I agree. There’s a big difference between a sentence of one to four years and a potential sentence of one to four years. I’m going to assume the court will look at the crime and give out a proportionate sentence, like maybe some community service or mandatory counseling.
But we shouldn’t just dismiss minor crimes as not worth bothering to enforce. Consider another crime; theft. And let’s say petty theft carries a potential sentence of one to four years. Now let’s say somebody shoplifts a soda from a convenience store. Should that person be sent to prison for one to four years? I’d say no. But that doesn’t mean we should rewrite the law and make it legal to shoplift anything with a value of three dollars or less.
Sexual harassment should be a crime and should have serious penalties available. And the court system should look at specific occurrences of that crime and decide what punishment is suitable.
This is why some countries, such as Canada, have abolished the offence of « rape » and replaced it with « sexual assault » of various degrees. The prohibition is on assaults of a sexual nature, with the punishment varying with severity. Some sexual assaults that don’t involve p-in-v can be horribly traumatic for the victim (eg Jean Carroll). The emphasis is on the assault, because assaults of a sexual nature can be an assertion of dominance and control. The sexual nature of the assault just makes it worse.
Even if some of the women did consent to contact with him, I get the impression that he viewed that as largely irrelevant, that he did what he did without any sort of assessment of whether they were likely to be consenting.
And maybe four years in prison is too much for a kiss. But we don’t know yet what he’ll actually be sentenced to. It might be less, and it might be much less. It’s certainly possible that he’ll get the sentence he deserves.
And with respect to post-game celebrations: has anyone here seen a case where a male coach of a winning team of men, especially a hockey or football team, has grabbed a player by the head and kissed the player on the lips?
If you have, I’d love to see it on video.
And if you haven’t ever seen something like that, doesn’t that help to show the issue here?
The thread title is a complete misrepresentation of what this is all about. It’s not about the appropriate criminal penalty for a single instance of abuse trivialized as “a kiss”. The reason for the massive outcry is that this was a very public instance of a pervasive problem.
I haven’t seen anyone call for him to be imprisoned for 1-4 years, or at all. (Although it would hardly be a shock if it emerges that he has done other things that do warrant that kind of criminal sentence.) The consequences people are generally demanding are that he should be fired, and that the culture of disrespectful macho sexism that has normalized such casual sexual abuse must change.
It is incredibly disingenuous for any man to equivocate this happening to him, to what women face when put in this hold. Like, shockingly tone deaf to the reality. Wow.
The man knows it is non aggressive, the man knows he can easily pull away. There is no real threat.
Any women in this clench knows exactly the reverse is true for her. This IS pure aggression, she CANNOT get free, and there is a VERY real threat.
No man would be equivocating, if he was overpowered, in this fashion, forcibly kissed publicly by a gay man, 100% without his consent. He’d def think that was an assault!
I don’t personally think it warrants criminal penalties, but this is not my decision to make and clearly there should be some consequences. If he has been suspended, then there have been. There will be people who think this is not enough, possibly for personal and political reasons or to make an example, especially as the suspension was for ninety days and these practices are said to be widespread, and the initial response was highly inadequate. There are also people who will state there are cultural factors and that sport can be emotional. It seems reasonable to take the wishes of those most directly involved into account. But surely some message has already been sent, probably for the better.
…just because people are choosing not to share potentially traumatic experiences here doesn’t mean they haven’t had them.
All sexual assaults are “relatively brief” in the grand scheme of things. It’s the lack of consent and the power dynamics that matter here, not the duration of the assault.
You probably know this already, but this was “the kiss of death,” which, according to popular culture, is the Mafia signal that the recipient is guilty of betrayal and is now marked for death. The firm holding of the recipient’s head is to keep him from moving his head back or away so that the intention is clear. It’s not, strictly speaking, dominance behavior.
That’s a useful rule of thumb for men who have difficulty grasping when consent is required. Would you want another man to do this to you? If the answer is no, then you shouldn’t do it to a woman.
Right, with the addendum: On a team where it was not just one’s casual after-hours personal athletic hobby but one’s full-time employer and primary vocation and source of income?
The persistent minimization of this assault — and it is, absolutely, an assault — in this thread is baffling and horrifying to me.
I once again invite Dinsdale to celebrate a workplace achievement by grabbing a female subordinate’s head and kissing her hard, and report back the results.
I think I started the references to coach. My bad.
They’re not able to fire him because of a law preventing it when the president’s remaining term of office is less than one year. I scanned the NYT article and didn’t see any mention of that.
Smartest thing said so far in this thread (with all due respect for some of the eloquent posts upthread). A full-scale investigation is in order, because it looks like there’s been some abuse going on for some time, and we should wait to see if any new facts emerge. That is, we should wait before we draw conclusions. Discussing it is fine, of course.
@Pardel-Lux, the legislation you posted was passed by Mexican authorities, not European.
That’s a strange conclusion. I think physically controlling someone to give them the terrifying message “I am going to kill you for betraying me” is the epitome of dominance behavior.