A lawsuit has been filed against a middle school in Fairfax County, Virginia over an alleged sexual assault that was swept under the rug by faculty members.
The victim, who was 12 years old at the time of the assaults, claims that she was sexually harassed on school property for months, and had been repeatedly sexually assaulted in a secluded area near her bus stop, sometimes even at knifepoint.
The girl, identified in court documents as B.R. to protect her identity, stated that she had been gang-raped multiple times in the school’s hallway closet by older male students between 2011 and 2012. After this time period, the plaintiff began at-home schooling.
These older boys “repeatedly physically assaulted and battered, sexually assaulted and battered, sexually abused and raped” the then-12-year-old girl at Carson Middle School in Herndon, Virginia.
The filing states that three unknown male students would force the young female into a closet between classes and rape her, in what the suit describes as being “consistent with the modus operandi of human and sexual traffickers in the Fairfax community.”
According to the lawsuit, in the fall of 2008, sex traffickers plagued Fairfax County and northern Virginia. The suit said, “organized gangs and co-conspirators began targeting juvenile females in Fairfax and northern Virginia to intimidate and coerce them into participating in commercial sex acts.” This would often involve MS-13 gang members, who were teenagers at the time, grooming middle and high school girls into prostitution.
“It started small, and it just continued to escalate, and Fairfax County knew about it at the beginning,” said the victim’s lawyer, Karin Sweigart, about the sexual harassment that turned into violent assaults. “They knew this. They brushed it off. They swept it under the rug.”
The lawsuit against Carson Middle School alleges that school faculty did not take the instances of sexual assault seriously, “performing superficial, self-serving investigations and not disciplining students for sexual violence and harassment because the disciplinary rates were measured by governmental entities and non-profits when evaluating the performance of a school division, individual schools, and school officials.”
The suit accuses school leadership of defending a male student who sent the plaintiff sexually explicit voicemails. When the girl’s family brought the recording to the assistant principal, they were told that the boy responsible “had a very hard life and been in enough trouble.” The assistant principal also shamed the parents for voicing their concern, asking why they were trying to “ruin a young boy’s life.”
In response to the sexual assault instances that were reported, the assistant principal told the parents that the pre-teen had engaged in consensual sexual encounters, suggesting that the seventh-grade girl was sexually active behind the parents’ backs. However, she was too young to legally consent to sex.
In March 2012, B.R. was evaluated at the Child Help Center of Fairfax County, where medical professionals found scarring and contusions consistent with her reports of “rape and sodomy.”
After reporting the rape incidents, B.R. received death threats from her alleged abusers, threatening that she would be shot in order to get revenge.
Since the names of the faculty members accused of covering up the crimes have not been made public, they could still be employed at the middle school without the knowledge of the current students or their parents.
Sweigart commented on the school leadership in this case, saying, “It is a horrific situation. She doesn’t want another student to have to suffer like this… I think parents have the right to know if there is an allegation that a school official didn’t take the action to protect minor students that they should have and that’s one of the unfortunate things here.”
The victim gave a statement on the case, saying,
“When I was sexually abused, Fairfax County Public Schools ignored my cries for help and retaliated against me. Teachers and principals are responsible for the safety of children in their care. They must protect them from all types of violence, including sexual abuse and trafficking. FCPS, a powerful institution, continues to deny responsibility, even 11 years later. I am seeking justice not only for myself, but the hundreds of nameless victims out there who have been abused in FCPS. I want to prevent this from happening to another child.”
