Anonymous Does Right By Me

I love Anonymous.  Call me sappy, but I have a lump in my throat as I write this because of the way they are standing up for the rights of an innocent young girl.

“The videos, pictures and tweets are chilling. A picture of a girl dangling limply from the arms of two young men.

Other boys, laughingly saying the girl had to be dead because she didn’t flinch as her body was violated.

An alleged rape, made into a joke.”  CNN

The alleged attackers are part of a revered football team, and aside from laughing about their evil deeds – like gang-raping, humiliating and devastating a girl  for life isn’t enough – they apparently posted photos and video throughout social media, joking, clearly proud of their accomplishments.

Well, Anonymous didn’t take too kindly to that.

“The town of Steubenville has been good at keeping this quiet and their star football team protected,” an Anonymous member wearing the group’s trademark Guy Fawkes mask says in a video posted to the group’s LocalLeaks website. CNN

They released sensitive information about the football team and the  town, and they are threatening to release more unless everybody comes clean. It also did a protest “to help those who have been victimized by the football team or other regimes.”

The spokesperson in the mask said that the Anonymous organization will not allow “a group of young men who turn to rape as a game or sport get the pass because of athletic ability or small-town luck.”

And with that, I melted.  The poor girl gets revictimized every time her story gets written about in the news, and I worry about her just because I’m blogging about it again, but if there’s any consolation to her, it’s for her to know that there are people who care, who believe her and side with her, and who don’t even know her. Anonymous is assumed to be a  group of young men too, and they care.

Maybe they are breaking the rules a little bit, but I’m proud of them.  When the rich, the strong and the powerful oppress and abuse the weak and the vulnerable, outnumbering an unconscious girl by gang to 1, this makes me proud.

This reminds me that no matter what horrible things humans do to one another, no matter what injustice is done, there are good people who anonymously want to right the wrongs, and this gives me hope for the future.