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Once again, I see that people are using a story that nearly was a tragedy to blame parents for poor parenting skills without actually knowing under what circumstances these young women were out at 1:30 in the morning.

For all any of you critics know, this could have been the first time they broke curfew. Perhaps they weakly acquiesced to parking with a boyfriend.

Having raised two teenagers myself, and done everything known to humankind to keep them on the straight and narrow, they STILL made boneheaded choices occasionally. Adolescents are emotional, impulsive, and hormone-driven. They make stupid mistakes in every type of behavior, from driving, drinking, dodging homework, etc.

This does not mean parents are not doing their job, nor does it mean that the children don't respect their parents, nor does it mean anything except that teenagers MAKE MISTAKES.

It is very sad that these girls will pay for years and years for their poor judgement. Anyone using this thread for comments about child-rearing should walk a mile in the shoes of a teen parent, and then apologize profusely.

I think some people here misinterpret comments about kids being out so late as "blaming the victim." I don't see that that is what is going on. Of course that vile animal is to blame! But I thought one of the few things most of here on FR could agree about is that there are an awful lot of people who are not properly parenting their children.

I think some people here take things too personally, as a reflection on themselves as parents. For instance, someone else here said their daughters broke curfew lots of times, but -- significantly -- she went on to say that they got punished! That parent is working to teach her daughters right from wrong.

In this case, it seems to me that they shouldn't have been out there at that isolated lovers-lane spot so late at night, summer or not. That's JMHO. Now, whether they were there because they snuck out or whether they were there because they had lax parents, we don't yet know. But in today's world, it's quite possible it is the latter. Being a parent is an awesome responsibility and duty, and many parents are in fact awful parents.

One commentator last night said (before news that they were raped came out), "If they were my daughters, I would hug them, tell them how much I love them, and then tell them they were grounded for the rest of the summer!"

I think he had the right attitude.

It is very sad that these girls will pay for years and years for their poor judgment.

I am going to apologise ahead of time for being very very hard on you and your fellow travelers who have gone down the path of "what were those girls doing in that place at that time." This statement and this thinking are dangerous and very ammoral, if not immoral, and to lapse into this feel good puritanism shows how out of focus your own moral sensibilities have become.

What poor judgment? Predators attack those at the edge of the heard, animal or human, but the kill did not happen because the victim could not stay in the center of the heard. We cannot all be at the center of the heard, and someone is going to be the victim. There is no codependency between victim and perpetrator in this case, but you have created one. Predators take victims. That is why they are called predators.

You and your fellow travelers, with this kind of statement, cause harm in at least three ways.

1. You continue the attitude of the Taliban by stigmatizing the victim. You make the psychological recovery of these women impossible - and that you most certainly and shamelessly did with your abominable statement - because you perpetuate the feelings of guilt and enable society to treat victims as somehow less worthy or somehow deserving of their fate. This is dead wrong.

2. You send a signal that juries can let these predators off because the victim bears part of the responsibility. We see this in Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. It is the "if the girl did not want to be raped what was she doing in that place at that time dressed in that manner" asking to be raped attitude.

3. You help fuzz the line that modern society continues to fuzz between what is criminal and what is merely immoral or contributes to the general harm and disorder of society. There used to be a very bright line. Doing bodily harm to another person to provide yourself some benefit is about the most criminal thing one can do besides commit murder. The line here should be clear and bright. Girls should be able to sleep in lovers' lane every night without having to face kidnap, rape, and murder. This isn't Monica Lewinsky flashing her thong at Bill Clinton. This is another order of things entirely.

We all know what those girls and boys were doing there. You and a few others here aside, most of us have been there. There is a long, long distance between making out in a car and asking for kidnap, rape and murder by a stranger with a gun.

You have immediately leaped to the conclusion that these are bad kids and/or their parents are bad parents. You have condemned them, without trial to a living hell that society should be helping them to climb out of. So long as they don't ruin lives with unwanted pregnancies or driving drunk, having a good time on a summer vacation is just fine in my book. We try, emphasis on try, to control teenagers because too many adults believe that teenagers lack the judgment to keep bad consequences from happening from their deliberate or negligent acts. But you have no evidence that they did anything that would result in, not hypothetical, but actual harm to themselves. Perhaps date rape, however cloudy a concept that can be is in some cases a consequence of bad judgement, but getting kidnapped and raped at gunpoint is not a normal societal consequence of bad judgment. It is the consequence that there is a criminal on the loose. I hope these girls will be able to have more good times, when and how they wish.

No, you and your kind are wrong, not just mistaken but morally wrong, and when people like you who surely know better, lose their moral focus and openly sneer at the victim, society is damned. God gave us the choice of good or evil as deliberate rational choices. If evil is the consequence of random acts then morality disappears.

In Tosca you have taken the side of Scarpia, and you believe that these girls should hurl themselves to their death off the castle wall. I really don't know how to state my abhorrance of your position more strongly than that.