(MAJOR TW) -- High School Assigned Reading Involving Gang Rape
I remember very little about this because being forced to read this book, with inadequate support from the teacher, cause me to have a mental health crisis and I was pulled from school for the rest of the year (two-ish months?)
This would have been sometime between 2012 and 2014.
The only thing I remember about the book is there is a group of young boys, prepubescent or very early in puberty, and one of them had gotten a hold of a dildo and they were all joking around and laughing about it. Then a boy they habitually bully and beat up is passing by where ever it is they are playing.
So the group chases him down and pins him, but before they start really beating on him the ring leader of the group proposes that they pants him and spank him with the dildo. And it escalates from there, with a member of the group eventually realizing where they could stick it.
It's been over a decade since this class read.
The Cornell 7 (actually the Cornell 57) has me dwelling on this.
I'm frustrated I can't remember anything else about the book.
We also read "Kite Runner" and then "Catcher in the Rye" earlier in the year.
If handled by a kind, competent teacher, with actual access to a support person like a guidance counselor or therapist, the students could have been guided through some really important lessons about sexual violence.
But we didn't talk about it at all.
I actually tried to talk privately about "Catcher in the Rye", and specifically the line: "When something perverty like that happens, I start sweating like a bastard. That kind of stuff's happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid. I can't stand it." I thought Holden had been sexually assaulted in the past, and was really confused by it. (As in, I can't be right because then the author would have just told us, right? It would change so, so much about the book up to that point, so why wouldn't the author tell us? But what else could it mean?).
My teacher completely shut down the sexual angle, was that it only Holden rejecting the support, compassion, and insight of everyone around him. It was a short conversation and I don't remember it well at all. :(
Part of me wonders if the above book even exists, or if my brain just chewed up every horrible sexually abusive thing from High School English and spat it into long term memory or however that works.