What the?!?! Who the!?!?!? Are you high?

I read two newspapers, the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe because it's good to have balance.

(In Boston there are those who swear that the Globe is for bleeding heart over-the-river liberals with their heads up their asses, and others who swear that the Herald is for those Masshole retaahds who spend half their day screaming at the car radio during drive-time talk shows.)

Anyway, today the Herald is covering an incident which took place at the Ella Baker House. It would seem that a teenage girl was raped by an employee and rather than call police or DSS immediately, the person who founded the center, Reverend Eugene Rivers, preferred instead to call the mother and have a meeting to discuss the incident and to pray.

It would seem that the rapist/employee (who is 32) originally paid the girl for sex and when she decided to end or change the arrangement, he forced her.

This hardly seems like the safe haven for troubled teenagers that it is supposed to be. There is a reason adults are not allowed to have sex with minors. If he is 32 and she is 15, is that less worse than 30 and 13, or 28 and 11, or 23 and 6?

So the end result is that a crime was committed. Not a misunderstanding, not an accident, not a mistake - a crime. And crime gets reported to the police.

Can you imagine how this summer would have been if instead of reporting homicides to the police, people got together to discuss the crime, to pray about it instead of dialling 9-1-1?

It's bad enough that the Ella Baker House, which is supposed to be a haven for kids living in high-crime neighborhoods, is instead a place that takes hundreds of thousands of dollars from the city and state and then thinks they are above the law?

Some people will think that the victim is lying. Some people will think that the victim is truthful.

But it's never a good idea to take the law into your own hands. If a teenager says she was raped by a staff member, call the cops. Don't put the employee on administrative leave while you sort out the details and then counsel the victim yourself.

And if you don't read the Herald, here is the article from the Globe (Boston.com).