Anonymous Wants to Teach Rape Prevention in Schools

Officials at Steubenville High were not too psyched about that.

Ollyy/Shutterstock

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


In late December, Anonymous hacked the Steubenville, Ohio, high school football team’s fan website in retaliation for its players’ involvement in the gang rape of a 16-year-old girl. The hackers threatened to post students’ and teachers’ Social Security numbers unless the girl received an apology; someone else sent the school a bomb threat. The hactivist group’s antagonistic relationship with Steubenville High quickly made headlines, but what has gone unreported until now was how Anonymous quietly reached out to the school at the same time, hoping to visit classes and teach students how to identify and prevent rapes.

A female Anonymous member approached Steubenville High about teaching rape prevention. Not surprisingly, she was rebuffed.

In early January, the Anonymous spokesman in Steubenville, @Master_of_Ceremonies (MC for short), convinced a female Anonymous member to pitch school officials on the idea of a rape awareness class. “He believed that there needed to be someone to get into the schools to bring a new approach to the system on assault, bullying, rape, and when not to be afraid to speak up and do something when someone is in trouble,” she wrote me via MC. The Anons also wanted to “give the kids a different viewpoint of what [the group’s Steubenville operation] was all about, other than what the teachers were telling them,” she wrote.

Her call wasn’t well received. “Our teachers are qualified and more than capable of teaching our students about rape, not people in masks, who go around terrorizing people,” the Anon recalls a school official saying before hanging up. (Administrators with Steubenville High could not be reached for comment.)

Since then, Anonymous’ success in making the Steubenville rape a national story has prompted dozens of pleas for help from other alleged rape victims. MC and his friends can’t possibly fact-check all of their stories, and they’re reluctant to blindly become “somebody’s personal army,” as he puts it. Moreover, he isn’t sure that investigating and publicizing another sexual crime is even the best way to cut down on rapes. The problem, as he now sees it, is a lack of education. One of the convicted Steubenville rapists had claimed in his defense that he didn’t know rape could include fingering a girl’s genitals. “If you don’t know that,” MC says, “that means you don’t get taught that.”

Ohio requires all high schools to offer a course in teen dating violence prevention, but it provides no funding for the job. Some schools still don’t offer the training, says Katie Hanna, the executive director of the Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence. The availability of similar courses in other states varies widely; some don’t want teachers to talk about anything sex-related, besides abstinence.

MC doesn’t have a background in education or sexual violence prevention, but his work with Anonymous has given him a pretty good idea of what he’d like to talk about. He’d like to say that if saw two guys lugging off a drunk girl by her hands and feet with the intent to rape her—as happened in Steubenville—he’d knock those guys out cold and drag them outside. Or that if you shoot a video of somebody joking about a rape, you should hand over that video to the cops as evidence, or else you’re as much of a bastard as the rapists. Or that Anonymous is everywhere, so rapists had better be careful: “As long as they think somebody is always watching,” he told me, “that might deter some things.”

MC is under no illusion that schools will welcome Anonymous into their classrooms. “A lot of Anons are pro-legalizing marijuana,” he points out. And then there’s perhaps the bigger problem of the ones who are in prison for hacking corporate websites.

“We would be open to talking to Anonymous,” says a rape prevention educator.

Yet I spoke with the leaders of several groups that work to raise awareness about sexual violence, and they didn’t dismiss the idea of partnering with Anonymous. “We would be open to talking to them, certainly, yeah,” said Hanna of the Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence.

Anonymous deserves a lot of credit for putting high school rape on the national radar, says Tracy Cox, spokeswoman for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. Although she would be worried that victims of sexual assault might be frightened by hearing about rape from men in Guy Fawkes masks, she figures a bit of explanation about “what the mask symbolizes” could allay their fears. The question of a partnership is more about “how we get there,” she adds. “I think it’s great that people want to get involved. That’s what we want.”

It’s also unclear how many Anons would be interested in taking on that type of role. Standing in front of a blackboard isn’t exactly the stuff of hackers, but then, neither is a lot of what Anonymous has been doing of late. “There’s a lot of things that are totally messed up with the culture,” MC says, especially when it comes to “sports and stuff.” But, he adds, “if you can get to the kids in grade school, middle school, and even high school, that could change a lot of things right there.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate