Reply #79: Not surprising

[Lydia Leftcoast]

Back in the 1970s, my mother was a ward clerk on an adolescent psych unit in a major Minneapolis hospital, and some of the boys raped a girl while the nurses and counselors was in a meeting. (This was not on my mother's shift but on the weekend.) You'd think the professional staff would know enough not to leave a bunch of unstable teenagers unsupervised, but they did leave them without anyone watching them.

When the girl complained, the psychologists and nurses did everything they could to try to discredit her, saying that she had a crush on one of the boys and was getting back at him for rejecting her. They even said that she had self-inflicted the bite marks on her breasts.

Then two things happened. One boy in the group of rapists broke ranks and confessed that the rape had indeed taken place. The girl phoned her parents.

It was all settled in a hush-hush manner after a gynecologist examined the girl and said that she had definitely been raped. The hospital paid a huge settlement to the girl, but the boys were never prosecuted.

The first instinct of anyone in charge of a large institution is to cover said institution's ass.