Again with the malls. What is it with you and malls?
I’m not going to answer any more of your questions. You are obviously not interested in the answers.
When I typed that post, I meant for the “indisputable” part to apply to the respectives statuses of “adult” and minor." It was in response to a series of posts trying to minimize that factor, or ridicule it by exaggerating the legal status to “man attacking baby” type characterizations of the opposing view.
Some people keep referring to it as “ripping” a girl’s pants off, or “tearing” a girl’s pants off. These seem to me to be loaded adjectives that quite possibly do not describe the events at all. In my experience with pantsing, it was always more like “tugging”, “slipping” or “yanking” pants off.
Ripping a girl’s pants off makes it seem like an act that would take time (as alluded to by the fact that someone mentioned getting out camera phones) but I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a pantsing that took more than 5 seconds from pants up to pants up again. And, yes, it happened at the mall, too. (Or, rather, Wal-Mart, because that’s as close to a mall as we had within a reasonable distance)
If I wasn’t interested, I wouldn’t ask. You’ve basically conceded that in any other public place, this would be charged as a crime. That amounts to a de facto argument on your part that the law either is, or should be, different in a school building than any other place. It is perfectly fair to ask why you believe that.
I’m not arguing that it’s a crime in one place and not another. I’m arguing that this alarmist “Won’t someone think of the children?!?” rhetoric is dumb.
Upthread someone mentioned that driving 2 mph over the speed limit is just as illegal as driving 50 mph over. Just so. But arguing that going 2 mph over is recklessly dangerous, puts innocent little children at risk, and these menaces to society should be locked up forever is worthy of little more than a rolleyes.
Dio, you’re on thin ice here. There is obviously a lot of ground between “factually sexual assault” and “legal”. You should be willing to explain why you consider that this case requires the conclusion that it was sexual assault.
Can you stop this. No one was taking pictures of little children.
A teenage girl showed her teenage boyfriend her breasts and let him take a picture. The teenage boy showed his friends because that was quite likely the best day of his life (hyperbole, live with it). At no time were any “children” being violated.
So cram it with this line of debate.
How are you to prove consent/lack of consent when a particular practice is the norm?
But what if that little child was your mother? At the MALL?!?!?!?!?
A 13 year old is a child. Not just by law, but by any other reasonable standard as well.
You also seem to overlook that in certain situations our system allows for individuals to be treated under a higher age bracket, but not the reverse. The only potentialy analogous situation I can think of is individuals who are held not legally responsible due to a “lack of capacity”. That is the reason minors are held to a different/lower standard than adults, because they are considered incapable of apprecuiating the implications of their actions. Mentally deficient people are treated similarly. Not because they are “children”, but because like children, they lack capacity.
So you won’t respond to my “strawman.” Fine. Would you do me the service of explaining exactly what strawman I constructed?
I’m clearly no logic/debate master. But as I see it, you’ve repeatedly opined that the current system, in which people who have attained a certain age are legally treated as adults, is “dumb.” Are you saying it is a strawman for me to say that your position implies that we would be better off either with no such system or a different one? And, if you believe a different system would be better, I am interested in hearing particulars.
If folks are agreed that my position constitutes erecting a strawman, I will appreciate being educated. But until I hear that, I’ll consider your designation of my position to be “a strawman” and your refusal to respond, the intellectual equivalent of your oft-expressed criticism of various assertions/policies as “dumb.”
To answer your question about what if you did this at the mall…
I live in PA, so I’ll go with our laws.
Probably I’d get charged with disorderly conduct.
This doesn’t appear to rise to the level of simple assault:
Here’s a whole pageof stuff about sex crime laws from PA. Pantsing doesn’t seem to meet the definition of sexual assault or indecent assault.
BTW, these are what are called “cites.”
“The norm?” Where is it the norm?
In any case, it’s a question for a prosecutor, not the school.
Rip the bathing suit off a teenage girl at beach. See what happens.
Clearly, you have nothing to back up your opinions, so why not just bow out gracefully?
As several people have noted, pranking people by giving a tug at too-loose-pants is something that happens regularly, every day, at every school, across the country. If the pants actually fall, they’re back up within a few seconds, everyone gets a little giggle, and the matter is done with and forgotten. You might as well prosecute noogies as aggravated assault.
Bingo. That’s exactly what I’m saying.
I never once said that we need a different legal system. Not once. I never mentioned it, not in this thread, or probably in any other (that I can remember off the top of my head). Never said it.
And yet you insist that I defend that position. I will not, because it never was my position.
What you apparently refuse to acknowledge is that few if any of the people arguing in support of more severe discipline are making statements anywhere near as hysterical as yours. IMO it is you who are recharacterizing into absurd terms the position with which you disagree, and then arguing that your rephrasing of their position is “dumb.” I am disagreeing with your rephrasing. I do not believe the majority of people holding a different view from yours have come close to the extreme hyperbole you have attributed to them.
Instead, I believe the question is who ought to make the call as to the appropriate response. IMO, there was a quite reasonable observation a page or 2 ago, where someone observed that the school could - and ought to - notify the authorities, whereupon the athorities could deterine how to proceed from there.
Well, at least you’ve moved from the mall to the beach.
You should have done that yesterday. The weather was nicer.
I’m not sure about round your way, but over here we tend to assume that people wear underwear. It is unusual, especially at school, for someone not to. Hell, not wearing underwear may even by against the dress code.
I posted before I saw that there were more pages to the thread. I disagree with you in that I think most would have another opinion, but frankly we don’t need this thread to go off on another tangent so I’ll let it go.