From my mailbox, a piece I love.
I Was Groped As A Teen And I’m Trying To Be Upset
By Anonymous
He was odd by my WASP-y Virginia suburb standards: a scrawny middle aged man with a thick Italian accent, long jet-black dyed hair, flowery shirts with three buttons undone in front, revealing gold chains and a cross with a small Jesus on it.
He was my barber.
He had an odd way of getting right up into my ears while cutting my hair. He would snip slowly, pausing to inspect my sideburns. The pauses would go on forever it seemed, I had no idea what they could be about. In the background the latest disco hits played from a small, rusty radio that sat on his counter. I’d feel his exhales upon my ears, hear his labored breathing and smell his powerful cologne.
Then he’d make another snip.
The shop had three barbers, each with a cushy client chair facing a large mirror with a hodge-podge of items taped around its periphery. On the left side of his mirror were postcards of Italian seaside villas and tourist spots in Rome; the right side had faded photos of boys with fresh haircuts, some of whom looked like models, others like clients.
I’d go there by bike after school. When I’d enter the store he’d glance at me and say: “You wait for me. I taking care of you.” And I would wait. He’s weird, I remember saying to myself, but it doesn’t matter. I knew my parents felt my haircuts looked good and the price was fair. Moreover, I had the distinct impression that getting a cut from one of the other two barbers would hurt his feelings.
When the haircut was finished he paid great attention to ridding me of any stray pieces of cut hair that had clung to my clothes. He was particularly concerned with my crotch area, which he’d first clear with a small brush, then take a closer look. He’d sigh, say “Is sticking to your clothes,” then with his bare hands brush and squeeze my jeans in the crotch area for a good minute or so, finally pulling every last hair off my pants with his long finger nails.
What the other barbers, or the other customers, were doing while this went on I don’t recall. But nobody said a word.
When I was nearly 16, I decided I would no longer use this man as my barber. This ritual was just too odd, something wasn’t right. I was increasingly aware of the other customers, mainly grown men but sometimes schoolmates, and was embarrassed at the thought of them watching this.
I was aware of another barber shop within biking distance. I’d never been inside and the thought of doing so made me queasy. Not only was it intimidatingly unknown, but I was concerned that it would cost more. My parents would give me seven dollars for haircuts (which included a one dollar for a tip) and I imagined the embarrassment of going in, finding out I couldn’t afford it, and having to leave. If I asked my parents for more money they’d want to know what was wrong with the original barber shop — and that was a discussion I just wasn’t going to have.
So I decided to stick with my barber shop but to only use the other barbers. To pull that off I’d start by locking up my bike around the corner instead of in front of the shop. Then I’d slowly approach the window from a side angle and stealthily peer in to see if he was there. If he was off that day, and he frequently was, I’d enter the shop and get a haircut from another barber without incident.
One time I entered the shop, sat in a waiting chair, and was mortified to see him come out of the back room. “I taking care of you,” he said. I sheepishly obliged. The usual ritual ensued.
I was a particularly naive child and young adult in a much more naive era than the present. Not until I was in my early twenties did I fully form and accept two obvious facts — that the man was gay and I had been groped.
Yet I did nothing. In fact, it never occurred to me that I should do anything aside from avoiding that barbershop where he still worked (on a visit to my parents I glanced inside to be sure). I thought the man was a pervert and that what he did was pathetic. But somehow it also seemed kind of funny — the lengths to which this man went to cop a feel.
There is a danger in retelling this story, or highlighting any story from one’s past, of imparting too much gravitas to it, of imparting it undo significance by singling it out of the myriad of situations, personalities and places that were my high school life. During those times I was the barber’s chair I felt uncomfortable, confused, but not distraught. At no time did I feel danger. Outside of haircut days I barely gave it a thought.
When, in my early twenties, I recognized what had really transpired I did not feel angry. I felt a dim sense of violation, though this gradually passed. Mostly I felt bemused by his antics and bewildered by the question of whether I was the only one. If not, I wondered, had anyone ever spoken up or made a scene? If so, what had they said, and to whom? How did the other barbers and customers react?
From then until now, I surmised the barber was creepy but harmless. And like so many odd characters I’d met from my teens, through college and into to young adulthood, he simply passed into memory.
As the decades wore on sexual assaults against children moved from something I hardly ever heard discussed to the front pages of newspapers. A frightened public demanded action and action they got — from national sex offender registries to state and local laws requiring any adults interacting with children (in some cases even volunteering to gives kids on teams rides to games) to have background checks and training. On college campuses the situation was no better: sexual assault was declared by some to be occurring at alarming, increasing and “epidemic” proportions. A “rape culture” some called it.
This hit home last week, when I read that one out of every four college women reports being the victim of sexual assault. A horrible statistic. But I was stunned to read that this number included unwanted kisses (really?) and groping.
Hey, that’s me. I am the victim of sexual assault. Wow.
I’ve spent a week pondering that.
Try as I may, I cannot summon outrage at the pathetic man who assaulted me. Nor can I conclude that I am any worse for the wear. Try as I may, I cannot make myself wish that I’d grown up in today’s more enlightened era — that I’d known to report it the first time, and that this report would have been taken seriously and would have been sensational: the barber would be lead off in handcuffs, most likely past satellite trucks feeding breaking news reports while breathless reporters declare barbershops to be treacherous places infested with child predators, and where no child should be left alone.
That punishment exceeds the crime.
What happened, happened. He touched me there many times. Yet everything still works. I enjoy a normal life including a healthy-though-unremarkable sex life.
He probably got off, in both senses of the phrase. But, frankly, I don’t care.
Don’t get me wrong. Real sexual assault — involving force against the will of the victim, or exposing a child to sexual organs or acts — is a very big deal. And what my barber did was immoral and wrong.
It should not have happened. But it did.
To me, it was of no consequence.
I print this for the same reason Blake wrote it: Not to minimize anyone’s lingering trauma, but to normalize the folks who don’t feel it. Lately, as this blog post at Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers points out, the more accepted narrative goes like this:
In September, 2010, a federal judge in Minneapolis sentenced a man to 30 years in prison for taking sexual pictures of two teenage girls (he had also molested one of them and faced separate charges in state court). When asked if he would like to make a statement before sentencing, the offender expressed remorse, apologized, and said that he prayed for the girls; which prompted the judge to say:
“These victims are never, ever, ever going to recover. No matter how much you want God to do that, no matter how much you pray, it is not going to happen.”
How does the judge know that? And how dare he suggest it, labeling the young women crippled for life? This “never recover” outlook perhaps explains the 30 years — a sentence comparable to what a person gets for murder.
Humans are resilient. That is not an excuse to hurt them. It is a plea for perspective. – L.
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140 Comments
A very closeted teacher at my Catholic high school made a drunken grab at me once at a post-school event. At the time, I just found it funny. Now, I just feel bad for the guy. I never felt violated, though.
I love the empowering kids thing, I really think the message is important. But you kind of lose me with the minimizing of rape and sexual assault.
I don’t think anyone is minimizing sexual assault. I think that the victim of this particular unwanted sexual groping is just not that upset about it. It should be ok for people not to be upset about things.
I had a similar experience of being groped at a college party. I elbowed the guy, gave him a dirty look, and moved on. I suppose I could have chosen to pursue action against him, but I honestly didn’t feel like it. I avoided that guy, and that was that. My first boyfriend probably did more psychological ‘damage’ by nagging me constantly for sex I wasn’t ready for. But again, I dumped him, and other than never wanting to set eyes on him again, I don’t feel that I was traumatized for life.
People can, and should, protest against unwanted sexual advances. They shouldn’t put up with crap from anyone, male or female. But at the same time, assuming a victim mentality, and assuming every victim will act the same and be ‘ruined’ isn’t giving the victims enough credit for their own strength and resilience.
Oh thank you thank you thank you! This line particularly resonated with me: “I print this for the same reason Blake wrote it: Not to minimize anyone’s lingering trauma, but to normalize the folks who don’t feel it.”
Why is it no longer OKAY to not be changed for life by these events? Why is it unacceptable to move on, to think of it no more, to not allow it to alter your approach to life in any way? Why is it no longer okay to say “I am more than what has been done to me.”
By the time I was old enough to understand what had been done to me, old enough to summon up the courage to tell, the attitude of that judge was the attitude that had been adopted by those around me. So I’ve never told. Because to me, having those I love believing I had been permanently altered by what was done to me is a far more terrifying prospect to face than simply dealing with it on my own.
So thank you, a thousand times. As another victim of molestation, this article makes me feel as if someday, we the silent-who-stay-silent, may someday no longer be despised as the weak.
If this guy wasn’t too bothered by this, that’s fine. But there’s a HUGE difference between this molester (and that is the very definition of what he did) being dragged off in handcuffs and publicity and the boy’s father going down and having a word with him. Some people aren’t especially bothered by stuff like this for whatever reason. Some people would feel incredibly violated. (I am among them. As a child I was very protective of my personal space.) The fact is that this kind of behavior often escalates (not necessarily with this kid, as I’m betting the barber knew exactly how far he could go with him), with each offense. So when there’s an actual serial rapist running around, police usually check the records for minor serial offenses, like peeping or flashing, as the perpetrator often can be found that way. This man wasn’t really damaged by this barber, but he has no way of knowing that the man was harmless.
The idea that people don’t have to let incidents like this affect them for the rest of their lives is empowering. However, the idea that kids can simply let it happen and not tell anyone is NOT empowering. It’s wonderful that he believes it did not have long-term negatives effects on him, but unfortunately that man likely had other victims who did not feel that way. And it can’t be known whether he took his inappropriately actions even farther with other victims. Kids should always tell a trusted adult when something makes them uncomfortable and should never be given the message that it’s no big deal. It’s difficult enough to have the courage to report a crime like this. It is a good thing that it is no longer being swept under the rug. If you had to read detailed accounts of children being sexually abused for years by men who pretended to care about them and the devastating psychological effects you might feel differently about promoting this viewpoint. Don’t minimize the feelings of the child who is afraid to sleep, cuts herself, or stops speaking.
6 responses and already people are having trouble reading this comment from Lenore: “Not to minimize anyone’s lingering trauma, but to normalize the folks who don’t feel it.”
NOBODY IS MINIMIZING ANYTHING. So that accusation no longer needs repeating.
I wonder if he would have felt different if he weren’t in a public place, or he encountered the guy in a secluded alley, or he was much much smaller than the guy and could have been over powered?
I wonder because I (as a female) have had some scary encounters with males and some similar to this story experiences. The ones where I was inappropriately touched that didn’t scare me or register as traumatic happened in more public places, or by guys who I could have squashed if I wanted too. Yeah they grabbed me, it was jerky and I let ticked off and violated but I wasn’t scared that something worse was going to happen. The ones that were scary happened in secluded areas or with guys that were much bigger then me and I knew could grab me and really hurt me if they wanted.
Perhaps if there is a power advantage to the perpetrator then it becomes more scary to the victim. It is really scary to feel powerless and not know what will happen next. Because this guy was in a barber shop surrounded by other people he didn’t feel helpless and afraid of what was next, just awkward. If he encountered this guy in a secluded area and the guy was stronger than him and approached him maybe he would feel differently.
When someone says “not to minimize….” they are excusing themselves for minimizing, but that doesn’t mean that the reader automatically has to join in the excusing. Like when someone who is about to tell an ethnic joke starts with, “no offense to Jews, but…” doesn’t mean that the listener automatically has to allow whatever offensive thing is about to be said without taking umbrage. The point of this post absolutely is to minimize the crime, and say ‘look here, this crime really isn’t so bad.’
What we had was a story of a guy who would casually sexually assault underage customers. It is wonderful and great that (one of ) his victim doesn’t suffer from that offense. Nevertheless, it was still a crime and the barber needed to held accountable for that. I know Lenore doesn’t like the sexual offender registry (and I agree with her that it is way overused) but this kind of creep is exactly the sort that the list was made for.
One more point. It is a great argument to say that our children are safe because the vast majority of adults out there are not creepy perverts or predators, and generally we still live in a society where people take care of each other. It is a lousy message to say that while there are predators out there, often times they restrain themselves to just a grope or two and the kids can easily recover from a couple of low grade sexual assaults. That seems like a horrible way to promote the message of free range kids.
When I was growing up–shortly after God created the heavens and the earth–the idea of feeling “assaulted” or “damaged” in any way because a guy tried to “cop a feel” would have been laughable. I know that today’s feminists, terrified of everything masculine and therefore determined to destroy it, will scream that it is attitudes like mine that helped create “rape culture.” I rather feel that it is attitudes like theirs that make teens and women all too willing to call an unwanted kiss or an inappropriate grope sexual assault. I feel that if sex offender hysteria had not taken over this nation, that if things were more as they were when I was growing up, women would, equal opportunity-like, be doing some of the unwanted groping rather than screaming rape at every turn.
Now that I’ve outraged half of the readers, my disclaimer: none of this applies at all to actual children. None of this applies to actual rape or assault. We are living in a Nineteen Eighty-Four world, and nowhere is Newspeak more prevalent than in the areas of relationships and sexuality.
And that said, I take serious issue with the statement of the judge in the incident Lenore recounts. It is attitudes like his that have helped shaped today’s “victim industry.” The trauma of child sexual abuse is real, and some who wish to recover struggle more than others to do it. I know many former victims of actual assault and rape, many from childhood, and they are infuriated when anyone suggests that they are “ruined for life” or will never recover. Almost without exception, they do not support today’s sex offender hysteria. They know that focus on the registry and those on it ignores victims and any attempts toward prevention, which is where our focus must be if we are to ever make a dent in child sexual abuse.
I don’t see this as minimizing sexual assault. This man’s situation and response to it are just as valid as anyone else’s. Some other young man may have gone through the same thing, and been more traumatized than he.
I think that in an effort to avoid the “my trauma was more traumatic than yours” game we tend to make all of these situations equally bad, and that’s disingenuous and unproductive in stopping assaults and helping people (victims) heal.
When I was 13, I was forced to sleep in the bed of a much older and scarier teen. (He was later convicted of really bad stuff…not in my case, but with another kid.) Here’s why. My dad was disabled due to Viet War injuries and couldn’t hold a job. We were in the process of being evicted from our home and this older teen’s father was my dad’s best friend. The man bought us a mobile home to live in and paid to have it moved to our grandfather’s property. (which was around the corner) For three nights, while we were setting up the trailer, we had to sleep at the friend’s home. Every night, I was groped against my will and worse. I was scared of the teen’s craziness (his father had hit him with a tie iron and seemed unfazed) and also worried that if I told the teen’s father would evict us and reclaim the trailer.
While that was traumatic, I was more affected by the fact that my father was unapproachable in matters of anything sexual. He wouldn’t talk about the changes puberty brought. One time on the way to his friend’s house (before the above events), I got an erection and embarrassingly tried to keep it from tenting my corduroys. I couldn’t understand why this happened. My father’s response was to tell me to stop touching it, that that was dirty or nasty. I quickly learned that I couldn’t get advice. As a strict Mormon, any discussion of sexuality was focused on procreation as a gift from God and anything outside of that was a sin, including masturbation.
Anyway, the point is this. I feel that a lot of people who are seriously traumatized come from a similar background. No discussion of sexuality and what there is emphasizes the evil nature of it. Kids are unprepared for what they’re feeling when some perv touches them where they shouldn’t. All the talk of ‘bad touch’ doesn’t mean a thing if the kid isn’t prepared for what the touching actually does to them.
Being touched can be confusing to a kid. The body doesn’t think for itself and those nerves don’t understand the kid’s age. It’s going to stimulate. When you discuss ‘bad touch’ing, it would be helpful to understand that although the body reacts to the touch, it doesn’t mean the kid ‘secretly’ wants it to happen. My abuser used that line. For years, I thought it meant that I wanted it to happen, even though my mind was screaming in confusion. All that emotion and mixed in sensations fought each other and kept me from telling.
Once I heard about the attack on the girl that got him imprisoned, I felt shame that I didn’t stop him at the time.
My apologies for the long post. I’m not blaming anyone for anything, but I hope some lurkers read this and understand that keeping kids in the dark about the above isn’t keeping them ‘innocent’, it can confuse them. If you go so far as to discuss ‘bad touching’, and you should, you need to make sure they understand that a biological response doesn’t mean what an abuser tells them it does. If they buy into that, it can make them hold their silence.
David
Re-reading my comment, I need to clarify. Children should in no shape, form, or fashion be exposed to any type of sexual behavior from older teens or adults. Those who know me know that I strongly oppose a public registry in any situation–it is not supported by research and makes recovery and re-entry virtually impossible–but I am a strong believer in comprehensive prevention programs, and empowering children to speak out in such situations is important. This barber was indeed a pervert, and I am relatively sure he had more than the one victim. In a perfect world, he would be reported, arrested, and, if convicted, given appropriate punishment which would include effective treatment. He would be on a law-enforcement-only (LEO) registry for a period of time with lack of another offense being closely monitored.
I have no problem if a person is fine with their unpleasant life experiences, that’ great. So what?
If “unwanted groping” is not considered assault by the author, that’s their prerogative, but this line suggest that they don’t think it’s assault at all.
“This hit home last week, when I read that one out of every four college women reports being the victim of sexual assault. A horrible statistic. But I was stunned to read that this number included unwanted kisses (really?) and groping.”
Why would anyone be stunned? It’s not okay for someone to grab or grope someone else’s body. Do you just not like the word assault? Is it not significant that one out of four women experience this????
I can count 2 different men who touched me inappropriately when I was in college. One was a male college coach of a women’s team. I worked in his office and he’d tickle my leg right at my shorts line when I’d go in to get things signed. I had another man outline the letters on my T shirt with his finger when I delivered something to his office and we rode down the elevator together.
And no, I’m not scarred, but I’ completely support people who call out this behavior or ARE impacted by these experiences. The reason I didn’t say anything or do anything? It’s because I thought I’d probably lose my jobs if I did and that this was basic “men will be men” behavior. But that’s warped and incorrect thinking. These men knew EXACTLY what they were doing and that the odds of them being called out on it were basically 0. And they were right, sadly.
I’m not scarred, but I don’t think this kind of behavior should EVER be minimized. This is so close to victim blaming that it makes me very uncomfortable. What on earth does this have to do with Free Range parenting?
Thank you, Lenore, for posting this. I know many people are saying you’re minimizing sexual assault, and it’s perhaps easy to see it this way. Nevertheless, this story is representative of many people’s experiences and their stories are valid as well.
It’s difficult to separate true sexual assault from situations like the one experienced by this writer, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make the distinction, or at least acknowledge that sometimes it’s better to just let it go and move on. As with parenthood and so many other things, it’s impossible to be perfect, it’s impossible to know who’s going to do what somewhere in the future, and we should focus our energy on the worst cases, not assume that everyone who commits the slightest offence that could be considered “sexual assault” will eventually become a rapist or murderer. Zero tolerance doesn’t work, as has been demonstrated so many times.
And just a footnote, but doesn’t Lenore’s thinking include “reporting” situations that make children feel uncomfortable? I presume that’s there because a parent WOULD act on a situation like this. They would either call authorities, approach the offender, mitigate the situation by sending the child to another barber. They would do one of these things because what the barber was doing was illegal. They would do these things because it’s not a rite of passage (like bike crashes or walking to the store solo, etc) to be groped by someone. It actually IS illegal.
I’m not judging the author for not reporting it, I didn’t even when I was an adult because I was afraid as well.
If someone as a young kid tolerated this at the time it happened, reflected on it when they were older and still views it as a footnote, that’s great. If they have “normalized” their feelings their entire lives, is there really concern that someone else’s experience will undo all that?
I’ve now read “true assault” twice here.
When an old man in an elevator with me traced the letters of my Tshirt across my breasts…are we saying that’s not true assault? If not, can someone tell me what the correct legal term is?
The point is that as a society we react with horror to any type of sexual offense and assume the victim will never recover. Like the judge who announced exactly that before sentencing a molester to a punishment comparable to a penalty for murder. Any time the crime is related to sex or sexuality, we act like the victim’s life is positively ruined in a way that is reminiscent of the idea that a girl who does not save herself for marriage is inherently defective. But not everybody responds the same way to a given stimulus and the writer of the article is coming out as a person who was abused and suffered no ill effects. But imagine if he had reported the barber– there would be such a huge deal made out of it that the writer would either accept that he was damaged for life or alternatively, he would question what was wrong with himself for not feeling affected by the situation. Either way, the result of reporting would have impacted this writer more than the actual crime. In no way is he minimizing another person’s experience.
As for the comment insinuating that the writer had a responsibility to tell an adult and by not doing so is somehow partly responsible for any other victims of the barber: it is absurd to expect a victim of a crime to come forward about a non-event in his life when doing so would quite literally victimize him further by making him publicly (even if just to his parents and the authorities) relive every single detail of an uncomfortable and embarrassing/awkward experience, for the purpose of preventing trauma in another, hypothetical person. Just because someone is not traumatized by an experience that other people are traumatized by does not make him less valuable or less entitled to privacy. For some people, myself included, the idea that a parent will know the details of an episode in which you felt powerless is far more shame inducing than a groping that nobody acknowledges. (Maybe that’s only true for those of us with dysfunctional families, I can’t say.)
As a 5 ft. 95 lb female, I have been technically victimized many times. Some made me feel merely uncomfortable and there is nothing wrong with me for not feeling like I’m damaged goods or for not reporting the incident. I don’t think my experience is that uncommon.
Sometimes federal charges for sexual exploitation of minors are for matters as minor as photos that a girl has created for herself using a camera with a timer, and who was a model and whose photos were on her dad’s computer, among other places, and therefore, the dad was charged with possession of child porn . . . and at trial, the girl/daughter testified in defense of the photos and in defense of her dad . . . he was still convicted . . . cause some of them could be regarded in a sexual way . . .
It happened in the case of Stephen Yurick and his wife and daughter . . . the more egregiously foolish cases are usually done in state courts . . .
In that case, the girl is more harmed by her dad’s prosecution and being missing than of her herself having taken and shared some photos of herself.
I love what this man wrote! Something in his character, his psyche, his upbringing–something made it possible for him to recognize that what happened should NOT have happened but that he would be okay anyway.
I wrote about a little girl who was kidnapped and molested, and about how her parents’ reactions helped her avoid the label (and the feeling) of everlasting damage: http://handbasketnotes.blogspot.com/2013/10/bad-thing-doesnt-define-her.html?m=1
Lenore minimizes nothing. What she encourages us to do is to prepare our kids to be resilient, to be able to go through something bad–weird barber, serious illness, death of a friend, sexual assault–and not succumb to victimhood.
Thank you Lenore!
This post hits close to home. Crappy things can happen, people can be assholes. Doesn’t mean you have to let it define you.
Being groped isn’t rape. Being flashed isn’t rape. An unwanted kiss isn’t rape. It’s unpleasant, it’s wrong, and the person is an ass. But it doesn’t mean the person who did it should spend a lifetime labeled and locked up, and it doesn’t mean the person who it happens to is scarred for life.
The very point of the 1 in 4 college girls statistic points out that TONS of people experience something that is considered assault (groping all the way to rape) and that the overwhelming majority deal with it just fine.
Clearly dealing with it and moving on is the “normal” reaction.
(@m, no one has ever suggested that groping is rape)
I’m sure the victim industry is already trying to compare this mysterious groper to the Sweeney Todd.
The view that “victims” are “traumatized for life” has been the staple of the victim industry for many years. Remember the Rand study from the 1990s? That study raised a lot of eyebrows by suggesting that not all sexual contact between adults and minors is not an automatically lifelong traumatizing experience, and CONGRESS passed a resolution denouncing the study.
Susan Clancy’s book “The Trauma Myth” has also sparked outrage because it also suggested that not every experience of sexual contact is an instantly traumatic experience. Furthermore, at times, people are traumatized more by our society’s overreaction to learning something happened.
Of course, the victim industry s a lot like religion in that we are expected to adhere to dogmas based on faith to its tenets without question.
My second-grade music teacher used to announce to the class each year that he would pick a “girlfriend” out of the class – who was then stuck sitting on his lap in music class and getting picked up and carried around on the playground at recess, etc. Probably because I was the littlest, I got picked, to my humiliation and horror.
Luckily, my parents told me next time he picked me up, I should kick him. I promptly did so, and due to my short stature and being held up in the air, I’m pretty sure I got him where it really hurts. Anyway, he left me alone from then on.
Anyway, the upshot is, I’m fine and it did me no harm… BUT I can’t believe he got away with doing that stuff. How did the other teachers or the principal never stop him? He taught the special ed class, with lots of non-verbal kids, so who even knows what he did to them in the rest of his long teaching career. What my parents did protected me, but they probably should have taken more drastic action, to protect other kids, if nothing else.
@Anna — great question. These are not simple topics though.
This thread is full of “oh he’s a creep, but whatever”. There’s a whole post of “victim industry”. There’s comments about “real assault”.
If everyone goes around thinking Mr so and so is a creep, but whatever — how do you affect change?
Are the punishments harsh and is the registry a joke? Sure.
It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t. You report this behavior and it becomes a big “thing”. A student or coworker has to be questioned about an already unpleasant experience. The path of least resistance is to just deal with it yourself and move on. And that’s what enables the behaviors.
I believe that the ongoing belief in a “rape culture” DOES suggest that groping is rape. If we are to believe that millions of boys have been raised to believe that forcible sexual contact is perfectly fine, we have to believe that we aren’t just talking about intercourse.
“As for the comment insinuating that the writer had a responsibility to tell an adult and by not doing so is somehow partly responsible for any other victims of the barber”
This is a correct conclusion. A decision not to tell includes a decision not to warn other potential victims of the danger they face. This is entirely independent of whether or not there are other reasons on both side of the decision (either to tell or not to tell).
Try putting it in a different context. If I’m driving a car, and I notice that the brakes aren’t working as they should, but I park and don’t tell anyone, and the next person who uses the car accidentally runs over 2 nuns and an infant in a crosswalk because the brakes fail, I’ve contributed to that outcome by not telling the person that there was a problem with the car’s brakes. Maybe I have a damn good reason for not telling. Maybe I have no reason at all. That doesn’t change the fact that I contributed to the outcome. What changes is that I contributed to the problem either with a pretty good reason or without one.
I (and a lot of kids of my age/generation) played doctor and did inappropriate touching as young kids (ages 4-6 or so). I was sexually harassed in 7th and 8th grades. I was raped at age 18. Did I report any of it? No. Do I regret not reporting any of it? Yes, the rape, which I didn’t report for many reasons (first, even my parents would have said that I’d asked for it, and at 18, that’s pretty powerful reason to not tell). That had a traumatic effect on me, in some ways. The other things had little or no effect because I didn’t see them as traumatic. I do remember them, but even looking back, I don’t see them as traumatic TO ME.
Like the author of this posting, what happened wasn’t traumatic IN HIS EYES. In the view of another person any of these things happened to, they would have been traumatic and need to be respected as such. Respecting how the event affected the individual is what counts.
“When an old man in an elevator with me traced the letters of my Tshirt across my breasts…are we saying that’s not true assault? If not, can someone tell me what the correct legal term is?”
“True assault” is not a legal term, and “assault” is not always used consistently within the law. For example, in tort law, it’s not an assault at all… it’s a battery. (and, a fairly clear one. You’d win the case, although you’d probably find the damage award disappointing.)
There are a few things that can make a touch of a person’s personal regions not a sex assault. One, very important, one is consent. Another is intent. To be a sex assault, the purpose of the touch has to be sexual in nature. So, when a male college cheerleader is holding up a female cheerleader by touching a part of her that is usually not OK to handle in public, it’s not a sex assault for two reasons… consent and intent. (of course, a sex assault may be disguised as something innocuous…)
The problem, of course, is that people assign a hierarchy of sexual offenses, with violent forcible rape at the top and various other offenses that, while still wrong, are not of the same category as a violent, forcible rape. Different people make different value judgments about the relative abhorrence of these offenses, which DOES have the effect of minimizing some of them. Further, they integrate these offenses with all the other wrongs that might be committed against a person in different ways, too. Is it worse to rape someone, or take their money? Does it matter how much money? No two people completely agree on the answers to how the many, many offenses compare to each other.
Not to speak for Lenore–or anyone else–but I read this post as a reminder that, as in all things, context matters. What qualifies as traumatic depends on what happened, to whom it happened, and how it was processed by the participants. Fact-gathering should always happen before finger-pointing and name-calling.
I understand why people are worried about minimizing (I’m sure this barber has other victims, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he did worse). But the point is very important that we need to stop treating victims of sexual assault as if they are ruined for life. Let us victims determine just how damaged (or not) we are.
The more I critically examine at the claims of how damaged I am supposed to be, the more it looks like most people are doing the equivalent of applying information about highway speed car accidents to a low speed crash or in some cases a parking lot fender bender. It is fine to realize that there is a whole spectrum in these experiences. Fine to realize that the same accident can be more or less serious to different individuals for a variety of reasons. And that isn’t the same as saying that a reckless driver who didn’t do lasting damage this time, isn’t a substantial risk for doing lasting damage to others.
But, the vast majority of the suffering I have experienced as a result of being molested came, not from the abuse itself (for I escaped that quickly and it was never repeated), but from hearing how victims of molestation are labeled as “damaged for life” or worse “damaged goods.” I didn’t feel *that* damaged, so I hid what happened for years, so as to avoid a label. In the meantime he was free to hurt others, and to my knowledge did try again. And when confronted, he brushed if off because we didn’t complain. Vicious cycle that.
Think about the car accident analogy again. Imagine for the moment that the result of reporting a fender bender with a careless driver was that regardless of how you felt afterward you would be hauled to the hospital, stuck full of IVs and morphine, put on oxygen, put on bed rest, and denied food and water for a day while they checked for internal bleeding. And then you would go home to a panicked family who would not allowed to do anything for yourself for fear that you might “exacerbate your injuries”. And on top of this the careless driver who hit you would be arrested and charged with attempted murder. If that is how people were bound to react; Would you report a fender bender, or cover it up? And if everyone covered up fender benders, wouldn’t we have a lot more dangerous drivers on the road with no record and no intervention until something happened so bad it couldn’t be covered up?
I can understand this guy’s feelings, but I’m just not sure how they’re particularly relevant to a broader debate about sexual assault. So, this guy didn’t feel violated. So, this guy felt like no serious action needed to be taken. So what? There are countless other people who feel the opposite. How is this guy aggrieved by society encouraging those *other* people to come forward, or by discouraging *all people* from committing torts and crimes against one another, whether petty or serious?
To put my point another way: Some people feel pressured to keep silent, even though they are seriously hurt and want to speak out. For those people, speaking out takes courage, and it requires a receptive, supportive society and community. Conversely, this guy is suggesting, other people feel pressured to make “something” out of nearly nothing, even though they feel it might cause more harm than good to speak out. Okay. But. For these people who don’t feel seriously harmed, what do they need that society is not already giving them? Does it take a great act of courage to *refrain from telling* anyone about something that *wouldn’t be known, anyway*? If you don’t want to say anything, just don’t say anything. I could sort of understand if his point was that he told someone, in the hopes of some minor action being taken, and then it was blown out of proportion and he was dragged in to testify in a court proceeding that he didn’t even want initiated. That’s a reminder that sexual assault victims should be allowed to maintain control over what level of action they wish to take, both in school settings and broader society. But this guy’s point seems to be simply, “Don’t negate or minimize my subjective experience and my subjective feelings.” Except no on is doing that. And by suggesting that all instances of unwanted kissing or groping are analogous to his own *does* minimize other people’s trauma, even if he or Lenore disclaim such an intent. It’s like folks who say, “I support free speech, but….speech codes, censorship, rah rah rah!” Just putting a disclaimer in front of what you say, calling out what your opponent will argue, doesn’t inoculate you against those arguments.
I agree that sexual assault survivors shouldn’t be labeled cripples. I agree that it is the recipient of harassment or violence who is in the best position to evaluate how it affected them. But we don’t know anything about the Minneapolis case that Lenore cites. Sure, maybe that judge was out of line. Or maybe the facts were really egregious, and maybe the girls themselves *actually testified* that they felt scarred for life – maybe it wasn’t the judge who labeled them at all.
I worry about the responses you are going to get to this.
It should not be outlandish to say that every instance of everything we consider “sexual assault” today is not, in fact, the worst thing that can ever happen to a person. If, for example, having a friend’s older brother show his penis to you, or having an old dude proposition you when you are a teenager working as a waitress, or having a guy cop a feel when he walks past you in the school hallway, or having a college peer take advantage of the fact that you are drunk and using bad judgment (all things that happened to me, none of which I feel the slightest worst for the wear for, nor which would reach the top 10 of bad things that happened to me in my life) are events that are completely devastating, the worst thing that could ever happen to you, and tragedies from which you can never recover, what of the person who is violently raped at gunpoint? The person who is sexually abused by a stepparent for years? No, we don’t need to always rank bad things that happen, but we do need to take a sense of perspective. Every single thing that happens to us around sex is not equally important in forming who we are. It’s wrong to treat it that way. I think it’s actually profoundly disrespectful to people who have been subjected to violent or continual sexual abuse to decide that there’s no real difference between having a guy on the bus run his hands up your thigh one time and having an older sibling force you to perform sex acts for years, or between a 15 year old choosing to have sex with a 20 year old guy she’s into and the same 15 year old being raped at gunpoint. But when we say that “‘rape is rape” or “sexual assault is sexual assault” or that every act we currently see as sexually abusive under the law is equivalent to every other act, that’s what we are saying, and that just seems to me to be cruel to people who have been subjected to violent or long-term abuse.
Havva, I would say that even if the girls claimed they were “ruined for life” by what happened, it would be the moral duty of every adult in their lives to assure them that was NOT the case, rather than to validate their distorted thinking.
The problem, I think, is Freud. We’ve replaced, in our culture, the idea of the soul with the idea of sexuality. Suddenly the core of who we really are is our sexual identity, and so any and every sexual act we engage in or are exposed to is seen not simply something we do with our bodies or that happens to our bodies, but as something that will now fundamentally shape and alter our very being. It’s interesting that we do not apply the same thinking to other forms of violence, but it makes sense given the primacy we have (mistakenly, in my opinion) given to sex in determining everything about who we are. So we will say that the young girl in Sudan who is raped is ruined for life, but we will not say that the young boy in Sudan who was maimed by enemy forces or who was forced to serve as a child soldier is ruined for life. He’s supposed to get right over that, because nothing sexual happened to him, after all. The girl whose older cousin once touched her breasts when she was 11 and he was 13 can never, ever fully recover from what happened, but the child who is beaten by their parent every day for years cannot claim the same level of lifelong psychological harm; they really need to just move past it. The college woman who is date raped is now permanently psychologically damaged, but we’d consider the college guy who is robbed and beaten during a mugging to be, let’s be honest, kind of a weakling and loser if he were to say, even six months later, that he is having trouble “getting over it.”
Human being are remarkably resilient. Until it actually kills us, we are capable of moving past EVERYTHING. Holocaust victims did not see themselves as helpless shells of human beings. Survivors of genocides do not walk around believing that they will never, ever, ever be able to recover. We should be, while acknowledging how painful many experiences can be, encouraging people to trust in their ability to move on and have a happy, fulfilling, healthy life. If it is true that 1 in 4 women is a victim of sexual abuse, we have to believe that either at least a quarter of women are soulless shells of human beings who are basically just trudging zombie-like through life, unable to experience real joy or fulfillment, or that people are capable of overcoming even the most horrific of events and coming out stronger on the other side. I choose to believe the latter. We aren’t minimizing the Holocaust by saying that every single Holocaust survivor wasn’t ruined for life or that the events were such that they were never, ever, ever, ever under any circumstances going to be able to lead a good life after. We are simply refusing the minimize the ability of human beings to deal with even the most awful of events.
Beth — you nailed it out of the park.
Anon Mom — I think the point is “wrong is wrong”. Not every crime has the same sentence, but many things are still illegal.
My friend that was raped surely experienced something far more serious, traumatic, and dangerous than I did with a rich man coping a feel in an elevator with me.
I’m still allowed to recognize it for what it was — a man thinking he could do what he wanted without the fear of consequence. And I’d suggest that because so many women (and young boys like the one in the post) accept it and move on, contributes to the cycle of it happening so frequently.
Who on earth is actually saying “that there’s no real difference between having a guy on the bus run his hands up your thigh one time and having an older sibling force you to perform sex acts for years, or between a 15 year old choosing to have sex with a 20 year old guy she’s into and the same 15 year old being raped at gunpoint.”
Who is saying this???
Ha! mixing my metaphor praise for Beth. She “hit it out of the park”!!!
And, as an interesting aside, Maslow (creator of the hierarchy of needs), actually found that his students, who grew up in relative comfort, ease, and privilege, were actually *less* happy and “self-actualized” than their parents, a good number of whom had been Holocaust survivors. He realized, as time went on, that this theories were wrong. He had believed, initially, that self-actualization and real fulfillment were going to be MORE possible the more easily people’s more “basic” needs for things like safety and food and shelter were met, but ended up finding that the more comfortable and affluent his students were, the less likely they were to be “self-actualized” and fulfilled.
What appears to be the gradual emotional crippling of a generation of young people who are increasingly shielded from any and all bad experiences would also belie our belief that bad events ruin a person for life. If anything, it seems like what “ruins” a person is a life shielded from pain, struggle, and hardship. That is not to say that we should seek to inflict these things on others, because life obviously affords enough experiences for them. But, the idea that bad events leave people “ruined” does not seem to hold up in light of how people actually work.
On a side note, there was a story trending on Facebook today about the “horrific” “tragedy” that was a high school student having a classmate put super glue in her hair. I mean, yes, that sucks. It really does. But, let’s not blow things entirely out of proportion and lower the bar so far on what constitutions a “tragedy.”
E–“Who on earth is actually saying “that there’s no real difference between having a guy on the bus run his hands up your thigh one time and having an older sibling force you to perform sex acts for years, or between a 15 year old choosing to have sex with a 20 year old guy she’s into and the same 15 year old being raped at gunpoint.””
What do you think “rape is rape” means? It means that whether you agree to have sex with a guy when you have had three beers or whether a teen initiates sex with an older guy or whether a woman is held down at gunpoint while she screams and begs the man to stop is all the same thing, and anybody who dares to claim there is a difference between them is nothing but a rape apologist. And if you haven’t seen that line of argument, you apparently haven’t spent too much time seeing what young women online believe about sexual assault.
READER DISCRETION ADVISED! Interesting story because my experience is almost identical to this man’s experience! It was a male hair dresser in town who had a wife and kid BUT he also had an affinity for teenage boys. He’d hang around at the city swimming pool trying to drum up business with many of the boys. Now this was in the early 1970s era when boys started transitioning from barbers to beauticians and the guy was pretty good at hair styling. Of course, he’d always schedule the boys for around 5 pm when all of the other employees and appointments were done for the day. Then he’d cut my hair and then treat me to a few Playboy and Penthouse magazines (He did this with all teenage boys whose hair he’d cut late in the day). Then he’d say stupid stuff like “You can’t tell me you don’t have a hard-on now!” Then he’d reach down and press his hand on my genital area and say “I knew it!” One day after one of my late appointments, we were alone in his shop and he tried getting me to “whip it out” as he had HIS out while looking at heterosexual porn. Of course, I didn’t “whip it out” so he accused me over and over again of “being chicken”. Finally I said to him “YES! I’m chicken and I’ve got to go now so goodbye!” So that was pretty much the last straw and even though I’d see him up at the swimming pool and engage in small talk with him, I never scheduled a hair appointment with him again.
But looking back, it would be absolutely ridiculous to say my experiences with him scarred me for life! Now I’m not condoning what they guy did as he was lewd and lascivious and totally irresponsible and I obviously was uncomfortable with his requests but the guy never raped me or tied me up and bonded me down and neither was the guy sadistic with me or with anyone else. In fact, many of my friends had similar experiences with him and we used to joke about it. He’d even do crazier stuff with some of my friends like glibly pointing the blow dryer down at their groin area after blow drying their hair and promising them some super hot porn if they could prove to him that they had “hair on their balls”. We would actually laugh to tears as we shared some of our experiences with this guy! But your typical sex abuse counselors of today would be totally miffed by that. According to them, we should have been completely messed up in the head. They’d say, “Sexual abuse of children is no laughing matter!” (I was 16 at the time) Then they’d drum up stupid theories as to why us boys found what this guy did humorous like “The Stockholm Syndrome” and that the guy “brainwashed us” you know, dumb stuff like that. They’d try to make it all more complicated than it really was. My theory is that many of these sex abuse counselors just want your business and your hard earned money so they’ve convinced the court system that ALL type of sexual situations involving minors (17 and >) is exactly the same from forcible sodomy to subliminal groping and will ruin a child for life. This, in MY opinion, is an insult to any person who was literally and forcibly raped as a young child!
Well about 10 years ago, this hair dresser committed suicide after he was arrested for fondling a 14-year-old boy. He was set to go to court and most likely was looking at a long prison sentence. With that being the case, he shot himself in the head while in the bathtub and while his wife and grown son were on a European vacation. I can’t imagine the gruesome scene they saw after arriving home and finding him. But the guy was an absolute idiot if he realized those type of actions would never have serious consequences in the 21st century!
Beth, but harm *is* done when we silence people whose narratives don’t fit the most popular ones. And, that is what we are doing right now with people who do not feel permanently ruined by whatever acts we currently define as sexual assault. Because we are 1) making people who don’t feel permanently ruined think there must be something wrong with them and 2) increasing the likelihood that people who have these experiences will end up feeling permanently ruined, because we make sense of our experience in light of the interpretative frameworks we are given. If the only interpretative framework a person who has been sexually abused is given is, “It’s your own fault,” then they will more often than not conclude it was their own fault. If the only interpretative framework they are given is, “This is the worst thing that could ever befall a person and you will never recover,” then they will more often than not conclude it was the worst thing that could ever happen and that they will never recover. The irony is that somehow we think that telling people that they are “ruined” for life is somehow a “compassionate” response. It is not.
People are not deciding on their own that, because an older neighborhood kid once groped them, they are a ruined shell of a person on their own. They just aren’t. They are deciding that because that is what society has told them. When we promote the narrative that sexual abuse ruins people for life, we are absolutely, unquestionably increasing the likelihood that people will feel ruined for life. And when we silence those who have different experiences, we are causing harm.
“People are not deciding on their own that, because an older neighborhood kid once groped them, they are a ruined shell of a person on their own. They just aren’t.”
Nobody else is deciding that, either.
“What do you think “rape is rape” means? It means that whether you agree to have sex with a guy when you have had three beers or whether a teen initiates sex with an older guy or whether a woman is held down at gunpoint while she screams and begs the man to stop is all the same thing”
It isn’t (“rape is rape” and “all rapes are equivalent” are not the same), but that’s beside the point. You left out the one about having a guy grope your thigh on the bus that one time. I suspect that’s the one being objected to, not these other three.
I think you’ve finally stepped over the line- if he had reported the barbers inappropriate behavior the first time, or the second time, heck- maybe even the 10th time- he could have saved other children from being touched and groped inappropriately- and there most usually are others- he’s not special. He was singled out only because he was judged to be one who would remain quiet. How’s that going to weigh on his conscience?
I’ve spent my whole life feeling guilty for not speaking out against a cousin who started off by groping me and then went on to touch and grope at least three other, younger cousins and then ended up raping a young girl who used to babysit his younger sister. And because his father was a man of influence- my cousin was quickly shipped off to a foreign county where he’s living happily ever after.
You don’t let people get away with that kind of behavior!!!!! Casual groping over an extended period of time is not acceptable! What is wrong with you people?!
Well, James, if you think there’s nothing to “object to” in the idea that being held down and forcibly penetrated while screaming and begging the assailant to stop is pretty much the same thing as a 15 year old willingly having sex with a college guy, I’m not sure what to say, other than that you’ve swallowed our sex hysteria whole.
And, yes, *of course* when society says that sexual assault ruins victims for life, they are causing people to feel ruined for life. Why do you think, for so many decades, sexual assault victims felt what happened was their fault? Because they inherently decided that? Absent any outside messages, they simply concluded that what happened was their own fault? No, because the message society sent was, “If these things happen to you, it is your fault,” and we interpret our experiences based on the messages society has sent us. We don’t live in an interpretative vacuum. The same holds true now. When people say they will “never recover,” it’s not because they independently concluded that, but because society has sent them that message both directly and indirectly.
I think the main issues are that, first, we need to justify the very harsh penalties we mete out on those who are convicted of sex crimes, and we can only justify those penalties if we decide that the consequences are maximally severe. How can you justify the cruelty of putting a 22 year old guy who slept with a completely willing 15 year old on a sex offender registry for life–very likely ruining his chances at an education, job, home, or relationship–unless we decide that he has ruined HER for life? I would be interested in seeing, actually, if societies that have less draconian penalties for sex crimes (i.e., pretty much every other Western nation) have the same belief that victims are “ruined for life.” I’m guessing they don’t, and we increasingly hold the belief that sexual abuse ruins a victim for life to justify our policies that, in practical ways, DO ruin those convicted of such crimes for life.
And, we have no moral language for talking about sex outside of psychological harm. If we didn’t think that having an older guy touch your breast was going to cause you severe psychological damage, what grounds, exactly, would we have in our contemporary society for not allowing it? That it’s immoral? But, why? We’ve thrown out all traditional morality around sex. That it’s a breach of decorum? That it is an affront to her virtue? We don’t believe in decorum or virtue. All we have left, to justify any laws against any sex act, is psychological harm. So regardless of whether an act actually causes psychological harm or not, if it’s something we don’t want people doing, we have to argue it does. Personally, I’d say that many of these acts actually *don’t* cause psychological harm but are still wrong, but we have no contemporary categories for that. If we want a sex act to be illegal, we MUST argue that it causes maximal psychological harm, because how else could it possible be wrong?
Society seems to confuse “something from which you can never recover” with “something that will never be forgotten.”
I have never been raped, but I assume that it is something that you never forget unless you were extremely young at the time. While the thoughts of it dwindle as recovery occurs, it not something that is ever going to disappear into nothingness such that you don’t remember that it even occurred (as so much of our life does). It is something that forms your past and will contribute to who you become as a person from that point on.
That is NOT the same as saying that you will never recover. Recovery doesn’t mean erasing the past as if it never occurred and being exactly same as you were before. Recovery means that you move forward to a happy life. That life may be different than you envisioned pre-rape, but is happy and fulfilling nonetheless.
It is always possible to recover. It may not be easy and you will never forget the bad thing occurred, but it is 100% possible to recover if you choose to do so. Telling someone that they will never recover is doing them a HUGE disservice. Validating someone’s belief that they can never recover is doing them a HUGE disservice.
“Well, James, if you think…”
You’ve done an AMAZINGLY poor job of analyzing what I think.
“*of course* when society says that sexual assault ruins victims for life, they are causing people to feel ruined for life.”
Society doesn’t say this.
“How can you justify the cruelty of putting a 22 year old guy who slept with a completely willing 15 year old on a sex offender registry for life”
The people who justify this… I am not one of them… do so by claiming that there is no such thing as a “completely willing 15-year-old”, because 15-year-olds are not capable of forming consent.
“If we didn’t think that having an older guy touch your breast was going to cause you severe psychological damage, what grounds, exactly, would we have in our contemporary society for not allowing it?”
We don’t, and that’s reflected in (tort) law. The damages would be “nominal”, likely $1.
I agree with the author. Our kids probably will experience sexual shaming, contact or abuse whether we hover over them or not. We must proactively teach them to recognize, resist and report along with all the reasons why. Phase two is how we react to the child after we hear a report. Recognize that a child might feel a spectrum of emotions: sad, confused, angry, humiliated, disgusted, depressed, vengeful, sullied, scared, or really terrified or traumatized. I believe we should do our best to match but not exceed their reaction, and give them the support they need. Personally, I would make sure that part of my message to them is that they are strong, resilient, whole, loved, “pure” and it’s the perpetrator who has the problem. I would give them permission to carry around enhanced alertness, but to try to let go of the pain if possible. This is my perspective after two serious sexual assaults by groups of kids at camp while I was a young teen.
It’s demeaning for the media to assume we are that easily destroyed. Let’s not give the abuser so much power right off the bat.
I think he has a valid point as to the overreaction on anything sexual these days. Yes there are sex crimes that are really harmful but if a child sees some guys penis who happens to be urinating in an alley or behind a bush
does that merit making him into a pedophile? Will that child have nightmares be harmed for the rest of their life… I doubt it.
This is actually how some people think and they are hoping for any opportunity to put some poor person behind bars. Back in the early 70’s when I was eighteen I had a 15 1/2 year old girlfriend and lover who had more sexual experience than I did was I a monster? No , just a teen with a younger teen girlfriend learning about sex.
“if he had reported the barbers inappropriate behavior the first time, or the second time, heck- maybe even the 10th time- he could have saved other children from being touched and groped inappropriately- and there most usually are others- he’s not special.”
Why should people be required to take that burden on themselves? To seriously negatively impact their own life to maybe stop something that could possibly be happening to someone else? And it is only a maybe as it is far more likely that nothing will come of his report (especially considering that this happened in a different time). Say his parents simply change barbers, is he still to blame for other kids being groped? Are his parents now to blame too? Or say they did tell someone, but that someone didn’t do anything about it? Or they tell the police, but the police decide that they don’t have enough evidence to arrest? Or he is arrested, but a Grand Jury chooses not to indict? Or the Grand Jury does indict, but,the jury acquits. Or the jury convicts, but the court of appeals overturns the conviction? How many people do we get to blame other than the barber? And doesn’t each additional person we blame take some of the blame away from the only person really at fault – the barber?
And if we are going to blame him for other people’s groping, don’t we also have to blame him for his own? And if we blame him for his own groping, we also have to blame everyone else for their own groping. Is there any blame left for the barber anymore?
And why do we have to read minds? Why does this man have to assume that something that is meaningless to him has so much meaning to someone else that he has a moral obligation to report it even if doing so completely messes up his own life?
One of the problems is that society has made it not only acceptable, but almost praise worthy, of remaining a victim for life. I just cringe when people qualify themselves as a cancer SURVIVOR, or a rape SURVIVOR, or a RECOVERING gambler/alcoholic/addict (even though their last slip was years ago).
It is not okay to see yourself as a victim for life, an addict for life. And yes I know people in both categories, and they agree. Deal with your issues and put them behind you. Take control of your life.
I get the point, I just don’t like it.
There is no emotionally “correct” way to overcome adversity. Everyone has different coping mechanisms. Some don’t need to cope- it doesn’t even affect them. Some may be victimized repeatedly and blame themselves vs. the inappropriate behavior.
I’ve never been a victim of sexual assault- I guess I’m in the 3 out of 4. I’ve had a few near misses that I take full responsibility for. In college, I went to a frat party (strike 1) and was drinking(strike 2) when one of the brothers asked me if I wanted to see his puppy (strike 3!) upstairs. I missed my dog at home so bad and went up with him (I can’t believe I fell for the puppy lure!) and he locked the door and tried to make his move. I looked at the puppy who was an ugly schnauzer and not even a puppy, and bolted for the door. We crossed paths on campus several times and I told all of my friends about the puppy encounter. We nicknamed him Chester the Molester and asked him often about his “puppy” and if he was also offering girls candy too. I think he was shamed sufficiently from our encounter.
@anon_mom
” Because we are 1) making people who don’t feel permanently ruined think there must be something wrong with them”
Let me get this straight. A young person who is groped repeatedly as a kid, deals with it and eventually avoids it using their own methods….grows up, reflects back on it as an adult but still doesn’t feel scarred or altered….is somehow going to think that something is wrong with them because OTHER people don’t endure a similar (yet individual) situation the same way?
So the person is resilient enough (for whatever reason) as a child and then an adult but someone else’s experience is going to shame them into thinking something is wrong with them?
By this logic, it seems like you wouldn’t have ANY trouble understanding that a child/teen/young person would be somewhat (or seriously) affected by the actual experience. I mean, we’re all, apparently VERY impressionable.
OK, so not everybody feels violated. But I can remember an unwanted hug a few years ago that made me feel very violated. It took me awhile, but I’m over it now. I actually felt more violated by that than by some more “real” assaults I had earlier in my life, because the earlier ones were consensual at first. While it’s not true that recovery is never possible, I just think that this whole thing tells people who DO feel violated that they are overreacting, to suck it up. It ads to the permissive culture that men can just take what they want. They CAN’T and until we stop acting like men just can’t help themselves, what this writer would call “real” assault will continue. Normally Lenore I am 100% behind you. But this diminishes my respect for you, I’m sorry to say.
I appreciate this discussion in the comments. I think it’s a needed discussion and one that doesn’t happen all that often. I especially liked what Donna had to say: “Society seems to confuse ‘something from which you can never recover’ with ‘something that will never be forgotten.'”
When I was about 7, a teenage boy put his hand down my pants on the school bus. It was only for a second and he didn’t touch anything other than the very top of my public area. I didn’t tell anyone (this was the early 70s and no adult had ever told me about “appropriate and inappropriate touching” and to report the inappropriate stuff. I knew it was wrong, but for whatever reasons, I didn’t feel compelled to tell anyone.) I’ve never forgotten it but I’m certainly not damaged by it. The same for some other instances later in my life that, looking back, I could have defined and reported as sexual assault, but didn’t. Again, I’ve not forgotten but again, no long-term effects.
I’ve never really spoken about any of them to anyone, not because I feel the need to bury them deep but because I’ve never wanted society (whether that means authorities, the public or my friends) to tell me what I **should** and **shouldn’t** feel about them.
Thank you to the people commenting who are validating my choices and my decision to not be traumatized or let it define me.
That would be “pubic area” not “public area.” Oops.
Wow, heavy stuff and reasonably good give and take arguments about whether the author on point or not.
I think the thing that bothers me most about the story is that this boy did not feel comfortable to stand up to the barber. Forget whether or not he should report it; each person that goes through something like that will have a different response based on their different set of circumstances. But what we should take from this – and as Free Rangers I thing we believe – is that you should help your child become the kind of person who (at any age) could stand up to this and say “no.”
As a teenager, I had some weird guy who started following me from the bus stop. I ducked into stores and libraries to get away from him but at one point I finally told him to leave me alone. I would still see him occasionally, but from further away.
Not too long after that, I went on vacation w/ my mom, her boyfriend and his stepson. The stepson and I became romantically involved during the trip, but one night the boyfriend (who must’ve had a fight w/ my mom), ended up on the pullout couch w/ me and the step son. The dirty old coot (who had been drinking) tried to feel me up right there with his stepson inches away! I said no way, Jose!
Another of her boyfriends tried to kiss me once.
I never told anyone about any of these incidents. None of them impacted me for life or affected my sexuality. I hope that telling them off made them think twice another time. (Not sure with the guy following me.) A long criminal lawsuit where I had to repeat it over and over. Now that might’ve stayed with me longer.
E – I don’t think anon mom is talking about this story in particular, but, yes there have been numerous occasions where I have dealt with a “victim” – usually a minor engaging in consensual sex with someone older – who isn’t bothered by the “victimization” at all at the beginning of the case, but becomes damaged beyond repair by the end of the case. It is very clear that the attitude of her parents, the police, the ADA, the victim services people, etc. who all view this as a tragedy are having an impact on her psyche.
My best friend also for awhile (she seems to have moved off of this now) suddenly at 42 convinced herself she was raped at 16. I was her best friend when she was 16. I remember the encounter. I remember her talking about the encounter afterwards. It was not rape at 16.
My favorite story is the local coed who went out drinking with her friends one night. The next morning she complained to her roommate about being sore in the vaginal area. The roommate insisted that she had to have been raped. Despite the coed not remembering being raped or even having sex, she went to the hospital for a rape exam and then reported a rape to the police. Witness statements and video evidence from the “scene of the rape” showed that she was neither raped nor had sex with anyone that night. Yes, some of us are highly suggestible.
Anne says, “However, the idea that kids can simply let it happen and not tell anyone is NOT empowering.”
I disagree. It empowers the kid because it shows them they can handle stuff like this, completely on their own — just like an adult. Not merely “get past it” but dismiss it from their lives as being no more than a passing annoyance with no lingering effect. They learn that they don’t =have= to be harmed by it. They learn that they don’t =have= to be helped and sheltered from every potential harm, because they can deal with it. =That= is personal power, the power to rise above.
It is the diametric opposite of the immature behavior of dwelling on every slight or harm until it eats you from the inside.
So it seems this thread is full of people have been inappropriately touched just like the author. And it appears that most (all?) of us have the ability to put it in perspective and it didn’t have any long term impacts. It seems like the people here (who aren’t “trying to be upset” as the headline implies) have not succumbed to the idea that “something is wrong with us”. Are we seriously saying that this is a thing?
@Donna
“Yes, some of us are highly suggestible.”
But the suggestion here is that the original poster and people like him (or like me for that matter) is going to be shamed into thinking something is “wrong with them” because they no longer feel like a victim.
It makes no sense.
Everyone is different, but if you are well adjusted and have perspective to look back on these experiences without falling apart, is there a real risk that someone else struggling to do so would make me feel like something is wrong with me?
I have a large family with a lot of sisters. I have one sister who lived in the same house, same parents, and feels like we were not shown enough love. She was the sibling that had crossed eyes and then wore glasses and had pigeon toes and had to wear leg straps. She is EXTREMELY self conscious of her appearance. I was STUNNED to hear her thoughts about my parents affection. Since we’re all adults, I respect her opinion (and realize she may have needed more than the rest of us) but she’s not going to convince me suddenly “oh yeah, Mom didn’t hug me enough”. That’s kind of silly to suggest.
So while it’s great that the guy, like many of us, is well adjusted and moved on — so what?
I’ve been raped, I’ve been emotionally abused, I’ve lived in a house where my then husband was carrying a gun at all times, I’ve been in a house where I tried to get my stepfather to hit me because it would show, I’ve been hit by my ex exactly ONCE and that landed his ass in jail.
NONE of these experiences define me; NONE of them are how I introduce myself to people. Just like any user childhood and young adulthood, my experiences taught me a lot. I learned who to trust, who not to trust, and how to really listen to my instincts.
But I am not now, never have been, and never will be a survivor or a victim. These are things that happened, nothing more. I refuse to accept the idea that what someone ELSE did defines me. All of those things are about trying to control me, to be more powerful than me. And if I allow those acts to affect me now, then those people succeed.
“But the suggestion here is that the original poster and people like him (or like me for that matter) is going to be shamed into thinking something is “wrong with them” because they no longer feel like a victim.”
No, that is not the suggestion at all. First, this man NEVER felt like a victim. He didn’t feel like a victim when it occurred. He doesn’t feel like a victim now. One suggestion is that we are convincing people who don’t otherwise feel victimized into being victims by insisting that they were assaulted and need to be upset about it.
The second suggestion is that, for those who do feel victimized, it is very difficult for them to move on when we tell them that they are never going to do so. You and most of the other posters did move on (or claim to have) but also were assaulted years before the current climate of you can never recover existed. Do you think you would have fared so well if you had been constantly treated as though the worst thing in the world had happened to you and you had no chance of ever recovering?
When a guy runs his hand up the thigh of a woman, stops when she tells him No, and still does prison time and ends up on the sex offender registry for 15 years (true story). .. it is safe to say that society makes too much of minor infractions.
When streaking across the football field can land a kid on the registry, it is safe to say that society makes too much of minor infractions.
When getting caught peeing in the alley can land someone on the registry…it is safe to say that society makes too much of minor infractions.
When a drunk girl has sex with a drunk guy and he ends up on the registry while she is seen as the victim of rape…it is safe to say that society can’t tell the difference between rape and bad judgment.
When bad judgment and regret are enough to call something rape, we devalue the experience of someone who suffers through a (dare i say it) REAL RAPE. The fact that we all know what is meant by that phrase, even though some object to anyone using that phrase because rape is rape…society has gone off the rails.
Sex abuse is worse than death. Any parent in her right mind would rather her child’s head be crushed in a car crash than have her “privates” touched by the village idiot.
@Donna
I’m quoting Lenore:
“I print this for the same reason Blake wrote it: Not to minimize anyone’s lingering trauma, but to normalize the folks who don’t feel it. ”
and now Anon Mom:
“Because we are 1) making people who don’t feel permanently ruined think there must be something wrong with them””
It’s my opinion that people like the original poster IS normal. And it’s my thought that there is no way that someone else’s experience (and even their ‘victimhood’ if you want to be pejorative) is going to change that.
“this man NEVER felt like a victim. He didn’t feel like a victim when it occurred. He doesn’t feel like a victim now. One suggestion is that we are convincing people who don’t otherwise feel victimized into being victims”
Being a victim and feeling like a victim are two different things, and it’s entirely possible to have either one without the other. While expressly disclaiming that it applies to the original story or to any of the commenters’ stories, it’s also possible to have lasting psychological effects from something and not be entirely aware of the source or severity or both.
Finally, yes, there are people who are easily suggestible; such a person, being told that they are a victim may internalize that. I think the problem is the “easily suggestible”, not the “being told they’re a victim”.
“It’s my opinion that people like the original poster IS normal.”
So then you agree that it is normal to not feel assaulted at all when a minor unwanted groping occurs? Does that mean that those, such as yourself, who do believe that it is an assault are not normal?
Because that is the part that you seem to be glossing over. The fact is that he NEVER felt assaulted. He didn’t feel assaulted when it happened and then moved on, as you and many here report feeling. He NEVER felt trauma. Even as it was happening, it was not traumatic. His comment isn’t about lingering trauma, it is about not feeling trauma at all. Lenore might have muddied the water with her comment, but you seem overly focused on one sentence – that was not his – in a rather large post about not feeling any trauma at all.
Yes James — that’s my point:
“Finally, yes, there are people who are easily suggestible; such a person, being told that they are a victim may internalize that. I think the problem is the “easily suggestible”, not the “being told they’re a victim”.”
E, it might be true for you that you’re immune to self-doubt about your reactions when the whole world around you is telling you that your reaction is not the normal one for your experiences.
Not everyone is like that. I can easily imagine being talked into thinking that there’s something wrong with me for not having what is considered the “normal” reaction to some experience. In fact, in my experience, it happens quite frequently, because I tend to be less emotional than some of my friends. I’m confident enough to usually set those doubts aside, but then I’m not a young child who has had a difficult experience and is being told by the people who are supposed to “help” that I should expect to be more upset than I am.
Well, some percentage of people are easily suggestible. That may in fact be the underlying problem in a particular individual.
I don’t see how that makes it not a problem to constantly pound the message about how people should feel, knowing that some people are, in fact, suggestible.
@Donna
“So then you agree that it is normal to not feel assaulted at all when a minor unwanted groping occurs? Does that mean that those, such as yourself, who do believe that it is an assault are not normal? ”
Poor wording on my part. I should have said:
It’s my opinion that people like the original poster IS common given the frequency of unwanted touching that occurs.
As far as if he felt “assaulted” — I didn’t either, but we’re talking about words describing actions that we knew were not at all correct or okay. He went to lengths to avoid this guy.
That’s why I asked what the correct word to use when someone touches your breasts w/o permission in an elevator. Is it assault? Is it groping. Is groping a legal term? I mean, this is just semantics.
I’ve got no problem with how this person processed this experience. I also don’t have a problem if other people don’t react the same way. I don’t think either side should be trying to convince the other that their experience and reaction should be the same.
And why are you so content to dismiss HIS feelings? Writing this piece implies that he is feeling some pressure to respond differently to what happened to him. People don’t spend a week pondering a lack of feeling unless they are feeling some pressure from somewhere to feel something. Why should the fact that you don’t feel pressured to still feel traumatized negate his feelings that he does?
“So then you agree that it is normal to not feel assaulted at all when a minor unwanted groping occurs? Does that mean that those, such as yourself, who do believe that it is an assault are not normal? ”
Is it normal not to feel assaulted when assaulted? No, probably not. I think the word should have been “traumatized”, not “assaulted”. Assaulted is a binary, either you have or have not been. Trauma is a scalar, ranging from “not at all” to “lifelong effects” to “causes death”. It’s not surprising that some things can cause emotional trauma of differing intensities to different people. (This harks back to the debate on “trigger warnings”… some people are affected by things that other people are not troubled by. Telling people “just get over it” is as useful as telling someone “you’ll never get over it.”)
I expect this post will generate a lot of anger… but I understand the writer’s feelings. I wonder how many of us have been groped or kissed when we didn’t ask for it or weren’t expecting it. Any other women here have creepy grandmas who used to make loud comments about how we were growing boobies in our preteens? I know my grandmother meant it as a “oh, look how much she’s grown!” declaration of pride, thing, but I can’t imagine any grandmothers getting away with that now.
I suppose I’m just confused at the takeaway we’re supposed to have.
Seems like we’re either encouraging people that their post-assault reactions are disproportionate now matter how they react/rebound from them.
“Seems like we’re either encouraging people that their post-assault reactions are disproportionate now matter how they react/rebound from them.”
I’d say that other people’s post-assault reactions are very likely to be none of my business.
Donna, I’m not sure you’ve read my posts or perhaps that I’ve been clear in writing about them.
I had the EXACT same reaction that he had when someone groped me. I did nothing then and don’t think about it very often and when I have think “wow that was so weird” (I can tell you the exact T shirt I was wearing when it happened, I can tell you what month and year it happened, and I can tell you that this man was a millionaire businessman/philanthropist who has a YMCA named after him, I can recall how stunned I was while it happened), but I’ve probably only told the story to about 5 people ever.
I just don’t know what my takeaway is supposed to be today. Are they saying that they really “Tried to be upset” or is that just a click bait Title? Why are they stunned that groping is included in a statistic about college girl being assaulted? Do we need a separate statistic that says “groped while in college” because it was not a big deal to him?
I’m presume the gist of what I was writing was clear (even though the sentence is awful) but for clarification:
“Seems like post-assault/groping/whatever reactions are disproportionate now matter how they react or rebound from them.”
This person feels that ‘society’ (I guess) is saying he should feel more victimized.
Other people feel like society (I guess) is saying they should feel less of a victim — I mean, isn’t that the message when someone else treats you like this to begin with? That their desire to touch you is okay because you are sitting in a public place (like a barber shop or an office building).
I think the issue is with the terminology that is being used. I think the typical person, upon hearing the term sexual assault, thinks of rape, or at least some type of violent attack involving physically overpowering someone or drugging them and then raping them. So, when a parent of a girl about to leave for college hears, “1 in 4 college females will be sexually assaulted while in school” they hear the absolute worst interpretation of that term.
But to include unwanted touching, an unwanted kiss, a drunken consensual sexual encounter that is later regretted by one of the parties, an unwanted look (yes, that’s been thrown in there as well), in that term, is really done, in my opinion, to bolster this idea of a rape culture existing here on our college campuses. Why? My guess is that there are elements on most college campuses who really need to drive home the victim mentality by telling a girl, for example, who had sex with a guy eight months ago and then got upset when she found out he’d gone off to a semester abroad and come back to campus with a girlfriend, that her encounter with him, since she now regretted it, was, in fact, rape. That’s basically the Columbia Mattress Girl story, by the way.
Or, you have the young woman who lied about being gang-raped at UVA. Reporters who read the story in Rolling Stone and expressed some doubts about some of the details were labelled “rape deniers” etc. until the whole pack of lies came crashing down.
” but we’re talking about words describing actions that we knew were not at all correct or okay.”
But he doesn’t report thinking that at the time. He reports thinking that the man’s actions were odd. And he was embarrassed to have someone else, particularly a classmate, see this happening. That is it. And even those emotions came after what appears to be years of this happening.
It wasn’t until he was an adult that he decided that the barber’s actions were wrong.
“He went to lengths to avoid this guy.”
What lengths? He thought about changing barbers but decided that was less convenient so he continued to go to the same place. He did try to go when the guy wasn’t there. Heck, I’ve looked in windows to see if certain people were working in order to avoid being stuck engaging with someone who annoyed me.
There is a difference between something being unwanted and you viewing it as an assault (even if you don’t conjure that specific word). Assault really a legal term. It connotes that you feel something is criminal or worthy of legal action. That appears to be the way you viewed the man who touched you in the elevator – that his actions would have been worthy of arrest if you had wanted to pursue it.
However, there are a great many things in this world that we don’t like and try to avoid, but that we also don’t feel to be worthy of criminal or other legal action. I don’t like to hug socially (those people you barely know who hug hello and goodbye), but I don’t feel that someone who hugs me hello should be arrested. I wouldn’t define it as an assault (despite the fact that it would meet the legal definition). It doesn’t make me feel anything. It is simply something that I would prefer to not do. That seems to be more his impression of this scenario. He didn’t want the guy to continue to do it because he didn’t like it, but he didn’t feel anything else about it really.
“I can tell you the exact T shirt I was wearing when it happened, I can tell you what month and year it happened, and I can tell you that this man was a millionaire businessman/philanthropist who has a YMCA named after him, I can recall how stunned I was while it happened)”
Sorry, but if you remember those things, you were far more affected by this than you want to admit here (unless it happened yesterday). You just don’t remember all those details about something that meant very little to you or something that you never think about.
Donna — I remember the month and year because I was helping deliver xmas trees for my employer and I know when I worked there at xmas during college. I remember what I was wearing because he traced the word “Ski” on my Ski Utah shirt and was very deliberate because he dotted the “i”.
I never said it didn’t affect me, I specifically said it stunned me. I knew it was completely inappropriate but I also knew that I’d probably never see the guy again and that he was a dirty old man (and a powerful one to boot).
My point was that I can recall all the details because it was such a strange unexpected inappropriate experience. But I didn’t dwell on it and I have probably gone years at a time without thinking about it. Just like the author that can remember the specifics (including the fingernails).
But thanks for the armchair psychology.
“You just don’t remember all those details about something that meant very little to you or something that you never think about.”
Maybe you don’t, but it’s more than a little bit presumptuous to be telling other people.
I mean, thankfully it is the only time anyone has decided to touch my breasts without invitation. It’s not like that experience will just get thrown in with all the other times, lol.
I also remember the first time I kissed a boy or had sex or any number of firsts or significant things.
I think being groped in that manner is significant enough to recall with some detail.
When I was five, my uncle and step-uncle, both about 13, would pay me a quarter to, let’s just say, BJ them. I realize now that it was inappropriate and predatory behavior on their part, but I don’t feel like it damaged or scarred me in any way. They were horny teens and I was a gullible kid who wanted 25 cents. I still interact with my uncle, and very occasionally my step-uncle. The behavior stopped when they were caught with my older sister and my grandpa beat the snot out of them.
Well said BMS.
I hate to tell this, more than I hate to give the details of how I was molested… but since it is highly relevant, and I seem to be the only one here who was groped at a time when the high alert was on, I guess I really need to try to explain the mechanism by which societal attitudes were worse than the groping.
I was 10 at the time. When my uncle groped me my very first reaction was “he is the ‘stranger’ everyone is worried about! This is STRANGER DANGER!” My second thought (thank goodness) was “this freaks adults out so horribly, it isn’t going to stop here if I don’t DO something!” So I waited for my chance, played compliant, and the instant he let both hands off me I ran to a public place. It was a pretty awful feeling making sense of it. It was a bit like finding out Santa Clause isn’t real. Glossing a bit over the long tail of why I didn’t tell. I was able to determine that I had secured my own safety from my uncle. I enjoyed about a year and a half of peace of mind. Then I went to middleschool.
In middle school of course the topic of sex and various aspects of sexual experience and sexuality became the topics both in class and on the school yard. Time and time again I heard the phrase “damaged goods”, I also heard the 1 in 3 girls have been molested statistic and people challenging it, and suggesting that if that was the case there would be x number within their midst. Time and again I felt that prick to my conscience that I was somehow different, damaged. I wasn’t convinced my personal agency was gone, because I had managed an escape and truce with a really large adult attacker. But… bit by bit I became convinced that I was sexually damaged. That if I attempted a relationship it would become instantly apparent that I was “damaged goods”. And I can’t tell you how many times I had heard “no one wants damaged goods.” It was bad enough feeling like I was being unknowingly talked about. And my greatest fear became that I might be discovered. Whatever remaining sense I had that I should tell was consumed by the fear of being outed. I didn’t want to to be gossiped about, outed.
So I sunk into a sort of death by a thousand cuts. I gave up any idea that I could be desirable to anyone but either an abuser, or someone who didn’t really want sex, but wanted a relationship to cover up for that fact. I lived in fear of being outed.
Eventually I was outed, to my family and I got the help I needed. But it took years to accept what they were telling me that what happened to me was about HIM and not about me. It took years to dare to believe I could have a normal relationship.
“Finally, yes, there are people who are easily suggestible; such a person, being told that they are a victim may internalize that. I think the problem is the “easily suggestible”, not the “being told they’re a victim”.”
That is true. Which is why people like the judge mentioned in the article should think about what he is saying before assuming. We don’t know anyone’s state of mind, without actually getting to know them on a personal level first. It’s pretty ignorant of him to assume (for discussions sake) that they ARE a victim, and therefore speak to them as such. What if this person never thought of it that way, but has a “suggestible” personality. Now, say this judge, just started making this person think about something that he/she never felt the need to, and was living a normal, happy and productive life. The judge just now made something out of nothing in this person’s life, and probably for the worse.
It’s like advise. You give it when asked. And you leave it with the person asking to do with it as they will. Not coerce them into following it. It’s really no different than how social and conventional media works. They target a certain mentality and suggestibility, and pick away at it. Example, the insecure. So they advertise, “you’ll look better, feel better, and people will like you more if you get this product”. I’d like to think many wouldn’t fall for something like this. But there will always be enough people that would. Enough to make a nice tidy profit. Now replace that with fears of children getting hurt, or being abducted. Now all the companies making “safer” children’s toys, and GPS tracking apps, have a whole group they can exploit. People are being “groped”, but because they feel it’s “helping them protect their kids”, they don’t even think twice about it.
“Which is why people like the judge mentioned in the article should think about what he is saying before assuming.”
He was talking to the accused, not the victims. As far as we know, he said nothing at all to the victims.
E – Your last sentence us I guess my point (too difficult to copy on my phone). You considered this a significant experience. Something significant enough to be remembered in great detail what I appears to be more than a few years later. That is not nothing. Not something that was just a little odd. That is something that had an emotional affect on you. It is something that you’ve thought about more than a time or two over the ensuing years.
I don’t say that to indicate that you are troubled by it now. Happy things can also have a similar affect on you. But just to say that it was something that is significant to you.
I’ve received unwanted sexual attention several times in my life. I think most people have and the only real difference between the 1 and the other 3 is whether they define it to be sexual assault or not. Personally, I don’t define a drunk guy groping my breast at a party who apologized and slunk off when I pushed his hand away to be a sexual assault. It definitely isn’t something I consider significant. I actually thought it was funny.
I don’t say that to indicate that there is anything wrong with viewing your elevator incident as being significant. It is to say, I don’t get the impression that Blake believes that his experience was significant. Memorable because it happened regularly for years, but not significant.
Sexual assault is real, and yes, it can be traumatizing, but a decade ago, recovering and moving on was considered a good thing–in fact, that was the goal after being sexually assaulted; or at least it was mine. I had a close call right before leaving for university, with a stranger I met at a bar. He coerced me into kissing with tongues, letting him suck my breasts, feeling his erection, and it would have progressed to sex, if I hadn’t broken free of his grip on my wrist, and run away. Anyway, getting over this was hard on me, but I got involved with classes, activities, and new friends at university, and I got counselling as well, because I was having flashbacks at night. After a while, the flashbacks got fewer, further between, and less severe, until they stopped altogether. The following year, I started volunteering at the university women’s centre, and participated in a production of The Vagina Monologues. In 2003 and 2004, this was considered a success story, but now it isn’t, because people are expected, or even encouraged, to be traumatized forever, as if being mentally healthy was a bad thing.
Is this 30-year sentence guy the middle-aged man who went on “social media sites” pretending to be 19, and persuading young teen girls to masturbate on their webcams for him, while he recorded the sessions?
I seem to remember similar comments from that judge before locking that guy up for decades.
One of the girls, who willingly performed for some anonymous stranger on the Internet, said that for the rest of her life, she would have to wonder every time she met someone if they had seen the video.
Yeah, the guy’s a perv and a creep, but is he really to blame for anything beyond soliciting?
But, why be angry at your own stupidity and poor judgment when you can be a blameless victim for the rest of your life?
I just realized that the original letter reminded me of a Friends episode.
As I recall, Chandler goes to the tailor that Joey has been going to since his teens. While the tailor checks the fit of Chandler’s slacks, he feels him up. Chandler is visibly shocked, but says nothing until he goes home and complains to Joey. Turns out, the tailor has been doing this to Joey for years, but he thought it was something every tailor did and that it was perfectly innocent.
So, Chandler feels creeped out and Joey feels a little stupid, but neither requires counseling nor goes to the police to demand the immediate arrest and incarceration of this predatory tailor.
And, none of the other characters lectures them on how their inaction will result in other, more fragile people, being similarly victimized and possibly raped by this man.
Victims of a crime don’t need to have their lives determined by the crime, an assumption that has nothing to do with the fact the crime should be left unaddressed and/or unpunished.
Even if what the quoted author of the original piece did survive without any major trauma, and even if the event didn’t define his life, that doesn’t justify letting a gay barber getting off unpunished for touching minors.
Many people who have their houses burglarized, or their cars stolen, don’t live forever in trauma for the incident. Most move on and over the events. That doesn’t mean stealing a car or breaking-and-entering a home should be treated as a misdemeanor.
I have no problem at all normalizing survivors like the author, who bear no scars and no major psychological damage from the fact. That doesn’t mean normalizing the behavior of sexual assailants like the barber as minute indiscretions that should be let go.
“That doesn’t mean stealing a car or breaking-and-entering a home should be treated as a misdemeanor. ”
No, but there are some levels of theft that actually are misdemeanors. And even some levels of theft that don’t rise to the level of reporting at all. There’s a huge difference between someone stealing my car and someone stealing my lunch out of the fridge at work. Both actions are wrong and theft. But if I demanded prison time and a lifetime registration on a stealing offenders’ registry for the person who stole my leftover pizza, people would look at me as if I was the crazy one overreacting. Stealing lunch out of the fridge deserves social consequences, not legal ones.
I have a problem with labeling an unwanted kiss or inappropriate touch as “sexual assault.” Maybe it technically is, but it deserves a social smackdown, not a legal one. And I think it does trivialize “real” assault to lump them all together.
One time I was at a play with friends and the total stranger seated in front of me had his arm around his date, but then his hand slid down the back of her chair to my knee and then slid up my thigh, between my legs. I wasn’t violated or traumatized. I was mostly amused at his gall and elbowed my friend next to me to point out his inappropriate behavior. We both looked at each other with wide mouthed “can you believe this guy?” looks. Then I tapped his date on the shoulder and quietly drew her attention to the situation. She smacked him upside the head and dragged him out of the theater. I’m sure they had quite the fight in the lobby, but they never came back to their seats for the rest of the show. Social consequences.
I’m not suggesting that women (or guys) should just take it and do nothing if someone behaves inappropriately, but there are many ways of handling minor infractions without escalating it to assault charges or reporting to authorities.
Just like many people who steal a sandwich out of the fridge at work would never dream of stealing a car out of the parking lot, there are also people who would steal a kiss but never actually rape anyone.
“there are many ways of handling minor infractions without escalating it to assault charges or reporting to authorities.”
There are many ways of handling minor infractions, of which escalating it to assault charges or reporting to authorities are available, and may or may not be appropriate to the situation.
Donna — I didn’t take your comments to mean I had any reason to be concerned, I just disagree with you.
Perhaps I just have a better memory to certain things than others. I can also recall the first time I cursed, where I was, who I said it with, and what I said (because it’s so silly now looking back). I can also remember when parents had a huge argument on a vacation because it was such a rare event. I mean, some things you recall because they were so unusual.
Tonight at dinner I asked my husband (of 25+ years) if I’d ever told the elevator story, because I couldn’t recall if I had. He said he did remember it (and of course knew who he was because he was a well known person in the community). So I guess I did tell the story at some point, but I couldn’t even recall if I had in almost 3 decades of a relationship.
Andrey makes the point that I think I’m attempting (poorly) to make. Normalizing a “it happened to me, I moved on, not a big deal” is one thing. But does it play a role in normalizing the unacceptable behavior?
@JPK: I’m against public sex offender registries, and have always been. They don’t work. I’m not suggesting the barber in questions should be send for prison for life. I also agree that there are degrees of sexually inappropriate behaviors to be considered when considering punishment.
However, touching a minor (the author speaks of being barely in puberty when it first happened) with sexual intent is a serious issue, at least a more serious one that many commentators tried to make of it here. That the child/teen survived well and didn’t had his/her life defined around the incidents doesn’t diminish the unacceptable behavior of the barber in question.
This is my general view of these sort of unwanted advances: the psychological effects on the victim have nothing to do with the wrongfulness of it. Many women are cat-called when walking through a parking lot heading to work, almost everyone of them will not have the day completely ruined by let, let alone a whole week or month – doesn’t make it right for instance.
That it involved minors make the issue much more serious.
If a story like that of the barber had become public, it is very likely other victims would have come forward, and then you’d have a serial molester that needs a restraining order and possibly home confinement for a period.
I have a problem with the phrase “true sexual assault” just like I have a problem with the phrase “rape culture”. Any unwanted sexual attention IS an assault. If someone gropes another person without their approval, then it IS a sexual assault. But that’s up to the “victim” to determine, not society. Unfortunately, we now live in a society in which that society is now telling us that we’re a victim and this is how we should feel. If a person doesn’t conform to that perceived idea then they are attacked for minimalizing sexual assault. And THAT’S wrong.
As far as “rape culture” goes, that term does a complete disservice to actual rape. A guy who compliments your legs, or your chest, is not adding to the “rape culture”. A guy who makes a sexual comment to their female counterpart is not adding to “rape culture”. It might be inappropriate, but it is in no way comparable to rape, nor should these guys be compared to an actual rapist.
I find it somewhat ironic that 20 years ago, there was an episode of The Real World: Los Angeles in which one of the male roommates went into Beth and Tammy’s bedroom where the girls were hanging out and talking. Beth was lying under the covers and the male roommate hung out for a bit, started teasing the girls, then things escalated and ended with him trying to pull off the bedspread. Beth held on and he ended up dragging Beth out of the bedroom and down the hall. She got pissed and an argument ensued in which the guy said she was over-reacting and she basically compared the situation to be raped (her telling him “no” and him not listening).
The internet (as it was during the early 90’s) went crazy with people up in arms regarding her comparing rape to what she had just experienced. She was vilified and demonized by women’s groups, rape crisis groups, feminist groups, you name it, they were pissed because they felt that she had minimalized rape. And now our society is doing the exact same thing.
“It empowers the kid because it shows them they can handle stuff like this, completely on their own — just like an adult. Not merely “get past it” but dismiss it from their lives as being no more than a passing annoyance with no lingering effect. They learn that they don’t =have= to be harmed by it. They learn that they don’t =have= to be helped and sheltered from every potential harm, because they can deal with it. =That= is personal power, the power to rise above.”
But he writes that he felt uncomfortable and yet didn’t tell the man to stop or find a way to prevent it from happening again. Everyone has the right to react to a situation differently and I do NOT blame him for not speaking up or stopping it. But this is a story of very limited empowerment — of coping and not letting something define you, yes, but not feeling empowered to protect your own personal boundaries.
To me, the free range perspective on this issue is to teach your child that they have the right to tell someone to stop when they’re making them uncomfortable. You don’t have to feel like a victim or be traumatized for life to tell them to stop and report them to an adult. Don’t ever be afraid to tell.
As much as the media talks about sexual assault as being wrong and kids are taught about bad touch, many people still very much want to sweep it under the rug when it happens in their family. For every person who identifies with the author’s viewpoint, there are more who wonder why they can’t get over it or think that maybe the family and friends who told them they were overreacting were actually right. There’s a danger in this article that I don’t think the author or Lenore recognize. It’s not enough to just say you’re not minimizing. Tell the story, and then make it very clear that everyone has the right to say no and/or to report it. Don’t suggest that the consequences may be worse than the crime. Make it clear that it was this author’s feeling that the man was “creepy but harmless” and there’s also nothing wrong with considering the same type of behavior NOT “harmless”.
I broadly agree with the post, but using the words ‘real sexual assault’ opens a real can of worms… who decides what’s real? It is a difficult area because there will be some degree of subjectivity – obviously some behaviours are criminal, whereas others I’d say are merely antisocial. had a random guy put his hand very deliberately on my thigh on a late night bus one – that could probably technically be classed as an assault, but personally I just found it rude and antisocial and was irritated rather than traumatised.
I too get annoyed at the often intoned words from judges and the media that a (female) victim’s ‘life is ruined’ or ‘will never recover’. To me that has the ring of the a Victorian, patriachal idea of the abused/raped woman as ‘damaged goods’ because of what happened to her.
There are lots of negative, objectifying behaviours where the perpetrators need to be called out, but not necessarily locked up.
“Any unwanted sexual attention IS an assault. If someone gropes another person without their approval, then it IS a sexual assault.”
I disagree. Any clearly unwanted sexual attention is assault. Putting your hand on the thigh of a complete stranger on the bus is an assault, an extremely minor one, but an assault nonetheless. Putting your hand on the thigh of someone you’ve been warmly chatting with for the last hour to see if they are receptive is not. Moving in for a kiss when they don’t protest your touch is not sexual assault. Continuing to keep it there or doing something else once the recipient expresses their lack of interest is sexual assault.
The problem with stating that any unwanted sexual attention is assault is that it imparts on men (and it is almost always men) a requirement to be mind readers; a skill they have failed at since Adam and Eve first came into being. We are not omniscient beings and therefore human interactions are fraught with mismatched expectations, miscommunication, missed signals, and overreaching. If we declare all of that assault, and thus criminal since assault is really a legal term of art, we basically destroy all natural human interaction.
And that is the path we are heading down. In fact, we are heading even further down that path. Society doesn’t just want men to read present minds. They now have to, while drinking themselves, read the future to know whether the drunk, but not clearly out of it, woman who is saying “yes” tonight will change her mind at some point.
I do think we need to put a brake on this trend. There does come a point where we should say “I acknowledge what you are feeling, but this is not a situation that society is going to define as an assault.”
“Make it clear that it was this author’s feeling that the man was “creepy but harmless” and there’s also nothing wrong with considering the same type of behavior NOT “harmless”.”
While I do agree in THIS instance, I do think we take it too far down the refusal to tell people that they are overreacting line.
JKP reminds me of another Friends reference. There was an episode where the guy was stealing Ross’ sandwich out of the work frig. This was a very special sandwich. It was a super fancy Thanksgiving leftovers sandwich. It happens a few days in a row and, in typical Ross fashion, when Ross sees the perp eating it in the cafeteria, he explodes well beyond the normal reaction for a stolen sandwich. His bosses didn’t say “I understand this is a theft and any theft is upsetting so whatever you are feeling is fine.” They sent him to counseling. We seem to have an understanding that a sandwich stolen from the work frig is not the same as a thief coming into your home and have no problem saying “dude, your reaction is way over the top here, get help to deal with your issues.”
Maybe it is the fact that sexual assault was minimized for years, but we seem to have really lost all perspective in this area. We allow people to make tragedy of things that should really just be harmless. We encourage people to be devastated by seeing a flasher instead of saying “Its a penis, not an unmitigated tragedy. With any luck, you’ll willingly see a few more of them in your life.” Any attempt to bring what happened into perspective is considered minimizing sexual assault.
“I too get annoyed at the often intoned words from judges and the media that a (female) victim’s ‘life is ruined’ or ‘will never recover’. To me that has the ring of the a Victorian, patriachal idea of the abused/raped woman as ‘damaged goods’ because of what happened to her. ”
I’m not sure you’re inferring what they’re implying.
I believe, in that setting, what they’re trying to do to drive home (to the offender) that the victim has lost far more than the offender has gained.
Imagine it in a different context. Suppose a burglar has burglarized a home, stolen goods from which he was able to realize $500. It wouldn’t be out of line to point out to this burglar, at sentencing, that, the cost to the victim was far more than $500. They had to go get new stuff, or do without. They might have had to take time off from work. If the burglar gained entry by breaking a window, they had to pay to fix that. And… some people who’ve been burglarized no longer feel safe in their homes, may never feel safe in that particular home again. Pointing these out to the offender is the last chance the judge has to convince the offender to change his (or her) ways.
” We encourage people to be devastated by seeing a flasher ”
Just who is included in the “we” in this sentence?
“They now have to, while drinking themselves, read the future to know whether the drunk, but not clearly out of it, woman who is saying “yes” tonight will change her mind at some point. ”
Of course, they ALSO have to read the future to know whether the completely stone sober woman (or man) who is saying “yes” tonight will change their mind at some point. And this is not a new development.
I had an experience as a young teen where my father’s best friend groped me and tried to seduce me. When i refused he did stop, but he persisted for a while.
I never told my father. I thought it would make him hate his friend.
It’s had about zero impact on my life. 30 years later i still am in contact with this friend. When i think about that night it’s still completely underwhelming.
I see no reason why this man should be punished.
Also my boyfriend when i was a kid was ten years older than me. The relationship lasted for years.
By today’s standards both these men should be registered sex offenders and have Been thrown in jail for years. My parents would be also punished for allowing the relationship. All or lives should have Been ruined over this and the therapy that would be firced on me only necessary to deal with the aftermath. Not the actual” crimes against me. ”
It’s sad today we put our children on sex registry, and label them offenders to protect our children from sex. Insanity!
Lizzie, you rock!
My response to all this?
We have turned punitive response up to high gear. We are extremely pissed off as a nation. Road rage….everything rage….soul rage. We believe in thunderbolts and divine wrath.
Sad….
I read the story with interest. Something like that happened to me once…briefly…..on a train ride, when I was 16.
It never occurred to me to do anything other than dismiss it. I did not need any help from anyone else.
That was long ago, when youth was empowered all by itself with its own common sense.
Sometimes I think we “quiver” just a little too much for our own sanity, these days.
Unable to differentiate between the sublime, the ridiculous, and the truly horrific.
Perhaps, we live in times where the voice of reason comes off sounding like the expressions of a de Sade…..
We are probably the most “commercially sexualized” society on earth. If we let that sink in for a moment, we must come to the painful conclusion that we do not wish to become the dog that bites the hand that feeds it.
This involves some form of payback probably, not written in the original social contract – but there it is.
Which leaves us pondering the nature of resilience in a human being. Can it still exist as healthy as ever? I wonder.
How normal are the folks who just do not feel it?
And if we hand down sentences comparable to that for murder……then what has become of murder itself?
A shrug and apology for a sad lack of perspective?
Sort of like an economic inflation…..if you raise the minimum wage to $25 bucks……then what becomes of the jobs that by nature of skill and responsibility, already earn that?
They go a little bankrupt, no?
Same thing.
If a molestation was not in fact, a murder of the soul…..than what exactly was murdered? The supreme and sublime belief in innocence lost, that does not actually reside within the ‘victim’ themselves?
And if not there – then where exactly does it reside?
(Now if I was unclear on that point – I think I’d want to check with the recipient of the ‘criminal’ behavior, first.)
Which is sort of the distinct flavor of the article above, is it not?
Imagine it in a different context. Suppose a burglar has burglarized a home, stolen goods from which he was able to realize $500. It wouldn’t be out of line to point out to this burglar, at sentencing, that, the cost to the victim was far more than $500. They had to go get new stuff, or do without. They might have had to take time off from work. If the burglar gained entry by breaking a window, they had to pay to fix that. And… some people who’ve been burglarized no longer feel safe in their homes, may never feel safe in that particular home again. Pointing these out to the offender is the last chance the judge has to convince the offender to change his (or her) ways.
***
It seems to me there’s a line between this and “this victim is now too traumatized to ever enter her home again,” intoned by a judge without first ascertaining whether this is the case.
“It seems to me there’s a line between this and “this victim is now too traumatized to ever enter her home again,” intoned by a judge without first ascertaining whether this is the case.”
Why?
Well well Andrew …sounds like Gino the McLean barber gave your gumbies a brush and a-rub-a…don’t feeeel so bad..the perv got me too…here is the proof…after your hair cut and your gumbie waxing did he say “a would a you like-a-lolly-a-pop-a”??……being from McLean va I know of some others that fell victim to the lolly pop gumbie rubbing licking hair cutting child molesting freak.The silver lining is that he hung himself later in the 1980’s so it’s said.There is a happy ending from a rub-a-and a-brush-a.
Brian: Yes, thank you for reminding me, he did offer a lollipop after those uncomfortable haircuts. But if in fact he committed suicide I take no joy in that. I don’t favor the death penalty, even self-inflicted, for groping. It shows that, as I suspect, rather than a happy-go-lucky child fondler he was a tortured individual and that the groping was probably part of a larger mental illness or impairment. I’d prefer to have heard that he had found another profession, or somehow stopped groping, rather than hearing he killed himself.
To those still following this thread: I’ve found out, as every commenter suspected, that I was not the only …. I’m not going to use the word “victim,” since I don’t feel like one. [I found this out by posting the article on my high school 1970s Facebook page.] Let’s say I wasn’t the only one he groped. In fact there were plenty. And one guy says one of the other barbers groped him. Also: one guy send me a private FB message saying he was wearing loose sweats one day, and the barber quickly slipped his hand UNDER his sweats — which to me is a greater violation.
“When someone says “not to minimize….” they are excusing themselves for minimizing”
Good that you know the motivations of every single person in the whole wide world who might have spoken these words. How’d you get so smart?
Trauma is in the soul of the person affected by another person’s actions.
I don’t enjoy using words like “abuse,” “trauma,” “victim” and “perpetrator” because all of these labels assume there is some kind of universal “given response” to stimulus.
There simply is not anything universal about human responses to circumstances.
It’s a case by case basis.
And I have see how profoundly an adult or authority figure’s “outrage,” alarm, panic, and insistence to characterize certain experiences a child has as “bad” cause trauma, while the original stimulus did not.
To all: Do you think all victims of sexual assault must feel/be irrevocably damaged for life? No? Then you agree with Lenore and the writer. Yes? Then you disagree with Lenore and the writer, though I would ask why you think someone’s reaction to a situation must be a certain way. Neither Lenore nor the writer is saying that anyone should ever feel ok being assaulted or that they shouldn’t report it if they feel compelled to. All that is being said is that they do not need to feel compelled to be distraught and utterly victimized. Just as none should make the writer feel abnormal for not feeling damaged, none should make anyone else feel abnormal for their reaction to being assaulted. That is literally all that is being said.
To Brian: Why is someone killing themselves a happy ending? As someone who has worked with children, I find it interesting that children are not naturally vindictive like many adults can be and like your response indicates you are. They forgive quite a bit, even things they perhaps shouldn’t (at least in our adult minds). We adults call this naive; yet a better analysis is that this is our natural inclination as humans, and that we adults simply become jaded and cynical. You will rarely if ever hear a naturally developed child genuinely wish misery or be happy at the misery of another. Only children who have learned such a behavior from their environment exhibit this.
Donna — You’re 100% right and I should have made my statement clearer. In my haste to type, I wasn’t nearly as clear or exact as I should have been when I inadvertently stated that “any unwanted touching is assault”. I was thinking more along the lines of extreme acts of touching such as being groped while at a nightclub by someone you don’t even know rather and not so much along the lines of the guy you’re out on a 1st date with going in for a kiss.
I forgot the cardinal rule of discussing topics via computer. The people on the other end can’t see your thought process or read between the lines of what you type.
“Real sexual assault — involving force against the will of the victim, or exposing a child to sexual organs or acts — is a very big deal.”
Um, guys… I do hope he doesn’t include normal dressing room / home bathroom situations here…
And…. So… my seeing a teen jerking off in the park when I was nine was ‘a very big deal’????? Or would it have been if the teen had intended for me to see it?
In this quote I feel the author is kind of falling in the same trap (that he tried to avoid) by declaring the whole category ‘a very big deal’. (Personally I’d separate at least the non-touching stuff from the rest.)
You don’t know that it was, you can’t decide that for someone else, child or adult. That is not the same thing as saying that, say, flashing a child is totally okay, and I agree that children should probably tell their parents about stuff like this, but I also think that parents need to be careful with how they react to such news, because, like Havva explained, the reaction can be worse than the thing itself. If the child shrugs and moves on, but mommy goes ‘WHAAAT OMG MY POOR BABY CALL 911’, that is not going to help the kid.
I wonder if the barber was doing this stuff to grown men! I think it’s important to consider that some people PICK who they cross the line with. I don’t think this was just about the man being gay. There are many gay men of that time that would not have done this to a young person. I told a friend of a few childhood/teenage experiences I had that were inappropriate on the adult’s part. They were memories for me. I remember the landscape of adults I encountered was rich. Some grownups were alcoholics. Some were wonderful, interesting and others were creepy, mean, “crazy”… I remember there was always a sense of not vilifying anyone unless they really went beyond reason. I always knew that some adults were tragic characters, a mixture of bad and good. There was the neighbor across the street that was an amazing helper to all, but when he had something to sip at neighborhood functions, he would try to smooch on me and hug me very closely, squeezing my waist to my backside. This always happened in full view of other people. Now when I look back there’s a surreal element to it. I wonder why did no one say anything to him? Did anyone see I was a young girl and afraid? I look at these times with a mixture of disgust, strangely fondness and an understanding that these things prepared me to sense danger and protect myself in adulthood. I also like the writer, see the funny in some of the instances and thank God that things were not worse (because the potential was TRULY there). But I learned how deeply these “little nothings” effected me. Years ago I went to the sonogram appointment to learn the sex of my baby. When the medical assistant said he was a boy, I wept deeply. I was surprised to discover how relieved I was. Even though I know boys and men can be abused (I have friends that were), I also know the minefield a girl child, young woman and woman has to walk daily. It’s often fraught with normalized vulgarity and danger. It’s a part of our culture and history. Here’s to those of us who are mostly unscathed. Prayers and good vibrations to those who suffered, that we would not minimize their stories and thanks to the people who have made laws and go about creating a culture where children and young people are safer.
When I was a little kid, a friend of mine had a teenaged brother who once got me alone and tried to get me to show him “mine”, promising to show me “his”. I just said “no thanks” and left the room. Later, when I was a teen, I worked at a factory where one day my supervisor, a man in his thirties, reached over and started fingering my hair, and saying he was sure I’d like to spend some time alone with him. I said I didn’t think so and went on with my day. Big deal. Stuff like this happens and is part of everyday life. I’m not a victim or a survivor.
The reason unwanted touching or kissing is assault is because there is a cultural problem in regards to how we treat women. Calling it a rape culture is not a giant leap. We all get up in arms when others tell us how to raise our kids, but we aren’t up in arms for EVERY individual who wants to say that it is an assault to touch, in a sexually exploitative manner, without permission?
I agree that FRK movement is about raising resilient children and I appreciate this man’s journey and message up until he essentially dismisses how other’s feel when receiving unwanted advances. It wasn’t ok in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, etc… and it isn’t ok now. Consent, consent, consent.
If anything, this author is a beacon by which we should guide a teachable moment for our chikdren. Trust your gut. When your instincts say “not ok,” it’s time to talk to mom and dad or just say “no” until you distill the many emotions we’re all entitled to.
A bit off the main thread but I wanted to thank David for this statement: “If you go so far as to discuss ‘bad touching’, and you should, you need to make sure they understand that a biological response doesn’t mean what an abuser tells them it does.” I’ve been talking frankly and in detail with my kids since they were quite young about the human body, sex and sexuality, bad touching, stranger danger, consent, safe sex, etc. Yet in all those discussions, it never occurred to me to mention this very important point. I’ll be sure to talk with them about it. Thank you for sharing your story!
@Kimberly “Any unwanted sexual attention IS an assault. If someone gropes another person without their approval, then it IS a sexual assault. But that’s up to the “victim” to determine, not society.”
Something being called ‘sexual assault’ has consequences to how law enforcement and schools and other institutions react to it. Leaving to up to the victim to determine is in essence making away with rule of law. It is absolutely society in general who should decide where the lines are for the purpose of law and the lines should be as clear as possible to everyone before they act.
If nothing else, “victim decides” is very easy to abuse rule and every-time there are easy to abuse rules, people abuse them. History shown both genders and people in all nations with such rules abused such rules.
Groping is absolutely bad. Someone who misrepresented other ones signals and tries to touch just to be rejected is not groping nor assaulting. It was unwanted sexual attention, it was not an assault. There are grey areas and it is all messy and there is usually no proof of what happen which makes things only worst. It is messy area of life where we do not have perfect solutions yet. However, “it is only up to the victim to decide not society” is not good policy at all.
@Abigail: “I agree that FRK movement is about raising resilient children and I appreciate this man’s journey and message up until he essentially dismisses how other’s feel when receiving unwanted advances.”
Where does he do that?
“Something being called ‘sexual assault’ has consequences to how law enforcement and schools and other institutions react to it. Leaving to up to the victim to determine is in essence making away with rule of law.”
Overstating the case. The biggest challenge of sexual assault is that the victim decides if it’s an assault or not, IN ALL CASES. The difference between “horrifying assault” and “No crime here” is consent. And who determines if the “victim” consented? The “victim” does. We have a law where the consent (or lack thereof” is a matter of “society decides” instead of “the person involved decides”… statutory rape.
I think there’s just some implied ‘over-reacting’ by how other might view that same experience: being “stunned” that the 1 in 4 stat about college girls included groping and concluding that any fallout to the barber (had it get reported) would have been a punishment that exceeded the crime.
Of course, he does not say that someone shouldn’t tell their parents, but he does believe that what might happen next would be unfair to the offender. So it kind of transfers the burden of doing something wrong from the groper to the target.
But if I read somewhere that [huge percentage] of children get ‘sexually assaulted’ (or other heavy sounding words) and then see that number includes stuff like (accidentally) seeing someone jerk off in a public park, I’d be stunned too to realize that *I* am one of those children.
@papilio
When he says “(really?)”
“if I read somewhere that [huge percentage] of children get ‘sexually assaulted’ (or other heavy sounding words) and then see that number includes stuff like (accidentally) seeing someone jerk off in a public park”
I don’t know of anyone who would call that a “sexual assault”. Who is saying that it is?
@James Pollock It is “society decides”. By law, a victim has to say no or protest for x escalation of sexuality to be assault. By new college affirmative consent rules, the victim has to say yes for it not to be assault. If you come to cops with “I did not said yes” event, they wont do nothing. If you defend against accusation in college with “she did not said no”, it wont help you.
What is assault and what is not is defined in both cases by either society or third party.
@James Pollock “I don’t know of anyone who would call that a “sexual assault”. Who is saying that it is?”
Statistics of sexual assaults sometimes include things like that because of the way questions are worded. The form usually do not ask the kid “was you sexually assaulted”, it asks what happens and often sweeps in innocent encounters “did you seen strange men genitals”?
For example, 1 in 5 college girl stats tried to measure every attack possible and includes everything from rape to encounters where the girl do not want sex originally, but is convinced by a guy (e.g. seduced or coerced or something like that – it is verbal). They include situation where girl would not have sex normally, but she had it after drinking. That is part of why there are such large discrepancies between survey attacks rates and amounts of girls who report that to authorities. According to those girls answers, they did not reported because “did not think it was serious enough to report.”.
That is why definitions matter. It makes perfect sense to measure all possible encounters to get the upper bound. It does not make sense to discuss result as if they were all horrible life defining events for 20% of female students. Portion of it were, but a lot of them are in the “depends on exact definition of sexual assault whether they count as one or not”.
To a certain extent, we’re getting to the point with some sexual contact that we would be if every time someone jostled you in a crowd – even just the times they elbowed you on purpose – we suggested that people file assault charges and go to counseling. Yes, its an intrusion and yes they were wrong, but pretending that there aren’t different degrees both of contact and response minimizes the truly horrible to benefit the relatively benign.
“By new college affirmative consent rules, the victim has to say yes for it not to be assault.”
Yes, that’s how consent works. Are you new to the concept?
“Statistics of sexual assaults sometimes include things like that because of the way questions are worded. The form usually do not ask the kid “was you sexually assaulted”, it asks what happens and often sweeps in innocent encounters “did you seen strange men genitals”?”
This is a wonderful story, but it isn’t an answer to the question I posed, nor is there an answer in your other two paragraphs. Who is that you are claiming is doing this?
And @MI Dawn:
“I (and a lot of kids of my age/generation) played doctor and did inappropriate touching as young kids (ages 4-6 or so).”
As a parent myself, I wouldn’t even classify that as “inappropriate touching”. Oh, its not something that we as a society condone to happen in public, but I bet that if you were able to get 100 people to honestly answer you’d find that the vast majority did the same, but were afraid to admit it. That’s a big part of our problem IMO – by pretending that things “never happen” or at least never happen to “good people” (see also: teenage masturbation), we’ve introduced shame and fear to millions of people needlessly.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. When I was in elementary school, a bunch of teenage boys rode around in pickup trucks and when they saw little kids, they’d stand up and moon or flash us. As far as I know, nobody’s parents ever called the police.
Later, when I was in junior high I was flashed by an adult man. I was walking past an alley, he whistled, I looked and he was standing there. Again, in junior high, I walked past a man, standing against his car, masturbating. Since, by that time, I’d seen multiple naked men, I just laughed at him and kept walking. i never called the police, nor did my parents.
With that background, last week my children had a school break so we went to Barcelona, Spain. Our apartment was 5 minutes from the beach. (Love AirBnB!) You know what there was at the beach? Naked old men and naked old ladies. No young naked people by the way. My kids (7 and 12) thought it was hilarious. No trauma.
@James Pollock No for christ sake, you do not have to explicitly say “yes” for the even not be an assault. Not in real world, not in normal voluntary sex between two adults. Does your wife really explicitly say “yes James” every level up along the road? Maybe yes, but then you are an exception. Among most adult couples, consent is expressed in more intimate and gentle ways.
The concept of “it is assault unless you say yes out loud” is absolutely new and far far far from being generarely accepted.
andy, have you been drinking?
“Among most adult couples, consent is expressed in more intimate and gentle ways.”
The key words being “consent is expressed”.
“The concept of “it is assault unless you say yes out loud” is absolutely new and far far far from being generarely accepted.”
Are you new to “it’s assault if there wasn’t consent”? Because… this has been in the common-law for centuries.
If you walked up to someone on the street, and punched them as hard as you could, would you be surprised when the police don’t accept your “but he didn’t say I couldn’t” defense? There’s other ways to say “It’s OK if you try to hit me in the face as hard as you can… putting on a pair of boxing gloves and climbing into a boxing ring does it, even if you never say a word… but if there isn’t consent, there isn’t consent, and if there isn’t consent, it’s a crime.
A well written article that really seems to hit the nail on the head regarding some of the debate here.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/05/20/feminists-want-us-to-define-these-ugly-sexual-encounters-as-rape-dont-let-them/?tid=trending_strip_3
Sexual assault is horrible and should be prevented and punished. But this “will never recover” idea helps no one.