Through a fringe of eucalypts around Greenacre's Gosling Park, Sydney's skyline is far off and ethereal. Tonight no one ventures even a glance at the distant lights. On they plunge, to a pool of darkness behind a small, dull brick shed. Across the road, just 30 metres away, families watch television. There in the night, lured from home by a boy she trusts, their prey is forced to the ground. Eleven youths surround her. Two rape her before she flees. The attackers go home, back to warm beds in nearby houses where there are sisters and mothers who love them.

Their victim a 16-year-old girl who, with a gun held to her head, had expected to die, takes refuge in a stranger's flat, drinking a glass of water and trying to wash from her mind an ordeal she will never forget. "I had people holding my arms down, holding my legs back and they held my head, and they took my pants off and they lifted my top off and they held my arms down and they held my hands and they lifted my top and they were touching my boobs and there were so many hands everywhere, I had hands all over me."

Two years on, court proceedings have ensured that Sydney still can't shake off the events of that night or the half-dozen other winter nights like it, bitter with the cold calculation in which young girls were raped by groups of up to 14 men in and around Bankstown. On their own, rape, ethnicity and religion are issues that raise strong passions. These crimes seemed to intertwine all three.

What is known? In the space of two months, seven teenage girls who identify as Australian - although two have Italian parents, one has Greek parents and one is part Aboriginal - were abducted and pack-raped by members of a group of youths their own age. Three others escaped the boys' clutches. At least 19 youths were involved in the attacks, though not all were present at every one. One girl was assaulted by four, another by two. An extraordinarily efficient police investigation captured 14 boys, most living within a few streets of each other in Greenacre, within weeks of the crimes. Three sets of brothers account for half of those caught. Five are related by marriage. All were born, raised and educated in Australia and identify as Lebanese Muslims, or just "Lebs", although two had mixed parentage.

Some chose to add racial abuse to their rampage. The teenager raped on August 30 was called an "Aussie pig", told she would be raped "Leb-style" and asked "does Leb cock taste better than Aussie cock?" by three of her assailants. Another girl was asked her nationality and concluded: "The world isn't what I thought it to be - it isn't safe and females are punished for being Australian." The taunts go both ways. On August 4, 2000, a 14-year-old girl earned a slap across the face when she told one of the gang, masturbating in front of her on an evening train: "You wonder why people don't like the Lebanese." The rape cases were always going to be socially divisive. Multiculturalism in Australia is built on the notion that a dominant Anglo-Celtic majority can tolerate new migrants provided they respect its guiding principles - rule of law, democracy and a grab-bag of Western values - and that new and old respect each other's cultural values. A street full of different restaurants becomes a thing of beauty, while protests in Australian streets about distant conflicts can be tolerated. But raping girls from the dominant culture is the worst crime a member of an ethnic group can commit.

All the rape victims were from a different cultural world to their attackers, who did not touch girls from their own community. Why? Discussions with family members and other Lebanese Muslims and court evidence show that fear of retribution played a part. Their parents, or the girl's parents, would have killed them, perhaps literally. Some people believe the boys were also conditioned to divide women into the saints who are their mothers and sisters, and the sinners who inhabit the world beyond. That's not uncommon among criminals across a range of cultures.

Lebanese Muslim teenagers believe Lebanese Muslim girls are likely to be less sexually active before marriage than those in the general community. Sabrine and Yasmin, 19, interviewed in Northcote Park, scene of one attack, estimate very few girls their age have sex, compared with, they say, 85 per cent of boys. If a 19-year-old Muslim male is going to have sex, chances are it won't be with a Lebanese girl. "I have friends, Lebanese boys, who say they would never go out with a Lebanese girl, reason being that they know in the future they want to marry one and they want her to be pure and clean, whereas Australian girls will go further..." notes Yasmin. Court transcripts show Judge Michael Finnane, in sentencing one of the rapists, feeling for the light switch that might illuminate the offences. Misogyny, contempt, drunken parties or even mass rapes by Japanese soldiers in Manchuria spring to his lips. The Bankstown rapes, he muses, are events "you hear about or read about only in the context of wartime atrocities". Were they sex crimes or race-hate crimes? Finnane is not the only one unsure. Dr Gail Mason, of the University of Sydney's department of gender studies, decries the tendency to slot such crimes into single categories. "Either it's gang rape, sexual assault or it's hate crime. We need to talk about the way gender and race might be working together in these kinds of assaults.

"But whenever we try to talk about them, people's biases come out," she says. "It encourages people to say this proves we should have less migration, which is complete crap because we all know that white men rape too. We have to ask the questions. It's just that often the answers are poor or not thought out. People won't grasp the complexity." Add last year's September 11 attacks and an election-fuelled Tampa immigration debate - events which for many cast long, questioning shadows over Muslims - and you have the ingredients for what some have called a moral panic. The youths involved have been spectacularly silent. "Until someone talks, we just won't know," says Detective Sergeant Michael Porta, who led strike force Sayda, which investigated the rapes.

The youths' families continue to live in total denial. Their sons say the sex was consensual or that they weren't there. If they're innocent, they can't express remorse: that's for the guilty. Quietly, however, some will whisper about boys and girls misunderstanding each other, and how - fired up on Internet porn and testosterone - they might egg each other on to increasingly outlandish, and criminal, acts. "We seem to be more tight with females and give freedom to the males, which is unfortunate," says one close relative. In the vacuum of meaning, others have made the running, chief among them being the victims. In their victim impact statements and interviews outside court the girls have - despite pixillated faces and turned backs - been given a powerful platform. "I'd just like to say thank you to all of the media for your support... if it wasn't for your support it wouldn't be such a hefty sentence... we're rapt," said one of the victims the day the ringleader was sentenced to 55 years' jail. Did the misunderstanding of a cross-cultural divide play a part in the rapes? Plainly, the girls misread the risk. But what does getting into a car with a group of young men mean? What, if anything, has such a girl "committed" to? The brother-in-law of one rapist cites the case in which the girls went from Chatswood to Greenacre by car.

"They stopped along the way; they had every opportunity to escape. Nobody accepts rape and I'm not saying what was done was right. If they picked up girls offering them marijuana, did the girls expect nothing in return? No one gets something for nothing these days."The Bankstown Multicultural Youth Service designed a scenario-based board game called the Pick-up Workshop to combat mixed and missed messages. "We were finding that both sexes, not just males, had really warped ideas on how to approach the opposite sex," explains the service's Christina Radburn. But an academic researching fear of crime, youth and ethnicity in Sydney, Paul Tabar, rejects the idea that Australian Lebanese born of migrant parents are "lost" between two cultures. "These kids can manoeuvre confidently between the two. People who want to see them as lost tend to be on the outside looking in," he insists.

He thinks the coverage has been unusually sympathetic to the victims. "It is a shame that we have to be racist in order to recognise the rights of raped women. It seems to me the fact the rapists are an "ethnic other" explains both the exceptional space given to the rape victims and the magnified outrage manifested by the dominant culture." One of the girls raped was taken to a toilet block in Bankstown. Inside, even now, every wall is covered with the letters "LBC". It's a warning and a boast: Lebs Beyond Control. Some young men in the community revel in the attention of being bad. The rapist's brother-in-law quoted earlier, a schoolteacher, knows their milieu well. "They're more influenced by the main culture which is Anglo-Celtic but they want a title for themselves to be noticed... they want to be seen as heroes; it's an act of rebellion."

The rapists brought before the court had in common a distinct lack of success at school, all lived at home and, if employed, had poorly paid, low-skilled jobs. Judge Finnane, in his struggle for insight, posits a "normal" typology of gang rape. What distinguishes these crimes is the degree of planning and coordination and the absence of drugs and alcohol. The pack rape he understands is "often, if not usually, perpetrated by intoxicated men who have seized an opportunity which has been presented to them". Rubbish, says criminologist Kerry Carrington: "There is often a lot of planning to get her pissed and all go through her." Graciela Szwarcberg, a social psychologist with 15 years' experience with sexual assault cases, says the key feature of gang rapes is the sense of impunity experienced by the rapists. It's an extreme act of rebellion against Australian society, against their own culture, their parents and the idea that sex is something precious and women deserve respect, she suggests.

But all teenagers rebel. Some stop with smoking; others stop at nothing. The brother of one rapist, a youth worker, also struggles for an explanation: "What I suspect is that many young people have experimented with illegal substances and have been watching illicit pornography that depicts acts of this nature. I could only assume that these young people were influenced by these graphic scenes that it is normal for the women to engage in group sex," he suggests. Szwarcberg rejects this notion. "It's not true when they say they learnt it from TV - we've all seen the same movies but not all men go and rape women."

A senior member of one of the rapists' defence teams, who did not wish to be named, says the crimes "don't fit anywhere", but that perhaps in their parents' headlong rush to put down solid roots, something went missing: "These kids have just gone off on a frolic of their own. They are boys using ethnicity as an excuse for behaving badly." Another defence lawyer, Richard Jankowski, believes Australia faces a challenge in resettling migrants from countries where the family unit is a stronger controlling force than in Anglo-European cultures. Parents, who control the dissemination of knowledge, arrive knowing little of the cultural context in which the law operates. "The type of guidance they can offer on Australian law is restricted, I think, and will take a lot longer to work through than in cultures which are closer (to the mainstream)." But Sergeant Porta won't buy this. "You have to keep going back to the evidence and the facts that were there. Making generalisations from these crimes doesn't help. The criminality speaks for itself," he says.

Sitting at home, the mother of one victim can't hide feelings that she was duped. One of her daughters had gone out with a Lebanese Christian, another had a long relationship with a Muslim of Lebanese background. "I had a respect for them. I thought they were quite dignified and I trusted them because of their religion. I got it from my daughter's boyfriend that Muslims were very, very good family-oriented people and that they look after their own. Unfortunately, that's all they look after." The daughter of Italian migrants, she grew up a wog. "It was the Italians then. We all have our settling-in period."

This one, she observes, has been more troubled than most. After years of accepting a multicultural society, she now has her doubts: "I'd prefer that we make our way through together, but I'm scared for us, I really am." As the community clamour continues, it seems prison is not enough for these rapists. Since the 55-year sentence for the man seen as the leader of the gang, myths have abounded that he has had his penis cut off, been anally raped and tortured, taken to hospitals or prisons interstate. There are court proceedings still to come and Judge Finnane's sentences will be appealed against. The community is left wondering if there is really a cultural context to these crimes. If we can't answer this conclusively, why ask the question? By wrestling with the issues it throws up, perhaps we can see that this is more about our reaction than the crimes. While the crime lies in the deed, as Porta points out, the great reaction has been to the words.

Or, as Tabar puts it: "The extreme moral outrage is not due to the act of rape itself, but rather to the collective fear of losing control over white women by our dominant white male society - a society that fails its youth by taking cheap shots to distract people's attention from the real social and economic causes of crime. "In doing so, we tend to forget the high price we're incurring on ourselves."