The press reported it in various ways—either as a “brutal gang rape” or, more forensically, as a “21/2-hour assault” on the Richmond High School campus. Any way you look at it, the horrendous attack on a 15-year-old girl raises troubling questions for theologians, criminologists and, of course, psychiatrists. How do we understand an act as brutal as rape? What factors and forces in the rapist’s development can possibly account for such behavior? And how on earth do we explain the apparent indifference of the large crowd that watched the attack in Richmond, Calif, and allegedly did nothing to stop it—or even, to report it?
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