The Department of Justice estimates that one in every three boys referred to juvenile justice detention is raped. I used to wonder what it might take for people to care enough to put a stop to it. I was naive to put it mildly. Institutions employ rape as overt victimization. This is indefensible and amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. It is also the institutional status quo. Minors do not have the same rights as adults. Legally, it is assumed that adolescents cannot have the same expectations regarding sexual battery used to violate them. This comes from English law when children were property. Juvenile detention facilities have a higher incidence of rape and sexual assault than federal prisons for adults do. Federal prisons report half the numbers that juvenile detention institutions (this would include group homes) report to the DOJ. The State of Georgia is credited with the most sexual assaults, with South Carolina coming in a close second. ProPublica reports that there are now 70,000 adolescent boys in the country’s juvenile detention facilities, thousands of them 16 years old or younger. The new normal is the old normal. This is the kind of violence that stays with kids the rest of their lives. The gravitas of it weighs them down with the kind of regressive emotional baggage they cannot escape from. What if this was your kid. It could be your kid. It has to stop.