How can a parent deal with teen savages?

How does a 15-year-old girl wind up passed out drunk in a home full of teenage boys and without adult supervision?

How does she wake up to find herself naked with writing in permanent marker all over her body — from her face to her genitals? How are pictures of her taken like this and sent around her suburban high school? How does she come to find out through Facebook messages that those boys had also put their fingers inside of her?

And, finally, how does her mother come to find her dangling by a belt from the showerhead?

Nina Burleigh's article in the new Rolling Stone seeks to answer these questions about Audrie Pott, whose suicide this spring shocked parents in her wealthy Silicon Valley community and around the country. When you read the message one of the boys sent to Audrie about the pictures of that night — "lol that sh-t gets around haha everyone knows mostly everything hahaah" — you have to stop.

How in God's name do I make sure that my children are never exposed to that kind of cruelty? That they never inflict it on anyone else? And how do I make them into the kind of kids who stand up for the Audries of the world?

The story, with all of its sickening details, is less surprising than any of us would wish. From Steubenville, Ohio, where two football players were convicted of raping a drunk girl at a party, to Louisville, Ky., where a 16-year-old passed out drunk and woke up to find two boys sexually abusing her, the pattern is becoming clear.

Some say teens today are in a "perfect storm" where they act impulsively, then technology captures their bad behavior forever. Sorry: This isn't just some force of nature taking over teen lives.

Start with the alcohol. While teens have always drunk, drinking to absurd excess appears to be on the rise. In January, the Center for Disease Control warned that one in five high school girls now reports binge drinking — an average of about 6 drinks in an evening.

Researchers affiliated with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism found that 10.5 percent of 12th graders consume 10 to 14 drinks on occasion; 5.6 percent consumed 15 or more.

These studies try to blame "peer pressure." Well, duh. But 15 or more drinks in a night? That's not peer pressure, it's Lord of the Flies.

Where are the grownups on this island? Audrie's mom says she had no idea her daughter would lie to her when she said she was just having an innocent sleepover at another girl's house that night. But the stepmother apparently had her suspicions and even placed "a tracking app" on the girl's phone at one point.

Other parents leave their homes unsupervised for these small parties that the kids refer to as "kickbacks." Many aren't even embarrassed by their lack of supervision: The parents of some of the hundreds of teens who trashed ex-NFLer Brian Holloway's house a few days ago are threatening to sue him for exposing their children's misdeeds, when the kids themselves were tweeting pictures of the party.

Caitlin Flanagan, author of "Girl Land," sums up the circumstances leading to Audrie's death, connecting the dots in a way that Rolling Stone's Burleigh never does: It's "a girl from a deeply broken family, allowed to go to teen parties where there is zero adult supervision and massive amounts of booze, being raised in a teenage culture that values extreme behavior, in the midst of a binge-drinking culture that regularly renders teens into the walking dead via the mechanism of alcohol-induced blackout."

Flanagan concludes: "Actually — we should all be congratulating ourselves that so few kids are killing themselves or being killed in the midst of this."

Sometime that night, three of Audrie's friends from her more staid middle-school days showed up at the party. They found her stumbling around incoherently, taking shots and making out with different boys. One told Burleigh, " 'At some point I was like, 'I feel superuncomfortable, everyone's so trashed and we are just sitting here.' So we left."

How do we raise the kid with the sense to feel "superuncomfortable" and leave?

For one thing, we have to show them that there is a world outside of their peers.

Writing of how our culture encourages a separate "adolescent society," Mark Bauerlein notes that all of the TV programs geared toward teens "raise ordinary fears and ambitions of the teen ego — Do I look OK? Do they like me? Am I invited? Can I get a car? — to dramatic, decisive standing."

With that reinforced by all the social-media hours they spend in their own world, kids start to think that it's worth trading their dignity and even their safety to be popular for a few hours. Teenagers can come to believe they really are on an island.