban apartment complex, officials said.

However, the fathers of the boys are of course saying that the sex was consensual and the girl is just “blaming it on rape” because she “doesn’t want to get in trouble with her parents.”

However, the police are still investigating.

Acworth Police Chief Mike Wilkie said said one of the boys was accused of threatening to hit the girl with a rock before the alleged assault. Wilkie also said the investigation is “far from over,” and investigators are looking into claims that after the alleged attack, the girl talked about it with her friends at a slumber party.

It’s easy to not believe that this happened, but at some point we do need to put trust in girls. If a girl that age was accused of sexually or physically assaulting a boy, the boy would be believed. I don’t think that there’s any question in that. Girls are not trusted. Young women, and old women are not trusted as much as their male counterparts. Either way, this girl was traumatized one way or another and something like this will most likely stick with her.

It’s a sad case for her and for the boys that are being accused of this. When did kids stop being kids?

A call for more male feminists

Or, anti-sexist male activists. It’s pretty much all the same. Jackson Katz, who is one of the leading male anti-sexist activists, spoke to the New England Patriots and the U.S. Marine Corps that men can’t sit around and do nothing about sexism and violence against women in our society. He calls for men to “stand up to a culture that allows the physical and psychological subjection of women.” Well, I would say that I have to agree!

“We need more men with the guts to break out [of] complicit silence,” Katz said.

Too often, Katz said, men allow themselves to disregard the issue because they are “good guys” who don’t beat their girlfriends or assault women.

In a culture rife with sexism and gender-based violence, refraining from hitting or raping a woman may not be enough to make a man a “good guy,” he said. “We need to raise the bar a little.”

I am really all for male feminists. It’s true that more men need to step up and realize that men are the problem and they should be active in influencing boys and young men that sexism, violence against women and any other “women’s issue” (of course, not just an societal issue, always gotta slap that women’s in there!) is not acceptable in society and women shouldn’t be the only ones to fight for this cause.

I sincerely hope that men take up this notion, because it’s really for the importance of one half of society.

Annoyance of the day!

I saw this over at Feministing and I had to bring it over here to share.

Ohh goodness, right?