When you’ve been beaten down long enough, when every attempt to prove your innocence which is as clear and obvious to you as the sun at noon on a clear day has failed, you give up hope. You do whatever you have to get through things and hope it’ll end.
What could she do? She was naked, had no car keys, and she’d been beaten for resisting. There were two people to her one. I assume the office she was being held in had only one door. What realistic expectation did she have that escape or protest would be successful, especially when not only had her earlier attempts to protest had failed, she’d been beaten for one of them? Nothing she had tried had worked up to that point; she may well have felt she had no reason to believe that would change. Remember, she was barely 18, still in high school, and probably not used to defying authority or to being falsely accused. At this point, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume she was without hope of anything except the possibility of it ending.
Actually, when she was beaten for refusing to kiss him would be another point at which someone should have realized something wasn’t right.
Can we really equate a paddling with the term “beaten”? I understand wanting to normalize her behavior - she really is a pathetic victim. But it isn’t really honest or accurate to suggest that it was really fear from physical harm that was her downfall. If that were the case, one would expect that a young adult would have to experience more than a pink bottom to comply.
Further, I can’t really see how she is any different from Summers, though. Both were highly gullible and deferential to authority. And if we are imputing subconscious motivations to explain the compliance of anyone in this circumstance, how do we exclude the young woman?
The oral sex was forced on her after at least three hours of imprisonment and degradation. By that point I doubt she had anything on her mind beyond survival, no matter what it took. And Nix was, what, twice her size? A big, heavyset guy from what the article said, one who’d already smacked her for failing to do what he ordered. “Pink bottom”? Just how hard did he hit her? We don’t know, but given his willingness to force a blowjob on a distraught, defenseless girl, I’d say “beating” might well fit the degree of brutality he used in hitting her.
Age. Ogborn was a high school kid, even if she was of legal age. Summers was a 51-year-old woman. She, presumably, had quite a bit of life experience that should have set off her bullshit meter. You don’t get to be 51 years old without encountering instances where you can’t always trust people in authority, even if it’s nothing more than hearing news reports about corrupt politicians or police officers. At 18 and still in high school, it’s entirely possible to be oblivious to that sort of thing.
Plus, Summers was used to giving orders and being obeyed. Ogborn was used to taking orders, whether those orders were, “Go clean your room,” or “Do this homework assignment,” or “Drop some more fries in the fryer.”
Why doesn’t an extreme level of compliance with authority explain all of her behavior? At what point did it switch from an abnormal level of compliance to a reasonable fear of physical harm? The pinkened bottom?
Further, why is Nix any worse than Summers or Ogden? Because he is a man? Because he received oral sex? One of Milgram’s studies found no gender differences in levels of compliance with authority.
I don’t think it is healthy or helpful to try to normalize such levels of compliance. We need to recognize it, call it what it is, and think about changing it. Not excusing it.
Did you ever read Perfect Victim? Some people simply possess dangerously high levels of compliance and credulity.
Do you think that credulity changes with age? My grandmother gave scads of money (relative to her total income) to Jerry Falwell and other televangelists. Recent national polling (at least in America) should also tell you that credulity remains high among samples of adults. Is there any evidence to suggest that Obgorn will not be equally compliant when she is 30? 40? 60?
Yes, for most people. I would not fall for stuff now that I would’ve or might’ve fallen for at 18. It’s also dependent on circumstances. If someone impersonating a police officer told everyone they needed to leave the mall I was in, I’d go along with it. Why shouldn’t I? But if that same “officer” told me I needed to take a broom handle to a fifteen-year-old kid who was accused of shoplifting, I’d tell him to get bent.
Siege, I agree with what you are saying. And really once you start accepting the idea, it becomes harder to turn it around.
But here is the thing. Police do not call civilians on the phone and have them conduct searches for them. They just don’t do that. Have you ever in your life or even in the movies or TV heard of cops calling civilians on the phone and getting them to conduct searches? The cops show up and search you themselves. They like doing that. Keeps that whole ‘chain of evidence’ nice and neat.
That is the point when they young lady and the old lady should have just said, 'When you get here, you can search her. After all they knew the police station was 3 minutes away. If the cops were afraid that she may ditch the evidence then simply holding her in the office would be enough. Forget the oral sex, cops don’t phone up people and have them do anything.
I don’t really have time to do a comprehensive review of the literature, and social psychology is not my gig, but I did do some searching to see if there is more evidence to help clarify what we are discussing. I was searching in OVID for developmental changes in authoritarianism as a personality trait, or for changes in obedience or submissiveness. I couldn’t find any papers using longitudinal data from adolescence through adulthood for either construct.
My brief scan and review of abstracts did yield the following studies relevant to our discussion:
Moilanen (1987). Dominance and submissiveness between twins: I. Perinatal and developmental aspects. Acta Geneticae Medicae et Genellologaie: Twin Research, 36, 249-255. Found that submissiveness was associated with lower intelligence in twin pairs.
Heaven, P.C. L. (1985). Developmental trends in authoritarianism: A research extension. J. Genetic Psychology, 146: 139-140.
This very brief article found no differences between groups of 20-29 year olds, 30-39 year olds or those 40 and above in measures of authoritarianism, suggesting no developmental changes over time. This inference, however, would be better supported by a longitudinal study of development within individuals, rather than between groups. I couldn’t find such a study that spanned adolescence and adulthood.
Another study, Vollenbergh (1994) found that developmental change in authoritarianism in adolescence (before age 18) was associated not with age, but with education, and that gender differences evident at the first assessment were absent two years later.
I know that and you know that. But did Ogborn know that? Hentor, she’s 17, she’s naked, she’s just been through an extremely humiliating and traumatizing experience. What the hell do you expect her to do when confronted by a man twice her size?
You don’t ask rape or sexual assault victims “why didn’t you fight back?” At that point, even if she had realized it was all bullshit, she didn’t have too many options left.
No, he didn’t “beat her”, in the classic definition of the phrase. But I don’t think it would be that hard to imagine what would happen if she resisted.
I would have thought the whole thing should have been humiliating and traumatizing. What makes her compliance in stripping for Summers any different than giving head to Nix?
Apparently, essentially the same thing she did when “confronted” by a woman her same size.
Why not? Is Nix some sort of sadist? Is he some monster, while Summers is merely a “dupe” and Ogborn is a “victim”? Assuming the article is accurate regarding Nix’s reaction, I would point out that sadists and monsters don’t get attacks of conscience.
Which one? Why is it okay to assume that Nix’s behavior is odious while Ogborn’s is understandable? Take, for example, the allegation that this guy called another restaurant and had a cook and manager strip and inspect each other. Who was the victim there, the woman or the man?
I have all the sympathy in the world for her, and I imagine that the circumstance was very traumatic. It is, nevertheless, very different from most forms of rape. Do you agree that a less submissive 17 year old would not have ended up in the same predicament? Is it okay to make that observation about her? Don’t you think she might want to change some of her behaviors if this were ever to come up for her in the future? If not, why not? If so, how can you say this without blaming the victim?
If your saying that if you change the incident and replace the girl with you, and that means it doesn’t happen. Then there is something about her that allows this incident to happen.
I’m not blaming her, or putting her down, exactly. I’m saying that sadly, she was naive and trusting. It doesn’t make her a bad person. It makes her an easy target.
“She said she believed she was trapped. Nix outweighed her by 145 pounds and stood nearly a foot taller. “I was scared for my life,” she said.”
Those saying that she was not in danger are contradicting themselves.
If Nix was willing to do what the caller said, then she was indeed in danger.
If Nix was not willing to do what the caller said, then how do you explain what he did?
A 90 pound teenage girl was scared for her life while a 235 pound man hit her threatened worse punishments should she fail to comply. There was every reason to believe those threats were real. Even now, I’m not sure just how far Nix would have gone had the caller ordered him to. How much more fear must the girl have been feeling at the time?
Here’s the main difference I see. When Ogborn took off her clothes it’s reasonable to assume that she was aware of the authorities requiring strip searches in other situations and that participating in one would demonstrate her innocence and allow her to keep her job. This was also not long she and Summers were told the police had been called and were on their way.
Nix didn’t even arrive on the scene until 2 hours after Summers and Ogborn had been told the police had been called and were on their way. Summers, herself, admitted she wondered why they were taking so long, but the caller had somehow explained them. While submitting to a strip search may be a reasonable way of demonstrating that one is not concealing stolen property anywhere on one’s body, I’ve no idea what legal purpose receiving a blow job could serve. At that point, Ms. Ogborn had been accused of using drugs, as well as theft (the addition of another charge should also have been another cue that things weren’t as they seemed). If someone, preferably you, Hentor, since you’re the one conflating submitting to a strip search with ordering someone to give head, could please give me an explanation of how receiving a blow job can indicate the presence or absence of drugs in one’s system, I’d love to read it. About the only thing I can think of is a half-joking, “She must have been smoking crack to submit to that!”
What purpose did Mr. Nix’s ordering Ms. Ogborn to give him a blow job serve? Is there any way it could have logically been connected with the things she was accused of? In my opinion, she could have seen submitting to a strip search as a way to demonstrate her innocence. I don’t know how the blow job would have accomplished that. That and Mr. Nix’s coming on the scene two hours later and not have been on hand for the initial pressure is why I hold Mr. Nix much more accountable for his actions. It has nothing to do with his being a man and everything to do with timing and degree of outlandishness. If others wish to differ, so be it.