The city of Milwaukee reacted with stunned silence and instantaneous numbing to block the pain we all felt when we heard the news of the abominable treatment of an 11-year-old girl.

To make matters worse, the story wasn’t released until three days later and when it was, it was a small clip with very little information. Sure, it was on the front page, above the fold (that means the top half of the page for those of you who don’t work at a newspaper), but it was underneath a quote by the police chief, not even a heading describing the incident.

The quote by Hegerty referred to the state of the city throughout the recent months, not just the incident involving the horrific gang rape of a child. A matter of fact, the headline covered two stories about undeserving people experiencing violent crime. I found this disturbing.

Does the gang rape of a child not have precedence over a three-year-old missing person (adult person) case?

The incident took place on Sept. 4. The next day, the front page of the Journal Sentinel featured a story about the Middle East and a story about a missing woman with a picture of the missing woman’s mother putting up fliers.

Don’t get me wrong: I feel bad for the missing woman’s mother; that is not the point. There is an element of newsworthiness involving timeliness that the Journal Sentinel was lacking with that story. It simply wasn’t a front page story. Perhaps it could have been in the Metro section.

I am in no way saying that the Journal Sentinel ignored the story, or even knew about the incident. This is a comment about how important this little girl is to our city, and how painful her story is to hear. I got the impression from the story in the paper (or the clip, I should say) that this wasn’t an important incident. Yes, it is an embarrassment to our city, but that makes it more worth hearing. We need to know what’s going on so we can prevent a recurrence.

The impression I have gotten from this story is that this little 11-year-old girl had a crush on a 16-year-old girl and the older girl took advantage of this situation. The older girl asked the younger girl to perform sex acts with various men and the younger girl complied. When the child asked to stop, the teenager threatened to take away her friendship, so the little girl stopped complaining.

I don’t know how many of you out there have been an 11-year-old girl with a crush on someone that no one would understand, but let me tell you: it’s unpleasant and makes you do things that you would never do. This child was hurting; clinging onto the only person she thought she could trust and believe, a person that she assumed would never hurt her.

She couldn’t discuss the feelings she had with anyone, felt abandoned and alone, and would have done anything to be seen by this object of her affection. At that age especially, girls need to be told how wonderful they are, and that they have the right to make their own decisions in life. Still, no matter how many times you say it, every pubescent young woman is going to doubt you and hate herself. These feelings come with the age.

Unfortunately, in this case, the girl is not only upset, alone, born with an incurable disease and in love, she is also physically damaged when walking into this situation. The only fault this girl had was not having a mother or father who loved her, and being in love with a sociopath.

Not only do we not teach our daughters to be proud, strong women, but we ignore an attack of this magnitude? This is preposterous. The police department seems to be doing it’s job as a few of the child-molesters have been caught, and they charged the ring-leader as well. The paper seems to be keeping up with the story (albeit not in an important location), but I am disappointed with the lack of outcry by the city.

Have we become so used to violent crimes against children that no one bats an eye when a child is raped by an entire neighborhood? Why did we, as citizens, not band together to embrace this little girl and show our more moral support? I feel like everyone is trying to forget about this incident, this black mark on our gray city, but that will not incite change.

Demanding that our politicians do something, anything, will not help either, as they are frightened citizens themselves. Politicians are just representatives of the average people in our city. If you can’t come up with a solution, what makes you think these men and women can?

My best suggestion is that we don’t allow ourselves to forget that these victims (and perpetrators) are children, and they need us to take responsibility for them. Don’t let victims be forgotten: make sure our young people learn from their peers’ mistakes by punishing them for their crimes.

Rally together to give our children other alternatives besides crime and violence. Not every one of our children has to be a victim or an offender.

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