Spanking In Gangs
When I was twelve or thirteen, one of those pulpy trash “Girl Gang” novels fell into my hands. You know the type, with lurid covers promising sex that’s not actually in the book, plus a tall tale about implausible juvenile delinquent girls doing all manner of non-sexual criminality. I remember quite vividly a scene in which a girl was (as the kids put it these days) “jumped in” to the gang by being viciously whipped with a wet leather belt. Several girls pulled her clothes off and held her down while the gang leader soaked her belt in a bucket of water, and then beat her quite a lot.
Of course I haven’t thought of that book in a couple of decades, until this police blotter entry came to my attention:
Two 16-year-old Urbana boys were arrested on charges of aggravated battery and mob action midday Monday. According to an Urbana police report, the two boys beat a 14-year-old girl with a belt, while a 17-year-old Urbana boy spanked a 15-year-old Urbana girl in Carle Park.
Mob action? Sounds like copspeak for gang activity in a jurisdiction that hasn’t updated its lingo since Prohibition. But it’s a rare thing to hear about a spanking incident, consensual or not, involving nobody but teens. I wonder what the full story is?
The story is sourced to the February 21/2001 Daily Illini in Champaign, IL. (I’m not, however, including a link to the site where Google turned up the reference. The reference comes from the archives of one of those virulent anti-spanking outfits, and they’d doubtless get all up in arms about “perpetuating the cycle of violence” or some such nonsense if they started getting hits from a site that fails to condemn adult spankings for pleasure.)
