We worry that everyone surrenders too much of their privacy on social media but, without the oversharing, things in Steubenville, Ohio, might have gone very differently. The underlying story is familiar enough: last August, a young woman, who had been out partying with members of the Big Reds, a high-school football team, woke up alone and, reportedly, with little memory of the night before. It took a couple of days to piece it all together; gossip had to fill in the gaps. What emerged was terrifying: rumor had it that she’d been repeatedly sexually assaulted at several parties, publicly dragged from house to house, unconscious, as a “joke.” Her parents went to the police.

In another time, it might have ended there. Rape cases are difficult to prove. Steubenville is a small town; the Big Reds are very popular; the alleged perpetrators, the witnesses, and the victim all seem to know each other well. No one wanted to talk. And the days that elapsed between the victim’s blackout and the police report meant physical evidence was largely unavailable. But teen-age gossip is no longer passed around in whispers and paper notes; it’s fixed, in digital form, on someone’s Facebook wall or Twitter account. The parents of the alleged victim showed up at the police station with a flash drive full of social-media postings that suggested the young woman had indeed been assaulted. Police seized the cell phones of the accused and found more digital traces that corroborated her story. One particularly damning artifact that surfaced is a photograph of an unconscious girl, possibly the victim, being carried like a calf. Its caption: “sloppy.”

Still, by Christmas, four months after the original police report, only two of the young men involved were charged. (They pled not guilty; the county sheriff recently reiterated that he has no intention of charging anyone else.) The local police chief told the New York Times, “If you could charge people for not being decent human beings, a lot of people could have been charged that night.” He is correct that there isn’t, and shouldn’t be, criminal liability for a lack of “decency.” But his definition of crimes that remain in the realm of being indecent appears unjustifiably wide. Among those who have evaded charges is a young man who reportedly testified, under oath, that he was in his car with the unconscious victim and witnessed her assault there, as well as another assault at her house. Another young man reportedly testified that he photographed the assault in progress, saying that he intended to preserve it as proof of the acts but that he later deleted it.

And then there are the young men who were “just” on social media, doing the digital equivalent of hooting and hollering. In a twelve-minute video, dug up last week, a young man tells excruciating jokes about the assault he seems to believe is ongoing. He was impressed enough with his own wit to preserve it in tweets, which he sent out the same evening. He was not charged and appears to have gone on to college, without any consequences whatsoever. Others, who had not yet graduated, were, reportedly, not so much as suspended from the football team.

“Boys will be boys” was a saying that once discouraged women from reporting sexual assault. You do not hear such blatant dismissals nowadays, yet the belief persists that the joking and the egging each other on not only is but ought to be unpunishable. “This is not a crime” is how these acts are excused. That’s actually far from clear; Ohio does have a cyberharassment statute that might have applied in this case, subject to the First Amendment. But consequences needn’t be defined by the powers of law enforcement. On the level of expressing disapproval, there is no reason to simply shrug.

The expression of disapproval being the Internet’s chief stock in trade, it has now filled that gap. The case has been in the news recently because a New York Times piece in December piqued the interest of a cell of the hacktivist collective Anonymous. On Christmas Eve, the cell released what its members called a “partial dox”—a list of names and addresses, mostly—along with a threat of more leaks if the alleged perpetrators (and what Anonymous alleges are the officials protecting them) didn’t apologize to the victim by January 1st. When no apology was forthcoming, they posted the twelve-minute video, which suddenly opened up the case to the attention of clip-hungry cable-news machine. Now, coverage is everywhere.

So, apparently, is a feeling of persecution. Over the weekend, a local resident complained to ABC News that the town had been subjected to a “witch hunt.” The young man in the video had to drop out of school and has reportedly received threats, as has the town’s sheriff. Another young man’s family sued a blogger for defamation, then quickly settled and withdrew the suit without receiving any money or even a retraction. A couple of days ago, the foster father of one of the young men charged appeared on the “Today” show and said, “At the end of the day, we have the best judicial system in the world; you gotta embrace the process and let it work.”

The impulse to observe the principle of innocent until proven guilty can be an admirable one. It’s just that in this case, as in so many others, people’s reluctance to “judge” is often chiefly exercised as an excuse to avoid uncomfortable facts. For one thing, the “process” is not actually working. The prosecution of sexual assault in America remains very difficult. Most cases boil down to “he said/she said”; they are thought to be impossible to prove. Despite concerns about rushes to judgment, all signs suggest the public still, overwhelmingly, believes the accused at the expense of accusers. The arrest rates for rape remain where they were in the mid-seventies, with just twenty-four per cent of reports leading to an arrest. The F.B.I.’s estimate of the rate of false accusations is a generous, yet plausible, eight per cent—not nearly enough to make up the gap.

These young men’s claims to prior anonymity have been overstated. Anonymous was not the first to reveal these names. Some had already been named by the local press in Steubenville. Others outed themselves by tweeting. Objecting to the release of personal information, like an address or a social security number, is one thing, because such acts hew closely to incitement to violence. (Just ask any abortion provider in this country about that.) It is quite another thing to claim that these young men ought to be granted a level of anonymity other alleged offenders don’t enjoy.

It was, after all, these young men themselves who were so intent on making their cruelty public. That is what makes this so disturbing. Whatever else they did or didn’t do that night last August, these young men in Steubenville were performing for each other. Everything they did, they did together, in a group. It is no accident that they photographed it and they tweeted it. It was their choice to make it public. That in itself isn’t new, and it isn’t unique: photographing cruelty has a long precedent in American life. As Susan Sontag once said, referring to another shameful set of photographs, “There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn’t take a picture of them.”

And it is not the only tradition they join. Every time a case like this comes out, it’s treated as a singular event. Yet there is at least one 16-year-old in Louisville, Kentucky, who can tell you it is not the first time it has happened, and she is hardly alone. The Internet ephemera engendered in these cases will not be recognized by the law as proof of sexual assault, perhaps, but these tweets and photos, as far as public discussion should be concerned, are proof of the flippancy and indifference with which some part of America greets the report of sexual assault. If you want to know why sexual assault is so difficult to prosecute, you needn’t look much further than that.

Photograph by Michael D. McElwain/Steubenville Herald-Star/AP