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The Loudon County Special Grand Jury final report has been released. [previous discussion here]
For a summary of the background: Loudoun County School District had a possibly-gender-something student sexually assault a much-younger female student who the assailant had a previous relationship with at Stone Bridge High School (SBHS) on May 28th, 2021. While eventually arrested, state law limits pre-trial detention to 21-days for this class of juvenile, and the assailant was transfered to Broad Run High School (BRHS) for the next school year. The father of this first victim was expelled from the school on the day of the assault, and later arrested by the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office (LCSO) during a school board (LCSB) meeting where he confronted or was confronted by someone (not a part of the school board?). On October 6th, the assailant further abducted and sexually assaulted another female student at BRHS.
Get used to the acronyms; the report uses them everywhere.
The report is... a read. With apologies for transcription errors:
There's two separate failures, here, that I think are worth discussion and highlighting. One is the more overt culture war, and the grand jury report does make very clear that the culture war drove a lot of bad practice. It's a little hard to tell since the report uses roles rather than names for everything, but it seems like even the last fig leaf Superintendent Zeigler was using about the controversial school board meeting, that he assumed the questions were about policy 8040-related sexual assaults rather than sexual assaults in general, was not actually true either, as an half-hour before the email previously made available, it turns out that:
With extreme charity, perhaps this refers to the father’s near arrest, and not the rape itself, but that doesn’t absolve much.
At the same time, there's another disturbing component that I think a lot of 'mainstream' conservative critiques are likely to overlook:
That is, a teaching assistant -- in Virginia, a mandatory reporter -- walked past a bathroom stall where a violent rape was in-progress and, once the teaching assistant left, continued. Further, that this was not an unusual mistake, but enough of a practice that it was recognized by the offender. It's quite possible that Superintendent Ziegler was making a bald-faced lie not in the sense that this particular sexual assault occurred in a bathroom, but that there is little effort or interest in preventing dubiously consensual sexual behavior in bathrooms between students at all.
And this continued more broadly. On the day of the assault, the report details how the school was more intent on expelling an angry father and seeking a no-trespass order against him (e-mail at 3:09), even suggesting that the father "should have been arrested", than tracking down the at-large rapist (who was only grabbed at the end of the school day). Even once arrested, the local police showed little interest in bringing the case.
And even once that was done, there was a complex game of blame- and paperwork-passing that seemed optimized to lose track of things, and not just for this specific case.
((SBHS seemed to think the student had transferred to SBHS from another high school, THS, over similar allegations. The grand jury report says that this probably is confused and didn't happen? Which is another level of wtf, maybe.))
This continued even as other warning signs kept scaling up.
This included, separately, the assailant's grandmother and mother both requesting additional assistance from schools and the probation officer, with the grandmother calling the assailant a "sociopath."
In early September, the assailant had separate incidents at the new school, first following female students around school long enough to result in an art class shuffling the assailant's seating around, and then a more serious incident in an English classroom where the assailant tried to take a female student's Chromebook, and asked the female student about online nudes (and another boy if the boy's grandmother had online nudes?). This was escalated, yet:
On October 6th, this escalated to a second sexual assault, this time with the assailant abducting a female student without a fig leaf of a pre-existing relationship.
In "late October", the school commissioned an independent review of the incidents at hand. However:
It's hard to summarize exactly how much of a shitshow this was, but :
Even if true, that's not a fig leaf. "Oh, you didn't mean 'rapes under our new trans-friendly policy'? You meant all those other rapes that happen in our schools? Sorry for misunderstanding you!"
Even accounting for the right-wing bias in the reporting, it sounds like the grand jury was mad as hell about the whole affair. Good. The kid at the centre of it all sounds, from other things I've read previously, to have been totally fucked-up by his dysphoric family life, and instead of doing anything to help him, the school board was all "Oh you are gender-fluid and trans and a girl? Of course you are! Feel free to use the girls' bathrooms at your own discretion! Rainbow flags aloft!" because, and this is just my own opinion, they were a bunch of spineless idiots in thrall to the local trans activist parents' group.
EDIT: Okay, to be fair to the school board, they were being kept in the dark by the administration. So it's the superintendent and the principals that should be strung up by their thumbs. There was an immense amount of "sweep it under the carpet" going on, and things were made worse by A not informing B that C had told them they were going to be working with D between the courts, the schools, the sheriff's office and pretty much everyone involved.
What I really hated afterwards were all the good progressives, online and in the media, solidly (1) engaging in victim-blaming which, in any other context, they would tear someone apart for doing and (2) suddenly they were all very, very sure that this wasn't a trans kid or gender-fluid, this was a male boy who was completely male and not really trans or any other identity he claimed, even again where they would be "if you say you're trans, you're trans!".
Yeah. Enough shame and blame to go around for every single person, including that bitch of a prosecutor who tried to hang the father of the raped girl with all her might.
I think that the trans angle is a possible read, and almost certainly a component of the story... but I think there's a lot of fingerprints that don't touch on it, and I think it's important not to miss them. There's definitely stuff like all the people insisting that the assailant was wearing a kilt, despite all everything going on, but there's also issues that had ignored other bad conduct when that bad conduct was the only real interaction they had.
In extreme cases, this involved parts of the system missed dozens of other incidents, and had for years, including in ways that never would have seen the assailant either in this case or in others, and might not have even gotten information about gender beyond the name on a piece of paper: the reporting system that had been broken for the better part of a decade falls into this group. I think the special ed teacher's assistant literally walking past a rape in progress does as well. There's plausible explanations for the complete lack of Title IX infrastructure, but more likely it's just not something anyone who should have been making the decision wanted to think for five minutes about. Same, if not more so, for the complete abdication of any role by the director of 'safety and security', the long-standing lack of cooperation between the school district and police, and the efforts to obscure the 'external' review.
There's still ways to argue these latter problems derive from culture war causes -- maybe even true ones! -- but they point to a far broader problem that I think a lot of social conservatives are ignoring in favor of the flavour of the month.
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