I don’t think I ever said that only women are victims of sexual crimes. I said the majority of victims are women. And that certainly cannot be denied. I also disagree that sexual crimes against women are always taken seriously. Women are often assigned a measure of blame when they are victims of a sexual crime. As in this thread, people have said these women somehow deserve what they got because they were applying to work at Hooters. Somehow that justifies that they be filmed naked without their knowledge or consent.
Children, I consider an entirely different category. We know that boys can be victims of sexual abuse by adults, just as girls are. And yes it is taken seriously when that happens. I encountered many cases of this when I worked as a manager of a residential shelter for children. Mothers can and are prosecuted for these crimes too. I don’t know how your friend arrived at the conclusion that nobody gives a shit if mothers sexually abuse male children, but having worked in social services I can tell you that any abuse of child is taken seriously by the law.
FYI, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice:
[quote] Females were more than six times as likely as males to be the victims of sexual assaults known to law enforcement. More specifically, 86% of all victims of sexual assault were female. The relative proportion of female victims generally increased with age. Sixty-nine percent of victims under the age of six were female, compared with 73% of victims under age 12, and 82% of all juvenile (under age 18) victims. The female proportion of sexual assault victims reached 90% at age 13 and 95% at age 19.
Based on the NIBRS data, the year in a male’s life when he is most likely to be the victim of a sexual assault is age 4. By age 17, his risk of victimization has been cut by a factor of 5. A female’s year of greatest risk is age 14. Her risk drops to half the peak level by age 17 and to a fifth of the peak level by age 27. At his peak victimization age of 4, a male’s risk of sexual assault is just half that of females of the same age. In the later juvenile years (ages 14-17), the female victimization rates are at least 10 times greater than the male rates for similar age groups…
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…And by the way bob, I am not your “dear” , and I don’t appreciate you using that condescending term to address me. Attack my argument if you like, but you can leave “dear” out of the discussion. Thanks.
“Known to law enforcement.” That I can believe. But who is more likely to speak out in todays environment a boy/girl abused by their father or a boy/girl abused by their mother? A woman raped by a man or a man raped by a man? A woman sexually abused by an employer or a man sexually abused by an employer? I can deny that the majority of sexual assault victims are women all I want because nobody really knows what is going on. It is common dog fuck for people to laugh at a guy who gets raped in prison. I think that is a pretty good indication of the general atmosphere. I was using dear sarcastically by the way so no need to let me know that you are not mine. It won’t happen again.
Being raped or sexually abused and having someone take pictures of you in your undies without your permission are two totally different matters. There’s as great a difference between them as there is between being attacked by a gang of axe-wielding bikers and being cursed by a stranger in the street because he doesn’t like something about you. The latter happens to most of us from time to time during our lives, and while it can be distinctly unpleasant, we can brush it off and would hardly be likely to consider it even needed to be reported to the police, let alone that the person doing it should be charged with a crime and thrown into jail (even though, according to law, it would amount to a crime in most jurisdictions).
For goodness sake, this Hooters business really needs to be put in a proper perspective!
What, essentially, is the difference between what happened to the Hooters job applicants and what happened to David Beckham a few weeks ago? Beckham was photogrpahed without his permission when he stepped onto his hotel balcony while wearing only his underpants. Even worse, he was caught on camera sticking his hand in the side of his skivvies and scratching his balls. It was splashed over the front pages of newspapers all over the world the following day (not just kept for the personal titillation of one sorry and misguided deviant). The full-page spread that I saw in my Chinese newspaper here reported breathlessly how he was all but exposing his balls, his pubes were nearly visible, his little bird came close to popping out, and much more in the same vein. Was Beckham embarrassed and annoyed? You bet he was! Was the paparazzi photographer arrested and hit with criminal charges carrying a lengthy prison sentence? Of course not! Instead, he was paid a huge amount of money for the fruits of his opportunism.
Erhu, why do you keep on writing about these girls being photographed “naked”? What makes you assume they were naked? If you were asked to change from your normal job-interview gear into a waitress’ uniform, would you strip completely naked in the process of doing so? I somehow rather doubt it! I haven’t read all the details of what this pathetic fellow captured on film, but it’s reasonable to assume that it was no more than shots of the girls in their bras and panties. Oh wow, that might have revealed as much of their bodies as when they wear their bikinis at the pool or the beach! How deeply distressing for them! No wonder people have suggested that they’ll never recover from the trauma.
I think that paparazzis are due for a bit of a dressing down as well. Remember a while back some government official in Taiwan was taped having sex and the cd was sold along with one of those cheap gossip magazines. At the time everyone I knew was talking about what a gross violation of privacy it was and in the next breath commenting on the guys sexual stamina. I suggested to them that they by buying and viewing the cd they were participating in robbing those people of there privacy and lining the pockets of the photographer and the magazine. If you asked a lot of those same people what should happen to the hooters guy I’ll bet they would say “Yup, five years, sounds about right”. You are absolutely right omni, perspective is exactly what is missing here. By the way I never suggested that being filmed in your undies was equivalent to being raped. I said that the punishment for taping someone in their undies is incarceration and the risk of being raped. Big difference.
I think the guy who made those vids is a slimy pervert arsehole. I have no sympathy for him whatsoever. If he’d done that to my daughter, I’d have slashed his face with a straight razor. Both sides.
Omni wrote [quote]Erhu, why do you keep on writing about these girls being photographed “naked”? What makes you assume they were naked?[/quote]
One of the articles stated that the manager asked the women to remove their underwear before putting on their uniforms so their pantylines wouldn’t show. That’s why I keep saying that they were filmed naked.
Out of curiousity I asked several of my friends if they think a 5 year sentence is too harsh for this kind of offense. Every single female I asked said “no”. I think there may be a gender divide on this issue. Women feel extremely vulnerable to these kinds of crimes and want to be protected from pervs like Mr. Hooters. Some of you guys may see it as just a regular Joe getting his jollies through slightly deviant means. Many women view it as an extremely malicious and degrading invasion of privacy. It goes beyond being “embarrassed”. I’m not sure if some of you guys can fully understand that, but perhaps we’ll have to agree to disagree on this issue.
Just to put this guys sentence in perspective, apparently police found 180 illegal videos in his apartment. So, if we break down his 5 years, that would be approximately 10 days of jail time for each illegal taping. Does that still sound too harsh?
Although you are exaggerating for effect there, Sandman (we know you’re really much too nice a guy to do anything anywhere nearly as violent as you’ve described), your remark is to some extent quite apt. The best way to deal with a situation like this is for the boyfriend, husband, father, brother or whatever of the victim to go storming into the offender’s office (or wherever he can be found), give him a damn good bollocking, threaten him with the most dire repercussions if he ever does anything like it again, and maybe administer a bit of a thumping to drive the message home. And if the girl has suffered any real harm, she can sue both him and his employer for damages in the civil courts. But there’s no need for the guy to be hit with a felony prosecution and sent to rot in the country’s desperately overcrowded, hopelessly failing, and fiscally ruinous prison system.
Oh, I see. But that makes me very surprised that they didn’t object and say “Sorry, but I didn’t come here to apply for a job in which I’m expected to work without any undies on.” Surely they wouldn’t expect that to be a requirement of such a waitressing job, and should simply have refused or walked out of the interview when it was suggested. At least it should have set a few alarm-bells ringing. If my wife came home from such an interview, told me what had happened and confessed that she’d done as asked, I’d be quite astonished and wonder what on earth had possessed her to do so.
Anyway, you’re absolutely right, we’re neither very likely to get close to seeing this from the other’s perspective, so we’d best just agreeably accept our disagreement.
bob, I agree with you that sexual crimes are definitely under reported. Men, due to social pressure, are probably less likely to report it than women, which will skew the statistics to some level. But I also know many women who were victims of a sexual crime and never reported it. There is an across the board under reporting of these types of crimes for many reasons. So, you are right. No one can give completetly accurate statistics of who the victims of such crimes are.
However, based on my purely unscientific observations, I still believe that the majority of victims are female. At least in society at large, women instinctively feel vulnerable to sexual crimes in ways that most men probably do not.
That doesn’t at all downplay the atrociousness of sexual crimes when they happen to males. And there is certainly no humor in prison rape. That is a severe human rights violation and thankfully people are trying to do something about it. If you have a particular interest in this issue you can check out the following link: http://hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/action.html
Thanks Erhu. Excellent link. I don’t have a particular interest in the issue but I think that it is an extrordinary example of how cruel and hypocritical some (perhaps most) societies can be. I wonder how many of your female acquaintences would still feel that five years was an appropriate punishment for an offense like this after reading that link. Lets extend the logic somewhat and imagine that this guy is small, weak and cute and the plan is to put him an institution that houses violent offenders. Would they still want to put him there? If so I would recommend that you find new friends to be honest.
It is interesting what you mentioned about how the people you knew who had been sexually abused without reporting the abuse were mostly female because my experience has been exactly the opposite. I don’t know if there is a direct corelation or not, and I have not seen any studies to support the idea, but from my experience men who have been abused by women (especially by mothers or step mothers) as teenagers are gay. I can think of about half a dozen examples of this and it is not exactly the kind of thing that people talk about freely.
I guess basically what I think is that there is one heck of a lot of abusive, perverse stuff going on out there and it is impossible without really careful study for us to know what motivates anybody to do anything. Sick socities breed sick people and punishing the ill doesn’t cure the disease. More open communication and a bit of compassion however might go a long way. People frequently act out because they feel isolated and afraid. Harsh prison sentences are not likely to change that reality.
