The problem is that it opens up a world where people can shrug an say, "Oh well, they're calling everything assault these days."
The law aside, I think it's morally assault if one or more of the following is true:
* The victim has a reasonable well founded fear of the consequences of non-compliance. * The assailant has made contact with specifically private areas of the victim's body - e.g. if you walk up to somebody and grab their genitals, then that's clearly sexual assault.
Anything short of those two is pestering, harassment, bullying even, none of these nice, but still different.
She was physically and assertively propositioning him for sex and ignoring both physical, paralinguistic AND verbal resistance. In what world do you live where that is not sexual assault?
She was - very rapidly - completely out of line. You could easily call her a bully. If she did it again, then the two incidents together would be sexual harassment. But it wasn't assault. Pulling at a man's upper garments simply isn't the same as pulling at those of a woman.
Who gets to define what is 'reasonable' and 'well founded'? In your example below the young woman had a well founded fear of men because of her past experiences and a well founded fear of what the consequences might be if she didn't 'play along'. And yet you're implying that she wasn't assaulted despite those facts. So who gets to say what is reasonable and what's not? Does a man get to? What about a woman who's never been assaulted? Who gets to draw that line?
Legally speaking you are completely wrong: "An assault is an act which causes another person to apprehend the infliction of immediate, unlawful, force on his person; a battery is the actual infliction of unlawful force on another person ... any touching of another person, however slight, may amount to battery."
I don't have public and private areas of my body. The whole thing is private. Nobody is allowed to touch it without my say-so. If someone hugged me when I was trying to back out of it then they have, both legally and morally, committed assault.
Now, it might not be assault with intent to harm, or serious assault, but it is still assault. Any kind of physical bullying is assault. Assault is a wide scale ranging from simply grabbing my arm to sticking a sword through me.
I think physical attacks to harm are different since it would be unlikely that an assailant would imagine erroneously that the other would consent to the attack.
Any touching of someone else's body without their consent is assault. Doing so in a sexual manner is sexual assault. Pushing someone back against the door of a police box, kissing them by surprise, and then refusing to back off when they're saying "No, get off." is sexual assault.
Couple of years ago, we had some neds break in to the close in Broad St. I asked them to leave and on the way out, one of the girls spat at me. She missed.
Later, the police perked up when I mentioned that as that contributed to the charge, and I believe contributed to previous assault charges and sentencing. It counted as attempted assault.
Yep, just so. I know lots of people to whom that applies. And since I usually welcome hugs, it's an effort for me to remember to get permission first. But the onus is still on me to get permission, not them to put up with me hugging them.
That's not the point. The point is that no one is allowed to touch *any* part of my body without my permission; it's *all* a private area. Would I react differently to someone touching my hand by accident as opposed to someone grabbing for my crotch? Yes, I would. But that's my choice, not theirs.
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andrewducker) wrote2010-05-25 01:04 pm
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The problem is that it opens up a world where people can shrug an say, "Oh well, they're calling everything assault these days."
The law aside, I think it's morally assault if one or more of the following is true:
* The victim has a reasonable well founded fear of the consequences of non-compliance.
* The assailant has made contact with specifically private areas of the victim's body - e.g. if you walk up to somebody and grab their genitals, then that's clearly sexual assault.
Anything short of those two is pestering, harassment, bullying even, none of these nice, but still different.
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I categorically reject this statement.
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"An assault is an act which causes another person to apprehend the infliction of immediate, unlawful, force on his person; a battery is the actual infliction of unlawful force on another person ... any touching of another person, however slight, may amount to battery."
I don't have public and private areas of my body. The whole thing is private. Nobody is allowed to touch it without my say-so. If someone hugged me when I was trying to back out of it then they have, both legally and morally, committed assault.
Now, it might not be assault with intent to harm, or serious assault, but it is still assault. Any kind of physical bullying is assault. Assault is a wide scale ranging from simply grabbing my arm to sticking a sword through me.
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I think physical attacks to harm are different since it would be unlikely that an assailant would imagine erroneously that the other would consent to the attack.
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Later, the police perked up when I mentioned that as that contributed to the charge, and I believe contributed to previous assault charges and sentencing. It counted as attempted assault.
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I claim the right to define my entire body as a private area. Which is hardly unreasonable, I would think.
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