Unlike many older guys who have gotten away with fooling around with underage girls, Rodderius Morton met the consequences swiftly. He is now dead. Morton died of a single gunshot wound to the back of his head in the wee hours of morning July 16, WTOC reported.
Kendra Scott, a Memphis mother, is now behind bars after the fatal shooting of the 20-year-old man who was found hiding underneath her daughter’s bed. Scott, 36, was charged with first-degree murder and employment of a firearm during the commission of a felony, according to WREG. When Memphis police arrived on the scene, Scott told them she “saw a dude under my kids’ bed, and I did what I had to do,” the police affidavit read.
The affidavit confirms that Scott’s child is a juvenile but didn’t disclose the girl’s age. Onsite reports that Scott’s daughter is 13-years-old.
A number of social media users are in defense of Scott and the alleged course of action, calling for the mother’s release; one instagrammer suggests the start of a GoFundMe account for support. Of course, there are a healthy dose of comments that blames Scott’s daughter for being—grown:
“Her fast ass daughter admitted that her mom had a plan to kill whoever she found with her daughter yet she still put that dudes life at risk.” @brandaeshannon commented.
“Yall talking about pedophile but you dont even know that they was fucking, and if they was, the daughter was 100% willing and ready and putting herself out there and most likely lied about her age like fast little girls do.”
In many instances, grown men messing around with underage girls has been normalized and somewhat socially acceptable, particularly as it relates to Black girls. A study titled Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood, found that “that adults of various racial and ethnic backgrounds view Black girls as more adult-like and less innocent than their White counterparts,” and even more disturbing, 1 out of 4 Black girls have been sexually abused well before the age of 18, according to CDC findings.
In Black communities, statutory rape culture was just about front and center, especially during the drug dealing phenomenon the 1980s and 90s crack era produced. It was not uncommon to see adult men pull up to high schools, in the latest Audis, BMWs, and Jeep Cherokees, that crack cocaine could buy, to pick up their adolescent and teenage victims they deemed girlfriends. Not only can many AUNTIES attest to this, Mikah K. Thompson unpacks this laissez faire response to statutory rape in an essay, “Sexual Exploitation and the Adultified Black Girl.” Thompson states: “the statutory rape laws in many jurisdictions decriminalize sex with adultified Black girls because they are perceived as adults, and these jurisdictions do so even where the offender is much older than the girl.”
Black Communities Do Address Exploitation Of Underage Girls
Black society has wrestled with pedophillia and child sexual exploitation in a multitude of ways. Not all factions are complicit. Thanks to movements like me too., founded by social justice advocate Tarana Burke, the mindset around sexual exploitation and violence against young girls has began to shift, and not just for Black communities but communities around the globe.
And as lore has it, a demographic of incarcerated men do not take kindly to men who are jailed for having “short eyes,” a street term given to child molesters and pedophiles. The slang was popularized by the 1977 movie Short Eyes written by Puerto Rican playwright and poet Miguel Piñero. These men take more of an unconventional approach on behalf of young girls who are exploited by older men. To make it plain—prison justice penalizes molesters, pedophiles, and statutory rapists by way of beat down or death.
And some folks go full vigilante, taking the not-so-enforced law (for Black girls) into their own hands. It appears Scott acted as a mama bear, albeit it enraged, protecting her cub from danger the youth has yet to understand.
The lesson here is that sometimes life can comes at folks, who are in the dead wrong, real fast and real furious—and that the key to living a longer life is to err on the side of morality and leave underage girls TF alone.
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