New Zealand Teen Rapists' School Knew About Roast Busters, Did Nothing

By Erin Gloria Ryan  |  November 8, 2013 | 4:30pm
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As more details emerge about the self-styled New Zealand rape club that called itself the “Roast Busters,” naturally, questions arise. Namely: What the fuck? Followed by: What kind of a malformed fucksticks do this kind of thing to other human beings? And, finally, the inevitable: How the fuck did this happen? It looks like we’ve got a partial answer to item number 3: The Roast Busters operated for years not because these things went on in secret; they operated for years because the people who knew about it did nothing.

New Zealand’s 3 News reports that three of the boys in the club — which gang raped girls who were too young to consent, too drunk to consent, or both and then attempted to shame the girls by bragging about it on social media — attended Green Bay High School. A 13-year-old who was raped by 3 of her Roast Buster classmates in 2011 complained to the boys’ school, only to be met with a resounding shrug. School officials couldn’t do anything about it, you see, because the infraction occurred off of school grounds. When she formally complained to police, they claimed they couldn’t do anything about it because they didn’t have enough evidence. And then one of her rapists began bullying her. From 3 News,

The final straw, she said, was being bullied on school grounds by the same boy, Beraiah Hales, because she’d gone to police.
“She just kept on getting bullied, sometimes she would go into the toilets, she was wagging, go into the toilets crying her eyes out, stay in there so no one could find her.”
The school, she says, did nothing.

When confronted by the media about their complicit bumbling, school officials responded similarly to Auckland police: by taking an index finger, placing it between their lips, and moving the index finger up and down while making a gurgling sound. Here, Spongebob Squarepants demonstrates the effectiveness of school and police officials in this entire awfulness.


In fact, the victim (who can’t be named for legal reasons) wasn’t even the only girl who reported Roast Busters behavior to school officials; Principal Morag Hutchinson said she’d never heard of “Roast Busters” until the story broke, but she did kinda sorta recall an incident in April of 2012 involving some girl and some boys and a party but… oh gee whiz it’s so easy to forget about rape specifics. The incident was resolved. Or something.

She says she was aware of an incident at an out-of-school party which she was told about it in April 2012, and that [Roast Busters ringleader] Beraiah [Hales] left the next month. She said the school co-operated fully with the police and tried to support the family concerned.

Except the school didn’t, really, “support the family,” because the Roast Busters continued to operate for a fucking year and a half after that incident.

Two years of excusing, of rationalizing, of turning a blind eye means that dozens (or more, depending on what source you consult) of young girls were victimized by a group of privileged predators. What happened in West Auckland is an inexcusable example of society completely failing young women — all the way from the police to the schools to their peers to their parents. And it’s going to continue happening unless people make a decision, en masse, to give a shit about girls.

[3 News]

 
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