Out of Control

The book is about a sexual assault by three boys in a high school on one girl, although the majority of the book is told from the viewpoint of one of the boys, Rollo. Rollo has a sister named Kara who has Down's Syndrome. Rollo himself does not have that, but he's not what would be termed an intellectual giant by any means.

One of the other boys is basically just plain mean, and the third doesn't have much said about him at all.

It's obvious that the three boys have very bad attitudes as far as girls go, and they can easily be termed bullies. What is the most interesting is that, after the assault, the school principal basically attempts to cover everything up in order to avoid bad public relations for the school. The boys are given a two-week suspension and that's it. No police involvement, no expulsion, no banning from extra-curricular activities.

The principal even successes that the girl go into self-study or go to another school in his attempts to bury what happened.

Rollo even basically becomes a stalker on the girl that the group had assaulted and somehow (utterly unrealistically, in my opinion) actually is able to talk to the girl later and they sort of get along.

There is even sort of an attempt to 'blame the victim' used by the administration, and the principal tries to get the girl to go into self-study or transfer to another school in an effort to cover everything up. There are a number of girls that admit the same type of thing had happened to them.

Not a happy story at all.

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