Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I stood there, an American citizen, sexually assaulted by a government official

ourlittlechatterboxes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 138 posts

Re: I stood there, an American citizen, sexually assaulted by a government official

#71

Post by electromagnetic »

mfukar wrote: post #58
Confusion wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We ought not to call these incidents sexual assault. It sounds too much like hyperbole. I fully agree: these people should talk to someone who has actually been sexually assaulted. That would probably knock some sense into them as to the difference between their experience and actual sexual assault. Being thoroughly frisked, in public, in broad light, where nothing bad could possibly happen, is being compared to bein…

Does a visit to the gynecologist count as sexual assault. Of course not, but why? Because, implicitly or explicitly, the patient has consented to being examined. Do you have a particular difficulty with grasping 'consent' in the context the author narrates? edit to clarify: Of course, as far as the law is concerned, there are other factors that constitute "sexual assault" as an offense, but those can't be accurately…

> Does a visit to the gynecologist count as sexual assault. Of course not, but why? Because, implicitly or explicitly, the patient has consented to being examined.

In accordance with a medically necessitated test. If a gynecologist is sticking a finger in a womans vagina, whether s/he has implicit or explicit consent is sexual assault if performed under misinformation.

If a doctor gropes my testicles or sticks a finger up my ass without medical justification for doing so, it is sexual asault.

Given that the 'pat down' is the least effective screening procedure in an airport, it has very little reason to be performed for the reasons given. The real reason the pat downs are performed is to find drugs concealed on the body.

Why is a pat down used, when a dog can more easily be used with less harassment of passengers and more verifiability in courts. Bloodhound evidence is permissible in all courts (IIRC) generally without any question because of the safe guards. The bloodhound will detect if you have an illicit substance on you, even if it is in an unverifiable quantity by an officer. If you aren't actually carrying, you won't be arrested as you're not prosecutable. So why isn't this used? Mostly because a bloodhound isn't intimidating to people who know they won't be busted.

Airline security is designed to add pressure, to make people feel nervous because people with a reason to be nervous simply walking past an officer will be panicking. This allows them to catch all the one-time mules who are doing it out of desperation, it may also work on amateur (AKA idiot) terrorists.

However, as we can see the 9/11 terrorists all managed to board a plane without panicking or looking suspicious, because they are all believed to have received paramilitary or military training. These trainings inevitably involve keeping calm under duress. Normally military training involves mock interrogations to train the soldier to withstand questioning and thus keep them calm about the risk of being questioned.

Re: I stood there, an American citizen, sexually assaulted by a government official

#72

Post by nosse »

I think this matter has been conversated enough in HN.

I don't believe this subject is gratifying majority's intellectual curiosity.

It might be provoking lots of feelings, but this is not Feelings News nor Moral News but Hacker News.

I'm not saying anyone has been posting badly. I'm just saying that I've seen these "TSA sexual assault" twice now, and I don't think any new ideas will come along third time.

Re: I stood there, an American citizen, sexually assaulted by a government official

#73

Post by loewenskind »

cookiecaper wrote: post #31
chc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's attempted murder and torture. Using that as the bar for sexual assault downplays real victoms' experiences as well. (I don't mean this to disagree with your overall point. I just don't want to see the bar swing the other way where people feel like they're being told to shut up about sexual assault unless they were bludgeoned with a cinderblock.)

Yeah, it is an extreme example. I used it to counter the opposite extreme posited by the article, that even unpleasant or unwanted or unexpected touching qualifies as "assault", but perhaps I was not adequately clear that less murderous assaults are also extremely serious and damaging. I don't mean to downplay those at all. In my mind, I suppose the bar for physical "sexual assault" is set around the forced handling…

>I used it to counter the opposite extreme posited by the article, that even unpleasant or unwanted or unexpected touching qualifies as "assault"

Unwanted touching absolutely qualifies as assault. Imagine a movie theater, sick of people videoing their movies, started doing "pat downs" like this. It would be very clearly sexual assault then. And if the person they were touching were a child it would be even more clear.

Re: I stood there, an American citizen, sexually assaulted by a government official

#74

Post by notahacker »

poet wrote: post #68
notahacker wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gratification? A sexual motive? Can the people downvoting me honestly not see the difference between a person performing an act of gratuitous violence on another person to satisfy their own urges and a person doing their job badly?

At the minimum it is sexual battery [1] and sexual imposition [2] and it could be argued that it was gross sexual imposition [3]. Ohio doesn't even use the phrase "sexual assault" in its laws about sex offenses [4]. The point is, quibbling about terminology is silly. Any reasonable human being understands what the author of the blog post is getting at. She was touched in a sexual way without her consent, without any…

"Quibbling about terminology" isn't "silly" when someone is making a public accusation of a sex crime. Neither of us are lawers, but right there in the statutes you've posted is the line "Sexual contact means any touching of an erogenous zone of another, including without limitation the thigh, genitals, buttock, pubic region, or, if the person is a female, a breast, for the purpose of sexually arousing or gratifying either person." [emphasis mine].

I don't think that brushing up against erogenous zones as part of a search procedure constitues "sexual contact" even though I agree that the TSA employee appears to have failed to give adequate warning and shown a lack of discretion in singling out a new mother in the first place. I don't doubt the indignity of her experience may have been shocking and upsetting, but it stopped well short of sexual abuse.

As other people have pointed out in this thread with rather more eloquence than me, the semantics actually are important here (i) because sexual assault is a very serious crime with significant consequences for both victim and perpetrator (ii) because hyperbole detracts from serious scrutiny of the boundaries of acceptability.

Re: I stood there, an American citizen, sexually assaulted by a government official

#76

Post by acabal »

aneth wrote: post #32
noonespecial wrote: post #15

I've been watching these stories trickle by on HN for a few days now wondering if I should say what I'm about to say. I'm going to put up an opinion that I'm quite certain is going to be unpopular. At length, I think the potential karma burn is worth speaking out. If you choose to downvote me, please drop in a reasonable reply as well: We ought not to call these incidents sexual assault. It sounds too much like hyper…

I completely agree that while she may feel violated, this is not sexual assault, and to say it is detracts from any argument about the rationality behind this new policy. Sexual assault requires a sexual motive and a sexual act, neither of which occurred here. The intent and action were both to search. A doctor touching the same place in the same way would not be considered sexual assault because there is no sexual i…

At the risk of sounding cynical or aloof, I think the times when rational debate shaped the political climate and real-world policies of this country have long gone. It might be time for intelligent people to take a cue from Fox News and (dare I say?) start manipulating emotion to get what needs to be done, done.

Re: I stood there, an American citizen, sexually assaulted by a government official

#77

Post by yummyfajitas »

electromagnetic wrote: post #67
corin_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The doctor cannot compel me to cancel a trip across the Atlantic if I refuse to submit to the tests" I'd suggest that failing to discover a fatal disease would be slightly worse than failing to travel somewhere. What you mean to say is that it's OK for a doctor to do it because in that case the recipient believes he is doing it for a good reason. If everyone going through an airport fully believed that these checks…

I think the problem is that the 'pat down' is the most ineffective security measure used in the airport. The real reason for the pat down is actually to find drugs concealed on a persons body. Why on earth do they believe they'll find a razor blade on a persons body? They don't, because they're not looking for weapons because every real weapon known to man is detectable from a metal detector, and the majority of impr…

because every real weapon known to man is detectable from a metal detector, and the majority of improvised weapons still use metal detectable parts.

Lets not get hyperbolic. I found a real weapon with less metal than my jeans in about 2 minutes with google.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/isotope/492829645/

(Presumably a terrorist could do it with no metal, but a prisoner has limitations on materials available.)

Re: I stood there, an American citizen, sexually assaulted by a government official

#78

Post by loewenskind »

shareme wrote: post #41
noonespecial wrote: post #15

I've been watching these stories trickle by on HN for a few days now wondering if I should say what I'm about to say. I'm going to put up an opinion that I'm quite certain is going to be unpopular. At length, I think the potential karma burn is worth speaking out. If you choose to downvote me, please drop in a reasonable reply as well: We ought not to call these incidents sexual assault. It sounds too much like hyper…

Unfortunately you need to re-read. They(TSA) did not follow SOP and warn her that such a search would entail what was described thus its sexual assault be legal definition..same rules as the pat-down when someone is arrested BTW..

This post should be more prominent in this thread. People are claiming hyperbole here but what happened was literally sexual assault. I think the case could also be made for young since they are not able to legally consent to the activity.

Re: I stood there, an American citizen, sexually assaulted by a government official

#79

Post by agentultra »

Confusion wrote: post #36
noonespecial wrote: post #15

I've been watching these stories trickle by on HN for a few days now wondering if I should say what I'm about to say. I'm going to put up an opinion that I'm quite certain is going to be unpopular. At length, I think the potential karma burn is worth speaking out. If you choose to downvote me, please drop in a reasonable reply as well: We ought not to call these incidents sexual assault. It sounds too much like hyper…

We ought not to call these incidents sexual assault. It sounds too much like hyperbole. I fully agree: these people should talk to someone who has actually been sexually assaulted. That would probably knock some sense into them as to the difference between their experience and actual sexual assault. Being thoroughly frisked, in public, in broad light, where nothing bad could possibly happen, is being compared to bein…

This is a pretty sick response and all too common.

If you did not consent to be being touched in a certain way by another human being, no matter the circumstance, they have no right to do so. That is an assault on your person.

She was not informed that this person was going to do the things they did to her. She was molested in public by a figure in a position of (supposed) authority. I cannot imagine what she must felt. However, I cannot deny that she was a victim!

I think it's disgusting that you would dismiss this as "not a real crime" for reasons I cannot even begin to understand. Your logic is incredibly weak. There was a crime here and just because it wasn't violent doesn't make it any less criminal.

After reading about several of these cases, I know for a fact that I will not fly in the United States ever. Neither will my wife or anyone in my family. And if I can help it, neither will anyone I know. "Enhanced pat-down," is a shockingly sick euphemism for "molestation policy." Let's call it what it is and demand that this be stopped before the idea catches on in other, still free, countries.

Post reply on HN