Boston Globe, February 1, 2000
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Two 15-year-olds charged in T case
Girls face counts of attempt rape

By Francie Latour, Globe Staff

Days after a Boston High School student said she was sexually assaulted and beaten unconscious on an MBTA train by classmates who thought she was gay, two 15-year-old girls from the school were arraigned in juvenile court, charged with attempted rape and civil rights violations.

A third female student, who is 17, was to be arraigned today in Boston Municipal Court.

As city officials and youth workers condemned the alleged attack, calling it an unprecedented antigay and anti-ethnic hate crime, the case has sounded twin alarms about intolerance among an ever-more diverse public school population, and the increasing brutality seen among younger and younger teenage girls.

''We used to say, in the days of all the killings, that the girls are just a couple steps behind the boys,'' said Emmett Folgert, who heads the Dorchester Youth Collaborative in Codman Square.

''Do girls get overlooked because they haven't been going around shooting people? I think so. Now we're just starting to scratch the surface.''

Nykesha Gant, 17, of Dorchester, will face the same charges in adult court today as her ninth-grade juvenile co-defendants: four felony counts of indecent assault on a child, assault with a dangerous weapon, attempted rape, and civil rights violations by force, according to a spokesman for the Suffolk District Attorney's Office.

Officials would not release the names of the juveniles.

Prosecutors yesterday asked Judge Leslie Harris to set bail for one girl at $5,000 cash because she has a prior record. But Harris set bail at $500 for her, and released the other girl on personal recognizance. Both will return to court on Feb. 16.

All three defendants were among a group of six students who police said boarded an Orange Line train at New England Medical Center and attacked a 16-year-old classmate, molesting her and taunting her with accusations that she was a lesbian.

The girl, who is Moroccan, moved to the United States about a year ago with her father. She grew up in a culture where hand-holding among schoolgirls is customary.

The girl was alone at the time of the alleged attack. But police sources said the students had often seen her holding hands with other girls at school.

Authorities said that after motioning to their genitals and shouting, ''You want this? You like this?'' the girls tore at the 16-year-old's clothes, attempting to force her into a sexual act as passengers on the train stood by.

When a male student who was with the girls held a knife to the victim's throat, officials said, a male passenger stood up and tried to stop the attack. The suspect lunged at the man with the knife, narrowly missing him. Then, the girl said, all six of her assailants began beating her until she fell to the ground and passed out.

Over the weekend, Mayor Thomas M. Menino spoke out against the attack and Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant called the incident ''horrific.'' Yesterday, Tracey Lynch, a school department spokeswoman, said school officials were working with MBTA investigators to identify the other suspects.

Lynch said the two juveniles arraigned yesterday will face disciplinary proceedings today on whether they should be suspended pending the investigation.

Echoing the sentiments of clergy, police, and street workers who work with teenagers, Folgert said the incident ''crossed a line'' beyond the already familiar and growing problem of violence among teenage girls.

''Fights with girls are not unusual, but with this we're kind of in uncharted waters,'' Folgert said. ''The tearing the clothes off, the knife at someone's throat.... It's a scary thing.''

While much of the intense effort to combat youth violence in Boston has been successful, Folgert and others said, most of it has focused on boys, not girls.

Meanwhile, nationally, FBI uniform crime reports show that the rate of violent crime arrests for female juveniles has doubled since the 1980s, while the rate of arrests for juvenile males has remained steady.

Those rates alone don't spell an increase in actual criminal activity among young women, according to Dana Nurge, an assistant professor at the Northeastern University College of Criminal Justice who studies girls and gang activity.

But more and more, Nurge said, studies and anecdotes from youth workers around Boston suggest that teenage girls are getting involved in a wider range of crimes at a younger age.

As part of her study, Nurge interviewed 70 girls from Boston public schools.

''All the girls across the board had been involved in a lot of fights. There are a lot of issues driving their frustration and aggression,'' such as physical or sexual abuse at home, she said.

''But rather than taking it out on the sources of those problems, other girls are an easy target.''

Folgert, whose center has begun a program for Southeast Asian girls in the city, said, ''Someone needs to go out there and claim them. To tell these girls, 'You're important to us,' but also to get serious with them on what the limits are.''

Of equal concern to some was the notion that, in a school system where immigrant students from Angola to Cambodia are increasingly prominent, the suspects didn't know or didn't care about customs that are tradition in other developing countries.

''This was a crime about ethnicity and culture,'' one source said. ''The reasoning behind it was totally unacceptable, and someone has to make sure the kids get that message.''

Boston Globe, February 2, 2000
Box 2378, Boston, MA, 02107
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Family says girl still afraid

By Francie Latour, Globe Staff

As a third Boston High School student was arraigned in the assault of a Moroccan girl by classmates who thought she was gay, a relative of the alleged victim yesterday said the child was terrified about returning to school alone.

''She's afraid to go back,'' said an aunt of the victim. ''Every day she needs to have someone go to pick her up.''

The girl told police last week that she had been attacked while riding an MBTA train by six teenagers who believed she was a lesbian because she followed a custom common in her homeland: holding hands with another girl.

The aunt, who did not identify herself, said the 16-year-old had left Morocco less than a year ago to receive better schooling in the United States.

Now ''she's crying all day and all night,'' the aunt said. ''She can't sleep, and she can't believe what happened to her.''

One of her alleged assailants, Nykesha Gant, 17, was charged with four felonies yesterday in Boston Municipal Court, including attempted rape and civil rights violations. Those charges together carry a maximum punishment of up to 30 years in prison.

Two 15-year-old girls charged in the incident could also be indicted and tried as youthful offenders, allowing a judge to impose an adult sentence if they are convicted.

Gant was released yesterday with orders to have no contact with the victim. Gant is due back in court March 7.

In an alleged attack that began on the train and continued on a subway platform, prosecutors said, the suspects fondled the girl and tried to tear off her pants, at one point holding her arms apart and trying to molest her at knifepoint.

The girl managed to break free when a T patron intervened.

Gerald P. Stewart, a Suffolk County prosecutor, said it was not the first time Moroccan girls had been harrassed in school. He said there had been incidents in December in which girls were taunted for holding hands.

Arnold Cohen, an attorney for Gant, said of his client yesterday: ''I'm not sure she fully understands just how serious this is. ... It started out as a group of kids teasing another kid, and it sounds like it got way beyond that.''

A lawyer for one of the juveniles, Stephen J. Weymouth, said he feared media attention about the case would create pressure to try the teenagers under the harsher youthful offender law.

''I will concede that something happened, but I don't think it rises to the level of what it's being made out to be,'' Weymouth said.

At Boston High School yesterday, hundreds of students, teachers, and administrators signed a petition expressing concern about the incident and saying the school valued diversity.

''The students are really concerned,'' said Greg Allen, a teacher who collected signatures. ''They are anxious to say that they believe in diversity and they believe in community.''

Boston Globe, February 2, 2000

The many faces of intolerance

By Eileen McNamara, Globe Columnist

Ralph Martin was thinking a lot about Alan Keyes this week.

No, Suffolk's liberal, black, Republican district attorney was not in New Hampshire stumping for the conservative, black, Republican presidential aspirant. He was in the Suffolk Courthouse, prosecuting three teenage girls for a hate crime for which, he says, men like Keyes and fellow presidential contender Gary Bauer bear some measure of social responsibility.

''We expect to hear hate-mongering in taverns or in the streets. We are quick to denounce intolerance in the ignorant and uneducated, but we don't do such a good job when the person is wearing a suit,'' says the district attorney.

John Rocker, the Atlanta Braves relief pitcher, tells a reporter he would not want to sit next to ''a queer with AIDS'' on the New York City subway and he is fined $20,000 and suspended for the first month of the baseball season. Keyes and Bauer tell campaign crowds they equate homosexuality with moral deviance and both men get a podium during the Republican presidential primary debates.

''How can they presume to talk about us as one nation and then exclude a portion of the population that works, that contributes, that has no intention of going away?'' asks Martin. ''How can Keyes, especially, talk about the detriment of racial isolation - and he does - and not see that he is marginalizing a whole group of people in the same way blacks were marginalized. The platform he has in this campaign legitimizes intolerance, and intolerance leads to the kind of crime we have this week.''

On Monday and yesterday, while Bauer and Keyes were wrapping up their campaigns in New Hampshire, two 15-year-old girls and a 17-year-old classmate from Boston High School were arraigned in Boston on felony charges of indecent assault on a child, assault with a dangerous weapon, attempted rape, and civil rights violations, stemming from an attack on a 16-year-old Boston High student on an MBTA Orange Line train.

Her attackers allegedly targeted the African immigrant because she often held hands with her female friends, a common practice among schoolgirls in her homeland, but apparently a signal to suspicious classmates that she might be gay. Taunted as a lesbian when she boarded the train at New England Medical Center, the girl was pushed, molested, threatened at knifepoint, and then severely beaten.

''We say we are appalled that anyone could be attacked because of sexual orientation or even suspicion about sexual orientation, but what does it say that presidential candidates can stand up on television and use words like 'perversity' to describe American citizens and get applause?'' asks Martin.

Keyes and Bauer have both made opposition to abortion and what they call the ''radical homosexual agenda'' the cornerstone of their campaigns, but Keyes has been the most vocal in his denunciations of gays. ''Homosexuality is an abomination,'' he has said. ''The comparison between race and homosexuality is absurd.''

After the arraignment of two of the juvenile defendants in the attack on the Boston High student this week, Martin was saying he failed to see the distinction. ''Intolerance is intolerance. When I grew up in Brooklyn my best friend called my father Uncle Ralph and I called his dad Uncle Chuck. We did everything together, went to parties, ran together on the streets. I was in my freshman or sophomore year at Brandeis when he told me he was gay. It made me confront my own prejudices. It is really no different than race. If we applaud an antigay sentiment in a political campaign, we are endorsing intolerance as a legitimate viewpoint. It's not a legitimate view.''

None of the Republican presidential candidates exiting New Hampshire this morning has embraced the extension of full civil rights to homosexual Americans. Single-sex marriage is still a controversial topic in America and this is not a Republican field eager to challenge social convention. But only Keyes and Bauer have characterized their campaigns as moral crusades for the soul of the United States.

Had the candidates been in Suffolk Courthouse with Ralph Martin this week they might have worried less about America's soul and more about the soldiers in their own ''righteous'' cause.

• Eileen McNamara's e-mail address is mcnamara@globe.com.