Where are their parents?

As the parent of a couple of college students, I probably note with more interest two big stories in our state: the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, and the shooting death of the college student in Wilmington by law enforcement.
A lot of the media attention on both cases has suggested that the authorities are the ones in the wrong in both of these cases, and seemingly the young people are being wronged. While I can argue the merits of cases being tried in the media, and the distortions that can bring, I am more concerned about the young people’s decisions and those of their parents.
I can remember back to my college days and the son of a doctor or a dentist, his parents divorced and his dad set him up in a house. I think he was going to school, though I’m not positive. It was a place a lot of us went to party. I may have come closest to death one night there.
I made some terrible choices that night. It scared me. Maybe I was a little more careful after the next day when I realized what had happened, though I can’t say that I was scared enough.
While my parents loved me, and they gave me a lot, they didn’t try to help me with some decisions like I wish they had. They gave me rein to make some mistakes. Fortunately, this mistake was not devastating, but it could easily have been.
I am not naïve enough to believe that I can prevent my daughters from making mistakes (they’ve made some), and they have to start making some of their decisions, but I can try to help them the best I can to avoid the bad ones, and hopefully the mistakes they make won’t be major ones.
The rape accusation over the heads of the Duke students is said to be “ruining their lives.” What about the decisions to rent a house off campus to party and bring in strippers?
Obviously many young people at Duke are given access to significant funds, as many of their families are wealthy. Like my friend, they may not have a lot of accountability for those funds.
I guess you could say that the young man in Wilmington fell in with a bad group. Judging by the photos his defense lawyer and father provided the media, he seems to be an innocent youth. You have to wonder what kind of fellow hangs around people who end up being accused of beating up other students and robbing them and who brag about carrying guns.
I can’t help but think many attitudes about this would be vastly different if the young man were black, and we called the apparent thugs he was hanging with a gang.
He was living in a house his dad paid for, and he made some bad choices.
Yes, a lot of young people make a lot of good choices when allowed, but a lot of them also make some mistakes. Sometimes those decisions can be life changing, sometimes fatal.
As parents, do we have a responsibility to check on what our kids are doing while they are at college? You can argue that these young men may not have gotten much of a moral compass to make these decisions in the first place, but they are going to have different influences in their lives. If you and I as parents fund bad decisions, allow them to continue, or don’t even try to check up on them, do we take some responsibility?
I don’t believe they ever stop being our kids, and I don’t believe we should ever stop loving them. I don’t think we should ever stop trying to protect them from the bad things in this world, and we should never stop trying to keep them from making bad decisions.