Down goes Lauren as Braekhus gets payback!
That’s just an issue of implied consent. You came into the doctor’s office, so you have implied consent to touch them in in a way that is necessary for the job.
The kiss does not have that implied consent. It’s not like they were in a romantic situation or anything. It’s not as if it’s a normal part of our culture for two sports rivals to kiss. There is no implied consent to kiss someone in this situation.
Also, I will note that doctors who do things unnecessary for their job, like Dr. Nassar who used his medical license to molest female gymnasts as young as 13 in the guise of medical treatment, are definitely committing sexual assault. That’s even though the girls actually gave him permission due to his lie that it was a needed treatment. So it was uninformed consent, which is not good enough.
So a doctor only has implied consent to do what is absolutely necessary for their job, nothing more. You can’t argue that kissing your opponent is something needed to do your job as a boxer.
The force of reaching her lips over and putting them on the other person. She was not given a choice to move out of the way. Therefore she was forced.
Why are you arguing such weird things?
You are right, of course, that the perpetrator being aroused or not is not relevant. What is relevant is the sexual nature of the actions he committed. He could do it for whatever reason. He could want you to be aroused, he could want you to feel violated. He could do it for his own pleasure, or because he’s mad at you. He could even do it because someone told him to.
That said impact on the victim is not how we determine crimes. If the guy you described were to have somehow done what he did on accident (and I’m not saying that was necessarily possible), then it would not have been considered a crime. It’s the fact that he intended to touch you in a sexual way without your consent that makes it sexual assault.
What’s more, if you’d have not felt anything at all from it, it still would be sexual assault. It’s not what it did to you that matters. It’s what he did and whether he intended to do it.
Still, I agree it was sexual assault, and I am very sorry you had to endure that. I hope that you, the police, and the prosecution able to get the guy legally punished in such a way to make it where he would be less likely to do this to anyone else.
And, no, I’m not necessarily saying that the sexual assault being discussed here is as severe as the sexual assault that this poster has described. Kissing strangers is (I argue) sexual in our culture, but not as sexual as groping or other such actions.
Okay. Now to apply those standards to the circumstance.
First not a stranger.
Second (assuming not staged) not sure it was intended to be touching in a sexual way but as a means to psychologically put the opponent off balance in a context in which other physical contact and behavior that would be assault otherwise is acceptable.
Context matters to determining that standard of intent. An aunt kissing a peck on a child against their will would be understood as having no intent to be touch in a sexual way. A sloppy tongue thrust one after taking the child alone to a bedroom would be seen as a sexual intent kiss.
How is it understood in this specific context?
[quote=“BigT, post:162, topic:799294”]
That’s just an issue of implied consent. You came into the doctor’s office, so you have implied consent to touch them in in a way that is necessary for the job.
The kiss does not have that implied consent. It’s not like they were in a romantic situation or anything. It’s not as if it’s a normal part of our culture for two sports rivals to kiss. There is no implied consent to kiss someone in this situation.
[quote]
I contend that the law is not clear enough in this situation to determine whether there is implied consent. I haven’t argued that the fighter did not step over the line, I argue that it wasn’t sufficient to make the act legally an assault, sexual or otherwise, because the law was not intended for this situation, just as it was not intended for two people on a date.
This is incorrect. Implied consent requires much more context to interpret, a doctor can’t assume an implied consent to do anything even if they feel it is necessary. The patient is entitled to object to any type of contact from the doctor. But it does allow the doctor to touch a patient in a way that a reasonable person would expect in an examination until there is an explicit objection. Professional boxers who agree to participate in a stare down should expect that there may be physical contact as part of an attempt to intimidate their opponent because it’s happened before, and without legal consequences because it does not necessarily rise to the level of an assault.
It’s not weird, she was not forced to do anything. There is the concept that a kiss can be ‘forced upon’ a person. That is not the same as forcing someone to do something against their will. When the boxer struck her opponent after she was kissed we don’t say she ‘forced a slap upon her’, we just say the she ‘slapped her’, that is the use of force because it is physically harmful. A kiss is not physically harmful. If she were held so that she could not get away from the kiss then force would be in play there, if her head were pulled forward to conduct the kiss she would be forced, but she did not act in any way at all, she was not forced to do anything, any more than she was forced to strike in return, which she did, committing a physical harmful act much closer to an assault if not for the circumstances.
These little distinctions all make a difference. I’m not going to get into an argument about what the informal definition of sexual assault is, you can call it anything you want, the legal definition is what matters here, and these distinctions are significant, as is the distinction about what the law was intended to cover as opposed to possible literal interpretations of a law that disregard the context in which the law is applied. To be clear, I don’t say this act can’t be interpreted to be sexual assault, I’m saying it cannot be interpreted in a way that would result in a legal conviction, largely because of the context of the situation.
Posting this as a response to someone discussing whether something is a sexual assault in a thread that is literally about defining sexual assault indicates that you’re not actually planning to participate in the thread in any meaningful fashion.
I posted a definition that clearly supports my usage of the word and that such usage is an ordinary part of the English language. If you want to engage in weird semantic arguments where you redefine words and demand that people use them only in ways that fit your definition, I’m sure someone else will join in that game eventually.
I’ll apologize for this because it wasn’t directly addressing what you are saying. My argument is focused on legality. You are looking at a narrower aspect of the acts. I am saying that the definition of sexual assault doesn’t necessarily make it illegal within the context specific to the OP.
And on this matter I have ended up being nit-picky about things that are not even relevant to my argument. I only recall you being fair and straight-forward in your arguments in the past. My apologies again, and to others, I’ll stick to the basis of my argument for the rest of this.
In my state, it would very likely be misdemeanor battery if a jury believed that it was an intentional “offensive” touching. Assuming it was not staged, a kiss in that situation was meant to be offensive and a reasonable person in that situation would believe that a person could be offended by such things.
Sexual assault, as noted above, in my state also requires a touching of certain naughty bits with the intent to arouse or gratify a person.
*double post
Are you talking about WV? I looked up sexual assault there and I can’t find anything about intent being required.
You are right. All three degrees of sexual assault (same article, subsections 3 through 5) require “sexual intercourse or sexual intrusion.” (definitions not relevant here). Sexual abuse (same article, subsections 7 through 9) which would apply to anything sexual that is not intercourse, has the above definition.