In keeping with the “women who hate women” theme we sort of had going last week, let’s take a quick look at Arizona Judge Jacqueline Hatch. Judge Hatch, you see, presided over a recent case involving a Flagstaff, Arizona police officer who was found guilty of sexually abusing a woman in a bar. According to the Arizona Daily Sun,
Prosecutors contended that he drank eight beers and then drove himself to the Green Room, where he flashed his badge in an attempt to get into a concert for free. While inside, he walked up behind the victim, who was a friend of a friend, put his hand up her skirt and then ran his fingers across her genitals.
When bouncers threw him out, Evans told them he was a cop and they would be arrested.
The cop faced up to two years in jail for his assault. But Hatch apparently felt the officer, who’d lost his job and served four whole days in jail, had already been punished enough for his crime, and let him off with two years of probation.
She also gave the victim a patronizing little lecture. Again, according to the Daily Sun,
Bad things can happen in bars, Hatch told the victim, adding that other people might be more intoxicated than she was.
“If you wouldn’t have been there that night, none of this would have happened to you,” Hatch said.
Hatch told the victim and the defendant that no one would be happy with the sentence she gave, but that finding an appropriate sentence was her duty.
“I hope you look at what you’ve been through and try to take something positive out of it,” Hatch said to the victim in court. “You learned a lesson about friendship and you learned a lesson about vulnerability.”
Hatch said that the victim was not to blame in the case, but that all women must be vigilant against becoming victims.
“When you blame others, you give up your power to change,” Hatch said that her mother used to say.
Hatch has now offered a half-assed apology for her remarks, saying, in part:
As a Coconino County Superior Court judge, it is my responsibility to ensure that all victims and defendants are treated fairly and in a respectful manner in the courtroom. It’s a responsibility I take very seriously. I also believe victims should not be blamed for coming forward to report crimes.
In a recent case, my in-court comments to the victim at sentencing did not further these important tenets. My comments were poorly communicated and for that, I am truly sorry if they caused the victim further distress.
No, you communicated pretty clearly. The problem is what you communicated.
@chocomintlipwax: That happened to me once when I was riding the underground. I was reading a newspaper, and then happened to look up, and what do I see? The guy opposite me has pulled his cock out and is jerking off while staring at me. Like, dude, you know there’s something called the internet? You could jerk off in the privacy of your own home, not disturbing anyone, while looking at something way more enticing than a fully dressed woman reading a newspaper.
Anyway, I got so pissed off that I jumped up and grabbed him by the hair and shoved his head towards the wall. He just stared at me in surprise, and I just realised I didn’t know what to say, and then came out with the not-so-awesome oneliner “That’s no way to behave in public”. And then the guy goes “Oh, I’m sorry”.
As if he hadn’t KNOWN that one is not supposed to masturbate in the underground!
And well, then we went our separate ways at the central station. I did call the police and report the entire incident, but nothing came of it (of course, but the policewoman I talked to said it’s still good to have these things on record in case they arrest somebody looking like my description for some other crime in the future).
Anyway, if some of you think “that totally didn’t happen” I can understand that, because I realise even while typing this that it sounds really weird. But I think that maybe he’d done this before, but it had never resulted in the woman jumping up at him and grabbing him by the hair, so he was honestly surprised and just couldn’t come up with anything to say other than the terribly lame and stupid “Oh, I’m sorry”.
@Dualityheart: I actually doubt that there’s any correlation at all between wearing short skirts and getting targeted by creeps. Completely anecdotal evidence to the contrary:
When I first moved to Stockholm, I was a real creep magnet. So I would look around and check out women who could walk the streets and underground unmolested to see what they did differently from me. My conclusion was that skirt length or cleavage makes no difference, but seeming confident does. I was new to the city and would often be a little lost, reading street signs, underground maps etc to see where to go, and THAT’S what made me such a target.
So I started to always pretend that I knew where I was and where I was going, even when I didn’t. If I couldn’t figure out where to go by a quick glance on an underground map I’d start going somewhere anyway, and if I ended up in the completely wrong place I’d turn back and look at the map again later. Always walking straight-backed and looking straight ahead. And yeah, the creep incidents dropped dramatically, despite the fact that I was still dressing like a slut.
I told this story at “What about teh menz”, and another woman responded with a similar experience. She had been married, and then suffered through a really messy divorce. She was feeling like shit. And once she started feeling like shit, creeps where all over her wherever she went.
Obviously two anecdotes does not make scientific evidence, but till I see any evidence to the contrary, I’m gonna believe that “creeps target women who dress like sluts” is a complete myth, and the truth is that “creeps target women who somehow look vulnerable”. And obviously, the latter is something you often have no control over. Like the woman who was going through a divorce; she couldn’t help feeling like shit and giving off, eh, vulnerability vibes. Or if you’re short and thin for instance, that might make you look vulnerable in the eyes of creeps and it’s not something you can help. Being new in the city was something I could to some extent hide with acting, but lots of “vulnerability factors” aren’t like that.
>“You learned a lesson about friendship and you learned a lesson about vulnerability.”
That sounds like something He-Man would say at the end of an episode.
Except He-Man’s lesson would be about helping your friends when they are vulnerable. 😉
Dvarghundspossen, I agree. Your post reminded me of a friend of mine from years ago. She was always getting targetted by creeps, and not just the sexual or male variety, either – the aggro sort, the drunks, the sleazes, the off-the-planet characters all went for her. I saw it in action a few times (it tended to send me into Rottweiler mode). It had nothing to do with how she dressed or looked: she was tall, gangly, not conventionally pretty, not dressed ‘sluttishly’ (except by Owly standards, ie. not wearing a burka) and most certainly not looking for attention from strangers. But she was vulnerable and it showed.
I’ve been lucky, or maybe I’ve got PISS OFF, LOSER written in large neon letters over my head, I don’t know; I’ve only been hit on twice by creepy strangers in the last couple of decades.
PS says something when ‘only twice’ counts as ‘lucky’, though. 🙁
nice animal pictures here
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-09-11/anzang-nature-photography-competition/4254012
Ugh, some of the comments at the bottom of this news article make me cringe:
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8529567/groping-happens-at-bars-judge-tells-victim
Some people *really* love to go out of their way to defend creeps and molesters, don’t they? Makes me think they’ve probably behaved the same way themselves at some point in their lives.
HE-MAN IS MISANDRY
These comments are depressing. 🙁
Mostly the realisation that (for me) guy-wanking-on-public-transport is more surprising and WTFy than woman-is-assaulted-and-gets-blamed-herself, because the latter happens so often that you end up expecting it..
It’s really fucked up when something that bad happens so often that you zip right past surprise/anger and into despair that it’s happening again.
@Dvärghundspossen
I second your theory. The most harrasment-riffic period in my life over the last few years was when my (much loved, 19 year old, who I’d had since he was a kitten) cat died. Every damn time I left the house, red-eyed and sniffly (which was super-sexy I assure you), it was like every creep within several miles zoomed right in on me. Which didn’t stop until I got past the life-will-never-be-good-again stage.
@Duality who wrote “@Cassandra- I still think it would be great to just pepper spray public masturbators right in the junk
That may be a bad idea and it’s better to just get up and move away from them. People who do this stuff may be mentally ill and not just some run of the mill sex maniac.. They may be classified as mentally disabled due to either a psychiatric illness or just low intelligence.After all, normal people are not going to do things like this on trains. Even flashers single people out for their flashing and don’t do it when in a train with other witnesses around. If you were to attack a disabled person with pepper spray it may be aggravated assault with a weapon and you may be arrested. It’s aggravated when it involves a disabled person or someone over 60. Of course you may report it and perhaps the person may be required to have a minder when out in public.Certain psychiatric drugs cause a loss of inhibition so it’s better to just get away from people who do bizarre things in public.
I realised I had one more piece of anecdotal evidence for the theory: There’s a Swedish feminist blogger I read occasionally, and she wrote about how she and some friends had discussed going out clubbing. She was pissed off because she got harassed all the time, and her friends were like “What?” It hardly ever happened to them.
But she’s short and thin, and the friends she talked to at that point were pretty tall ladies. So they also came up with something like the vulnerability theory: Tall=looks physically strong=everything else being equal, less likely to be harassed.
I think so many people think creeps target sluttily dressed women because they believe in something like the “boner werewolf” Cliff wrote about on zir blog. Even if they’re not outright victim blamers they still think that creeps creep on people because they get so AROUSED when they see a sluttily dressed woman that they have a hard time controlling themselves.
But remember, if women do avoid activities and people because they’re afraid of sexual assault, then they’re paranoid bitches who think all men are rapists.
🙁
You see now how our deeply misandrous culture works. Take the red pill!
I found this article http://sverigesradio.se/sida/gruppsida.aspx?programid=3304&grupp=6240&artikel=2779325 on the website of Sveriges Radio (the state-owned radio channel). According to the article, a fresh survey shows that 83 % of all Egyptian women have been sexually harassed. Lots of Egyptians claim that only “bad women” who dress sluttily (i e non-veiled) suffer sexual harassment, but according to this survey most victims wore in fact either a hijab or a niqab when they were harassed.
At the bottom of the article the writer quotes a commenter on an Egyptian news website that reported about the survey, and this comment is really the weirdest most disturbing piece of victim blaming I’ve ever seen: The problem, according to this genius, is that women are no longer genitally mutilated, and therefore they’re horny, and with their horniness they entice men they see who then sexually harass them.
This is all the proof you need that victim blamers will ALWAYS find a way to blame the victim, even when we’re talking about victims who WEAR FUCKING NIQABS.
When I first moved to Stockholm, I was a real creep magnet
I can understand the train incident although I think it’s a bad idea to pull someone’s hair because he may be a real maniac and stick a knife in you but in what other ways did these so called “creeps” annoy you? Are you a lesbian where any man who speaks to you is a creep? Neurotic, who imagines things? Just curious.
Dvarghundspossen – I got really bad street harassment when I was a teenager. It dwindled to far, far less as I entered my twenties. (This was from men of all ages, so it wasn’t a “teenage boys” thing.) I think there’s something to the vulnerability theory. Either that or a shit-ton of pedophiles out there.
Then again, that can get victim-blamey taken to extremes–“you should carry yourself with confidence and these things wouldn’t happen!” It’s important to also keep in mind that “this is how they choose their targets” is not the same thing as “so nobody ever be young, small, or shy, and everything will be fine!”
—
Weird memory this post stirred up: going to an all-ages club with a friend when we were about 20. A guy put his hand up her skirt from behind. She grabbed his hand and bent his fingers back, really hard, and he ran off.
At the time I thought that was totally badass. And it was! But it makes me sad that neither one of us realized that this was an actual crime, something he could seriously get arrested for. We were so used to that shit that we thought of control over our own bodies as something we had to win with badassery, instead of an inherent human right.
Many of these clubs are crowded noisy places where most of the people are half drunk. When you go into one you have to expect certain things that you wouldn’t if you were in some more sedate bar with your friends. The cop was likely a bit drunk and thought he knew this female. What he did may have been rude but hardly sexual assault. Besides, how was the female damaged in this case over something that had probably happened before and she knew what to expect in these clubs. Sounds like making a mountain over a molehill to me.
Well aren’t you just precious, Melvin Pelli. Yes, the innocent curiosity just oozes off of you. You needn’t have added the “just curious,” really, we can all tell.
@Melvin Belli
You can only be a troll but are you really saying that sticking your hand up someones skirt from behind without their permission and groping their genitals is not sexual assault?
Also how the hell would it have been any different if he did know her well? If you think that’s normal behavior how the hell do you treat your friends I’d like to know?
And finally, why on earth should women have to expect sexual harassment and assault when they go to clubs? In what way can that be called an acceptable state of affairs?
“One” doesn’t. Women do. That’s a fucking problem.
Also, why is this some law of fucking nature? If you have a rabid dog in your backyard, you don’t say “well, if anyone goes in the backyard they just have to take what’s coming to them,” you call goddamn Animal Control.
Yeah, how dare she worry about little things like bodily autonomy, no harm done as long as the merchandise doesn’t lose value!
Hey Cliff, perhaps you should have been staying out of sleazy clubs and not subconsciously doing things to get attention on the street and you wouldn’t have problems. I know of no females that this stuff happens to and I can assure you that they are all good looking young girls unlike the fugly dykes on here. You and the others here are obviously doing things to encourage normal men to behave in a certain way. And stop calling them creeps you perverted little creepette. You’re as wacky as Fruitloops Frutrelle the stalker and weirdo who runs this dopey hate site.
“Oops, sorry I reached up your skirt in public and fondled your genitals! Obviously, I thought you were someone who wouldn’t call the police.”
You’re a real gem, Pelli.
oh, nvm, it’s fucking Pell again
get a fucking life man
Seriously, even if you’re just doing this for laughs, someday you’re gonna grow up and feel hella weird about the fact that you got your laughs by making fun of sexual assault victims.