Except that, if the news stories are to be believed, the girl made clear to the radio people beforehand that she was scared and didn’t want to do it. As soon as that happened, their responsibility was to shut it down and tell the mother they would not be involved as long as the child was not giving free and uncoerced consent.
Maybe somewhere in the continuum of rape/seduction/consent there’s a rape that’s also a sexual experience. But I’ve been raped. It wasn’t a sexual experience, anymore than getting two black eyes in a bar fight is a sexual experience.
Hmmm. Putting minor into a lie detector? On air? Seriously poor judgement, IMO.
I daresay the hosts didn’t anticipate this result, but on the other hand, asking a minor about her sex life on-air was just porn, IMO - Pure prurient interest, and completely inappropriate.
I personally would suspend the DJs for a week, without pay, and put them on a year’s probation - any controversy in the next year, they’re fired summarily and without appeal. Mom? She needs a visit from Child Services, to see just how screwed in the head she is - Maybe she’s an able parent, but at this point, she’d need to convince me.
This rivals the Howard Stern tv show episode where Erin Moran revealed she was sexually assaulted by a family member when she was 23.
Why did the mother and daughter consent to it? Because some people, everywhere, have seen ordinary folks go on television and lay bare their innermost secrets. Rather than seeing it as creepy (as I would,) they want the chance to be on stage.
Why did the radio hosts set up such a thing? Because some showbiz people have seen what huge stars Jerry Springer and Oprah became by exposing other people’s souls. They want that fame, and they don’t care what vile deed they have to do to get it.
I’m disgusted, but I’m not surprised that it happened.
Except that the daughter didn’t want to do it. Assuming the facts are substantially as presented in the OP, I cannot see the mother as anything but a raging and abusive bitch, and the hosts as the willing enablers of said RAB.
Just because a kid was scared to go on a radio show doesn’t mean its a legitimate fear. Knowing that she was raped after the fact makes us all look at the story a little differently, but I tend to see it like one of those talk shows where the kids are forced into boot camp and scared shitless in front of a drill sergeant. Those would be wrong by your reasoning
I hope we can agree that only because we know this girl was raped do we even think theres something wrong with putting kids in front of mics. There’s nothing wrong with that. Most shows of this nature trust the parents that their kid is some juvenile delinquent. Had this radio show episode been about getting kids to confront their drug problems, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Nobody could have known that the kid would blurt out something like this, it was completely the mother’s fault
I disagree. Considering that you know the girl is involved with drugs and that she’s only fourteen, is it such a huge stretch to think that asking her if she’s had sex is going to result in the answer involving some kind of sexual coercion? It’s not like she just blurted out she’d been raped out of the blue–they ASKED her if she’d had sex.
After hearing the clip, I think the hosts responded appropriately. While the whole segment is questionable in the first place, it is, after all, radio.
The mother is really a subpar human being, however. The most pathetic part is how she tries to defend herself, “But the question was if you had any sexual experiences other than that.”
That stands alone on its stupidity. Then you consider the fact she never said that second part (oh, you mean other than being raped), and that she asked it with a stupid shit-eating grin. I can only imagine what her initial response was to news of her daughter being raped.
But owing to the Maury comparisons above (and I’m not proud that I’ve seen the show), this is a huge outlier in how these things normally go. Usually the teen in question will get up and spew the foulest, vilest filth you can imagine (in the affirmative) when confronted with the question. And it will always be punctuated with “I’ll do what I want and you can’t stop me!”
But of course, when you introduce the concept to a teenager who has been sexually assaulted, and the mother knows that she has been sexually assaulted, it doesn’t quite follow the script.
20-1 says the rapist will be revealed as the mother’s boyfriend (if she’s a single mom that is).
It is easy to anticipate that something unfortunate, that could harm a minor, could come out during a live interview on this subject matter. The station could have been more careful. In the future, segments like this should probably be taped to prevent such things from airing.
Bullshit. There is no way to legitimize the mother’s actions. She KNEW the little girl had been raped. She KNEW the little girl did not wish to answer the questions. She KNEW that at a minimum she was exposing her child to public humiliation for no goddamn reason.
I guess. I don’t know–“They did it on Maury” isn’t much of an excuse in my book. It just seems like all the adults–the mom above all, and the radio people–really dropped the ball on this one. I have no idea why anyone would think it’s okay to question a kid like this on live TV. It’s disgusting.
He wasn’t trying to legitimize the mother’s actions. He was legitimizing the hosts’. They were obviously completely blindsided and then concerned once it all sunk in.
Initially the hosts totally misread the situation, and I hope some changes are made to the format of this segment, indeed, if the segment continues at all.
The point is, that there is a precedent set for this kind of thing in broadcasting and, to my knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened before. I don’t know that there was anyway that the hosts could have known what that girl had been through. The only person who did have that knowledge was her mother.
I haven’t listened to the clip yet…just read the two articles…but the sense I get from the print part, is that the mother is concerned about whether her daughter is having sex NOW…and probably didn’t expect the child to bring up the rape from two years before. I mean, if you are arguing with your child about her current behavior, and you bring her on this stupid show to confront her about the running around and drug use she is doing NOW, I can see where you might not consider that your child will lead with the rape. Of course, perhaps that WAS the only time her daughter had had sex, and was therefore answering truthfully.
It still was a horribly stupid and dysfunctional thing for them to do.
No. This didn’t have to be live. The hosts had a responsibility to determine why the kid was scared. The reason they didn’t do that is because they WANTED the kid to be scared, to react with great drama, in order to produce a more “interesting” show. They wanted an explosive show, and they got it. They just didn’t expect it to explode in their faces.
When the kid said she didn’t want to do it, and the mother and the hosts went on with it, then all of them showed that they only wanted the exposure. The mother should have taken that girl to counseling, not to some radio show. Nobody had the kid’s best interests at heart, especially not the mother.
A 14 year old girl cannot be expected to insist upon not going through with a show, not when her own mother had determined that she will, not when her mother and two other adults are insisting that she do this, not when there’s a whole roomful of other adults, with a roomful of equipment, telling her that she has to do this. This girl was raped again, emotionally this time, and her mother was the one who set it in motion. The hosts share some of the blame, though.
I do not think that Maury and Springer are good role models. I know that I just about puked when I caught a few minutes of their shows.
shrug
Statutory, obviously, assuming the AoC in Australia is about the same as here and most of the USA, but I’m sure there are a few Doperettes who can say they had consensual sex at fourteen and were all for it.
I would be more wary to assume that just because a kid’s been doing drugs that its also likely for them to be sexually coerced. Like torie said, there is a precedent for this sort of thing. The hosts and the producers and the audience probably expected, and rightly so, that she would have mouthed off and called people names and defended her free-wheeling lifestyle. The rape thing was just completely out of the blue; it would be as if she said she confessed to murder.
The only blame I place is on the mother, who knew about it. The radio hosts should probably change their segment, if they continue doing it, to having it taped to prevent future incidents. I agree that something, anything, could have come out but the likelihood of a bombshell like this is very small
Defending the radio hosts, not the mom. The mom bears full responsibility in this
I agree with the not being live aspect and that Maury and Springer are probably not your best role models, but the fact is this kind of admission usually doesnt happen. I cannot think of an incident in the past that it has. Sure, the radio has a responsibility to protect the child, but it is unreasonable to expect them to plan for every contingency when the mother was hiding this fact from them to begin with. That’s why I think she should be the only one punished.
It would be like the mother neglected to tell the hosts of her child’s peanut allergy and brought her into the radio show knowing that there’d be peanuts in the room. The radio hosts can only go by what the mother chooses to tell them and in this case, she was a bitch for putting her daughter through this.
Not sure of the AOC in Australia off the top of my head, but its not exactly unheard of for 14 year olds to be doing the deed. It would raise eyebrows sure, but not send people in paroxyms of outrage or anything.
While the hosts in this case were a bit careless and stupid, its the mother the bears the brunt of the blame.
An analogy if I may - I see the hosts as the drivers of the train, but the mother was the one that tossed her daughter under it. She knew full well what the truth was, and what the questions were going to be.
What I find most disgusting is that, according to what the daughter says, the mother knew about the rape and was smiling when she asked the question.