We live in such a way, it seems that even after all of this time we fail to protect our daughters. Well, that's what he said, hm? That administration guy. He did too: "They gave us their daughters and we failed to protect them." We like to think about how far we've come, but in the end, it's not that big a leap from Lot, Agamemnon and Lord Capulet. They gave up their daughters, we do the same.

      When I was in grade school I was teased. A lot. I was tiny and I liked to read, which made me pretty unpopular. One winter day, I was walking home for lunch when a group of older boys snuck up on me. I was face down in the snow before I even knew they were there, and they grabbed my mittens and held them over my head, laughing like it was the funniest thing in the world to see me crying. The tears were freezing to my face, and I was jumping as high as I could to try and grab my mittens, but the one boy, the ringleader I guess, kept pulling them up, just out of my reach. All my small face could see was the mitten being dangled in front of me like a carrot, when it suddenly was grabbed from his hands, handed to me, and a pair of hands removed me from the circle of boys and behind a nearby tree.

      When I peeked out from behind it, I saw my father, who had come to pick me up. He was red-faced and screaming at the group of boys, who cowered, shocked from his rage. It reminded me of a nature video, what it must be to see a father lion come home to see his pride under attack. He was yelling, asking the boys "what were they thinking, teasing a girl half their size, and outnumbered four to one, where did it come from, what could I have possibly done to deserve it?"

      My father took me out for lunch after that. I was very quiet, my ten year old mind trying to process what I had done to deserve it. I couldn't think of anything that made me a threat to them, someone they needed to attack. I was just trying to get home for lunch.

      When I told my teacher that afternoon about the boys who teased me, I was told, essentially, that "boys will be boys". Well, that's funny. They get to pick on me because they are boys. Boys get away with it because this is what they do. I didn't know it at the time, but somewhere else, another boy was being a boy. The date was December 6, 1989.

      What can be done for these women? What could have been done? What would my father have even been able to do if the boys at the playground had held a gun to my head rather than my mittens over it? We do not protect our daughters, because we cannot know what to protect them from. It is a crime of ignorance, and of indifference. You can't protect someone from their gender and the assumptions that come with it, and no one seems willing to offer up any explanation other than boys will be boys.