On Aug 8, 2005, at 8:04 PM, Andrew Paul wrote:
I know I am treading on complex moral ground here, but the girl was 16,
in a prison. Somehow I doubt that she was an angel, she apparently
consented (albeit, as the judge said, from a position of relative
weakness, being a prisoner - unlike him who was perhaps a prisoner of
something less obvious than bars) and participated of her own free
will.
And it appears that actual penetrative sex was not involved just a
little touching and watching. It worries me how it's become very PC to
jump on this sort of thing and condemn the people to hell. Do you
really
think this guy should have his balls frozen off?
Maybe some of the heat is post-MJ trial. (Did Michael do it? I really
can't say, but things sure look weird, don't they?) But it does seem to
be a bit much to suggest freezing or acid here. How about something a
little more restrained to begin with, such as actual jail time
(punishment) and therapy (treatment)?
To be fair our vacationing convict did abuse his position of authority;
contrarily, he wasn't humping Brownie scouts, and in Colorado City, AZ,
dozens of teenage girls are forced into polygamous marriages each year,
many of them as young as 13 or 14, and they are expected to have sex
with their husbands -- yet there's not a lot of outcry regarding their
predicament.
[We have "religious freedom" to thank for a lot of that, FWIW. I guess
if you're a prison guard groping a girl is a crime, but if you're R-LDS
it's part of your Sunday worship. Yet priests who pull (!) similar
stunts are vilified -- justly … so where's the balance?]
To make things more convoluted, TTBOMK there's a clinical difference
between a pedophile and someone who's got a thing for, say, teenaged
girls; and I believe there's a difference between someone who's partial
to teenaged girls and someone who will abuse his authority to gain
access to girls. That is, there's a difference between the occasional
daydream and acting with (probable) intention to escalate.
As to whether she encouraged him: It doesn't make a damned bit of
difference, and shouldn't have any effect on the sentencing or
decisions here. This man was overstepping. He failed to behave in a
responsible fashion. Whether she was "asking for it" or not is totally
irrelevant. Had it been a case of the girl next door flirting
relentlessly with her neighbor, I think seeing things in a *somewhat*
more lenient light would make sense; but that wasn't the case here. The
girl was incarcerated and he was a guard. There's instant and total
inequity in power position, one far too vast to be ameliorated by any
"circumstance" or other argument.
So what if they'd met under different circumstances? Suppose he was
single and she wasn't a jailbird; what then? (That's another lengthy
discussion, I suppose … what would they have in common? Yet, there are
relationships with partners of widely disparate ages that form and
persist … and many even seem to be reasonably healthy. Oy.)
There's also a big difference between an 18- or even 21-year-old
groping a 16-year-old girl on a date; and a man who is married, has
kids and is in a position of *some* trust basically ignoring all that
in order to get his hands, however briefly, on someone in his charge.
The cliché applies: He was definitely old enough to know better.
As for what to do with people who break laws in general -- perhaps it
would be a good idea for us to consider not how they're treated before
or after serving their sentence, but rather *why* they're serving their
sentences to begin with. A pot possession bust should *not* have the
effects it has on the future of a "criminal" caught with the stuff --
going so far as to cut off all fed student aid is stupid and
overwrought, and classically right-wing hysterical. I don't even think
*most* jobs should have drug testing. (Some, such as assembling nuclear
detonators or driving NASCAR vehicles, sure, but working at McDonald's?
Shit, you need to be wasted out of your mind just to handle the
stupendous drudgery of the work.)
This particular person should not, of course, be allowed to work near
youth again, particularly teens, and should probably undergo some
therapy, possibly even diagnostic stuff to see whether he's actually
drawn to teens or was just being opportunistic. But he shouldn't be
allowed other positions of authority either -- no security guard,
traffic enforcement, or cop work, for instance, and it wouldn't hurt to
find out if part of the reason he did what he did was because he
*liked* the power inequity. If so, he might be heading toward real
trouble. Catching it *now* might save someone from being assaulted
later.
Should his family go on welfare? Not if it's avoidable. But should he
be permitted to use anything even remotely like a revolving door while
under the onus of a sentence? Absolutely not. Even if this guy just
fell victim to profoundly bad judgment, I don't think we need a
teen-girl groping Martha Stewart clone running around the Ohio (or any
other) countryside, and we sure as hell don't owe him the courtesy of
an uninterrupted vacation.
He must be both white and possessed of money.
--
Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books
http://books.nightwares.com/
Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror"
http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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