At If I Ran The Zoo, Deborah has an entry in which she seems to cast a mother's response to her daughter being molested by a man she first "met" on the internet...as both sexist & anti-sex, and anti-technology. You can read the entry there and also see a reply that I posted, but i decided I had more to say.
The crux of her argument seems to be that this girl "chose" to have sex with a man in his 40's. As if there is such a thing as consensual sex where a child is involved (tip: there isn't). So the mother shouldn't blame the computer for making it easier for that to happen.
She even seems to blame the mother for taking her daughter's computer away as a result of her actions. Deborah is a parent and I'm not, but...I think that's what I'd do, too. For starters.
Deborah (apparently grudgingly) admits that yes, this man was a pervert. But she doesn't seem to get even half as much exercised about that as she does about the idea that this mother might actually have a reaction to what happened to her daughter.
What's weird is that I agree, in the broader sense, that 99% of those "sex predators on the internet" stories are inflated scare tactics. But in a case like this, where something actually happened...that's a draw a line in the sand moment for me.
6 comments:
Yeah, I'm with you on this one Ben. I read her posting and she is wrong, wrong, WRONG!
What the hell is she thinking???
A'mee
I don't know, I think it's more complicated than that. I mean, if a 15 year old girl is having sex with a 15, 16, or 17 year old boy, do we not think she's capable of making that choice? It might be a bad choice, but we don't assume she's being molested, do we? I'm not saying the 42 year old man is the same thing, not by a long shot, but a 15 year old isn't a child, not in the same way an 8 or ten year old is. And I don't think (in most states, at least) that sex with a 15 year old is the same crime that sex with an 8 or 10 year old is. Though I'm not a lawyer.
In any case, teenage girls have been having sex with predatory older men since way before the internet ever existed. And it's always been complicated. Just how complicated, and just how damaging, it is depends on exactly what the situation is, exactly who the girl is. In this instance, there's no way of knowing just how much the girl was harmed by whatever happened, because she's not talking. We only know what her mother's saying, and mothers of girls that age are often clueless, though well intentioned. The point I'm trying to get to here though, is that taking away the computer is a silly gesture. If the mother had been a little less clueless in the first place, the daughter wouldn't have been hanging around with 42 year old men, either online or in life. Functional parents, who know what their kids are doing, especially kids who can't drive themselves around yet, go a lot farther towards preventing stuff like this that taking away computers ever will.
I think what I most objected to is that Deborah seems hardly concerned at all with the molestation.
Except inasmuch as it gave her the chance to write yet another entry advancing her anti-sexism/anti-tenchnophobia agenda.
Much of which I may agree with, but to me, this is a case of seriously fucked-up priorities.
And I think that my issue is that when the girl's 15 I'm not entirely sure molestation is still the appropriate word. If the guy had been, I don't know, 22, would we be calling it molestation? I tend to think not, I don't know. It's still something fucked up, but it's not quite molestation, I don't think.
And I am ever so articulate, in trying to explain my thoughts on this, aren't I?
For me, partly but not entirely for personal reasons, the dividing line is 15.
Both my experience of 15-year-olds, and my memory of having been one, is this:
They think they're a lot more grown up than they actually are-and I might almost say they need *more* protection than a younger person, for precisely that reason.
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