The Grim Lives of Virk's Attackers

In the eight years since the murder of 14-year-old Reena Virk, the tragedy has burned itself into Victoria's collective consciousness. Nearly everyone who lives in the city knows the basic story line: How a misfit teen went with a group of other teens she hoped would be her friends to the secluded darkness under the Craigflower Bridge. How she was then swarmed and beaten by seven of the group - six girls and one boy, all aged 14 to 16. And how two of the group then followed her as she struggled back across the bridge and beat her further, with one girl finally drowning her in the Gorge Waterway.

After the years of news stories reporting the case and the seemingly endless series of trials that resulted from it, one would be forgiven for believing there could be little new to be said about this killing that traumatized an entire city.

But author Rebecca Godfrey, in her just-released book, Under the Bridge, shows how erroneous that assumption would be. Godfrey doesn't just retell the story. She puts it into context - the context of an entire teen subculture that existed within the larger society of suburban Victoria, a subculture that was previously all but invisible to that larger society.

Emotional scars

Portions of the teen society she describes resembles William Golding's novel, Lord of the Flies, more than any non-fiction book ever should. The perpetrators of the attack on Reena appeared to live in a world that only tangentially touched mainstream society. Relationships, power struggles and survival within their own teen culture were overwhelmingly more powerful forces in their lives than parents, than school, than the adult society into which they should shortly have been about to emerge.

Golding had the convenient novel contrivance of the plane crash to place his youthful characters on the island without any adult influences on their lives. In the real world of Under the Bridge, the factors that bring the adolescents to the point where their own subgroup is the most compelling force in their lives are more individual, more differentiated, but none the less influential.

One of the girls involved in the attack had, before she was six, witnessed the murder of her father. The families of several of the others had found themselves unable to cope with their daughters as they struggled with problems ranging from poverty to illness.

Some of the girls had drifted their way through the child welfare system, moving from foster home to receiving home to group home.

The lone male in the group was, at the age of 16, about to become homeless once again - the friends who had taken him in when his father decided to move back to the U.S. had told him he would not be able to stay much longer.

Straining against loyalty

Many staff at Shoreline Junior Secondary School, which many of the group attended, struggled to do their best for these lost young people, but it too was beset with financial difficulties - a school so poor that it couldn't even afford uniforms for its athletic teams when they went to compete against other schools. Is it really any wonder that these adolescents had already learned that they were more likely to find the help and support they needed from their peers rather than from the adult world?

It should be noted that far from all of the young people who appear in the book fall into this category. Many of those who witnessed the swarming, but did not participate in it, come across as well-meaning, if confused, teens - some torn between loyalty to their friends and the group, and their internal conviction that such behaviour should not be considered acceptable; some simply unable to believe that people they had known, gone to school with, partied with, would truly be capable of such actions. And a few of the teens come across as positively heroic: two sisters who not only report the rumours of a murder to the police, but help find out more evidence, and insist that the police do take their story seriously; others who, when the chips were down, told the truth, over and over again, to police and in court, no matter how unpleasant or unbelievable they found it. It is a joy to read about them.)

New programs and cutbacks

But it is no joy to read about the others. And it is impossible to read the book without beginning to wonder how many other groups are there out there in BC's schools that are living their own Lord of the Flies existence, while hardly being noticed by the adult society around them? How many of them see violence as a solution to what most others would see as the most trivial of problems? How many find brute force their default method of dealing with conflict, perhaps because they have no experience of better ways? And, one worries, are the numbers of such teens increasing?

In Victoria, since the Virk murder, several programs have started to encourage youth to use non-violent methods of conflict resolution, the best-known being Rock Solid, a program put together by some top athletes and police officers in conjunction with the school district.

But at the same time, government cutbacks over the past four years have substantially reduced the number of programs that would otherwise be available to help such teens. Schools have fewer counselors with bigger workloads (and it's obvious in the book that school counselors are among the few adult resources that some of the teens will utilize). Agencies that help youth with substance abuse or mental health issues are strained to the limit. Many programs that help families in dealing with adolescent problems have also had their funding reduced. Everyone with an interest in the future of youth in British Columbia should read Under the Bridge. As they read it, they should be thinking not just about the past tragedy of Reena Virk, but about what's going to happen in the future.

Barbara McLintock is a contributing editor to The Tyee in Victoria.