Married Couple Propositions 13-Year-Old Girl For Sex, and Naturally, People Blame… The Girl

By Erin Gloria Ryan  |  August 6, 2012 | 10:30pm
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A couple in Gurnee, Illinois was arrested and charged with attempting to facilitate sex with a 13-year-old girl, which is completely messed up on its own. But the story becomes more of a symphony of WTF when you scroll on down past the article about the couple’s arrest, into the comments, where everyone and their dirty uncle shows up to weigh in on how it’s probably the girl’s fault, kind of, a little bit. Those little barely-teenage temptresses sure know their way around a group sex situation nowadays, after all. What. The. Actual. Fuck.

The girl’s mother discovered that something was afoot when she looked through her daughter’s cell phone and saw that she had been receiving “inappropriate” text messages from 21-year-old Kevin Pettitt and 25-year-old Gina Gusimano. A detective pretending to be the girl exchanged messages with the couple and agreed to perform sex acts with them at a prearranged time, and when Gusimano showed up for their date, the couple was arrested. This sounds like an entirely clear cut, open and shut case of two a-holes trying to have sex with a teenager.

Nope! Not if you’re one of the Chicago Tribune’s online readers who think there must be more to the story. In fact, the comments after the piece skip entirely over the “My, what horrible people! I hope the girl gets whatever help and support she needs!” phase of Reacting to a Story of a Kid Being Propositioned and head straight to the “But What Did She Do to Deserve It?” territory. And that’s when my cranium heads for my desk, over and over again.

Not defending the couple, but how did they get the girl’s number? And you’d be amazed at what some 13-year-olds are capable these days.

Ten people “liked” this comment.

In addition to being kind of sexually asking for it and adulty, another helpful commenter noted that the girl shouldn’t have had a cell phone (shitty parenting, victim’s mother!)

My son was allowed a cell phone…. When he got a job.

Yes, it must have been her mother’s fault that a couple of adults propositioned a 13-year-old for sex. That’s it.

And, of course, no conversation about a child who was propositioned for sex by an adult couple would be complete without a creepy debate among grown men about what the age of consent should be.

But in the midst of men guessing that perhaps the 13-year-old girl is to blame for her sexual harassment, a voice of reason:

It’s amazing how times have changed. Romeo and Juliet are heros to us, but if the same thing happened now, everyone, including the parents and the priest who married them would be in prison. There wouldn’t have been a suicide because they all be locked up — perverts, all of them.

Well, that’s settled.

[Chicago Tribune]

 
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