My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

I'm a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I thought long and hard about this and decided that talking to my children about the existence of sexual predators would rob them of their innocence.

I've studied how this works. Sexual predation almost never starts with rape. It starts with myriad instances of boundary violation and disrespect and culminates in rape.

Rape hinges on the detail of consent. As a society trying to combat this issue, we seem to overlook that for the most part.

I taught my children that hugs and kisses required consent. I taught that from birth. Even a baby too young to talk can turn their face away because they don't want a kiss or hold their arms up enthusiastically to receive affection.

When they were older, I told them if they told someone "no" and their decision was not respected, come get me.

I only had one of them come get me once. The person who felt entitled to get "sugar" from my child was utterly shocked that I told them they were wrong.

This was an elderly female relative. My children are both boys.

Most likely, she wasn't actually a child molester, but this practice of adults demanding hugs and kisses from children who have no right to say "no" is commonplace and gets treated as something funny in movies. I treated it as no laughing matter.

If you want children to understand consent and respect, the best thing to do is let them experience it firsthand from birth. And make sure they know that rule is a two-way street, not a one-sided privilege.

I still shout "rapist owned" each time i pass his business, as do my brother and my father, my sister privately shared her story with his daughter on facebook last year (his daughter is one year younger than my sister, the creep), basically destroying their relationship, and the cooking school my sister went to directly called all female student and ex-student to tell them to avoid his restaurant. I also scraped social networks (only public data, nothing illegal) for his activities two years ago but only found business contacts. Each of them still received a nice email though.

I will move back next month, so i will continue my shouting campaign harder after the pandemic end and hope his business can't survive covid. Since his restaurant will be between my place and the place i keep my boat, i'm pretty sure i can be successful.

Another commenter mentions somewhere here that the specific thing that happened may not have been illegal in Germany then (but is now). I don't know how to verify that as I don't speak German.

This happened several years ago; there is no physical evidence that remains. This, as you allude to, is a he-said-she-said situation. I assume there are emails/texts/etc. that might speak to Pretty's poor character and ill intent, but that's not much. In the US this would almost certainly not be enough for a conviction. Maybe it would be in Germany or the UK, but I suspect not.

Agree that she may have opened herself up to legal liability (at least an accusation of libel or defamation). As I recall, in the UK it is harder than in the US to defend oneself in court against accusations of libel.

It is possible, though, that Pretty might be dissuaded from bringing any legal action because doing so will only draw more attention to his bad behavior, and could result in a worse situation for him than just going and hiding under a rock for a few years.

If two adults get together, fly together, get a room together, drink wine together, have relations... Then we're supposed to say that consent can't be given because the woman is drunk. But they're both drunk. Isn't it essentially the patriarchy to say that a woman can't make that choice? Like if they're equals and they're both drunk, why do we blame the men?

Because they aren't really equals? Isn't that what we're fighting against? We blame the men for not ignoring the wishes of the woman while drunk. It's a little bit chauvinistic to think the men know better isn't it?