"Yet long term, I wonder if this hard line is going to benefit their community or ours."

I feel a need to comment on this.

Surely, a community of human beings can insist on some basic rules of conduct, such as you do not brutally rape 8-year-old girls. The fact that this depraved garbage goes on in other countries is no reason to tolerate it here.

This is a tragedy for all involved.

At the same time, the boys who did this are dangerous, wild animals that must be kept away from the community at large until such time as they can behave themselves. Prison might not be the best place for them to learn about American cultural norms, but there is also clearly a safety issue here. Regardless of whether or not this kind of behavior is ubiquitous elsewhere, it is also brutal and vicious, and there is no way for me to believe that these boys could misunderstand the violence of their actions. Given that, they need to be locked up--for now.

If this girl is going to grow up without her family, that is a tragedy, but with luck, she will find a family where she can grow up in a safe, nurturing environment. There has to be a better place to live than one where you can be brutally raped and then be blamed and shamed for it by your own family.

I do wholeheartedly agree that some kind of outreach is desperately needed here to educate this community on the standards of behavior expected of it, and to the extent possible, to prevent this from happening again.