‘My son, 14, touched a girl’s leg. He was called a rapist.’ Sunday Times article (share token)

[EmmatheStageRat]

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/b698b306-af03-11ed-b94f-fc4969750d6e?shareToken=1876e207894ef2960e35de884ddb573d

@Newbutoldfather at 14 I would have frozen in horror if a boy had put his hand on my thigh.
I wouldn’t have liked it but wouldn’t have said anything either.
I was very young for my age.

Boys need to learn to get clear consent before touching anyone.

It is sexual assault in fact but not rape like you said. Although I believe penetration with fingers should class as rape as well as it does in some other countries.

So some years ago I did jury service. I handled a very distressing rape trial. As I believe is very often the case a jury needs to decide between a man who says everything is consensual and a women who says she did not give consent. This is the case here. However, where a number of girls are making the same allegation this does appear to be a fairly strong indicator of a repeat pattern. The article is anonymous and does not contain a great deal of detail, but on what there is in the article I think the school appears to have acted correctly.

My son was extremely tactile as a young boy. He also totally knew it wasn't appropriate to touch his female friends, and definitely not their thighs and bottoms.

I'm amazed boys actually need this spelling out for them. Have all the many sessions of PHSE on consent passed them by? Or even just within the family learning about boundaries?

There's another article in the Times this week about the #metoo movement leading to over correction. This sounds perilously close to the tropes about racism and misogyny, 'you can't even say anything these days' kind of perspective. Girls should be able to go to school and get on with their day without being groped. It's really that simple. I manage to spend my entire day without groping any men, friend or stranger. It's not difficult.

I have to say I disagree with many here. There is a difference between touching someone's breasts and genitals, and touching other areas like arms, shoulders, thighs. I have close friends or family where it might be appropriate to touch places like arm/thigh, eg when comforting when they are upset, I don't think it's necessarily sexual. Breasts, bum etc is different, off limits outside romantic relationships.

I have no idea the full details of the boy in the story and dont want to get into an individual situation. There are definitely some sleazy guys out there who have absorbed horrible messages about consent and how girls want to be treated. But I also worry that we are playing down the responsibility of the girl to say "stop" or move away from someone or remove their hand or whatever.

I think we need to resocialise our girls as well as our boys. Its like when there are threads on mumsnet where people say "the neighbours kid keeps coming over every day and its driving me mad" but they haven't got the courage to actually say no to the child or parent. There are loads of threads of women saying basically some variation of "I dont like this thing which someone else is doing but I don't have the confidence to tell them". I see leg-touching as the same thing: tell the boy to stop, don't just put up with it and then complain to someone else later. If the boy carries on after being told to stop, then that's when it becomes inappropriate.

When I was young, guys would sometimes touch girls leg or put arm round shoulder as a way of making a move. If the girl's not interested, she moves away or remove the other persons hand or whatever. If the guy keeps persisting then obviously that was a problem, but I think its ridiculous if touching someone's thigh is now assault.

I genuinely wonder if it's possible to "get together" organically nowadays outside of online dating, if people can't gradually "test the water" in an appropriate way (not just grabbing someone's ass or breasts, but maybe touching arm or something). Do people genuinely have no physical contact at all and then comevout and say "can I kiss you/will you be my girlfriend" because the only time that ever happened to me was when i was 12/13 and it was gross.

Sorry if thats an unpopular opinion. FWIW, I am the mother of teenage boy and teenage girl.

I have questions.
In the article, the dad says he doesn't want to downplay or detract from #metoo - after doing exactly that, of course - because there's 'genuine harassment' out there.
How do we distinguish 'genuine' harassment from what his son has done, exactly? What is 'pretend' harassment? What is 'fake' harassment?

So the girls concerned didn't complain so it's sounds like it was consensual exploration by teenagers. Some other girl no doubt raised that #metoo is a good things goes to the teacher to say it is sexual assault and the teachers take it further. What happened to the head dealing with disapline. If the age of consent is to remain at 16 then the age of punishment for the crime being sexual assault should also be 16. If your not old enough to consent you also aren't old enough to understand the ramifications.

The assembly sound like a good idea and should have been the end of this.

You seem to be centring the boy in this eg the boy wants to flirt... all the girl has to do is.... Its different level of intrusion, but its still intrusion. Just as a matter of interest, what do you tell your son? And what do you tell your daughter about consent?

Or may be they did not have the courage to say anything.

Eeek raising my head above the parapet to say that I believe this could happen. When I was at school a teacher who never did anything wrong was given the nickname of paedophile because some kids thought it was funny. Some even made posters. Categorically none of these people had any genuinely accusations. But it became almost a parody. Thankfully and worryingly the school hierarchy seemed oblivious and it soon blew over.

Meanwhile another teacher did touch girls and make inappropriate comments. Nothing was done.

At the same time a girl was demonised for having sexually assaulted another girl. As far as I can tell they had a consensual lesbian encounter and then one felt embarrassed. She eventually left the school but not before being beaten up.

My point being that mob rule is rarely a good way to decide facts and teenage groups are especially prone to this since they have the toxic mix of a) wanting something exciting to happen b) wanting to fit in with their peers and c) having a lack of maturity to fully grasp the consequences of their actions.

I teach my daughter to smack, punch, kick, scream, whatever....but I can tell you now, she’s very unlikely to do that. One of my nieces has pushed them away, another had just froze. It’s not just a case of teaching them they can, some girls/women just freeze.

I have pushed boys/men away from me in the past. But I have also been ‘nice’ to these men when I’ve been alone walking home and they’ve hassled/touched me because I don’t want to escalate it and just want to get to safety.

Why the fuck does it always comes down to what the girl/woman did wrong.

So if no-one sees it, it hasn't happened?

I think secondary schools deal with teenage children negotiating how to start relationships and become sexually active every day.

Therefore in this case I think the reaction of the head teacher suggests this was more than "putting his hand on her thigh".

The school has a duty of care to all the students to keep them safe. Therefore the bar for the school acting on reports of assault has to be lower than the bar for finding someone guilty of a crime at court, surely?

I'm not sure what the Times' agenda is here but I don't like it.

'He's not a rapist'. Yet.

And at school, there’s a pressure to take it all as fun. Be cool girls.

Exaggerated and witch-hunty maybe, but now the boy knows how women who’ve been sexually harassed or raped are made to feel.

Everyone piles in, rumours sprout, maximum shame applied, multiple accusations appear from
nowhere (‘slag’) - that’s how the victim
gets treated.

You can hardly blame tempers running high in a change of public mood against the accused.

Hmmm - I know the poor little sod could have just got it wrong, and prob had no harmful intentions, but isn’t it cringey when men do #Poor Me.

The story seems to change too, it’s part of a game, it’s when they are chatting, it’s innocent flirting. All minimising the fact that the boy deliberately touched a number of girls on their thighs .

I wonder at what level of “innocent flirting” the father would accept that his son touching girls who don’t want to be touched is wrong? I bet it is not the same level of “ innocent flirting “ that the girls’ fathers would think is appropriate for 14 year olds in school.

I accept he had a rough time on his return to school, and while I sympathise with that, part of me says Yay! well done to the school for raising it, and well done for the other kids in the school who made it clear that they didn’t think it was appropriate behaviour. Schools need to have very clear boundaries, and far more importantly they need to enforce them and be seen to enforce them.

I’ve been teaching my dd the same thing. She always confidently says she would kick them in the balls. But saying you’ll do it and actually doing it is hard

Or they'll hit harder. It is getting quite common to see women knocked out cold on reddit with no prior context - apart from she deserved it.

Just because the girls didn’t complain, ( more than one girl remember) doesn’t mean it was consensual. There are all sorts of reasons why girls don’t speak up. I won’t list them. They should be pretty obvious.

In the meantime, all we can do as parents is teach our boys to be very, very careful.
Maybe teach them to be very, very careful to keep their bloody hands to themselves!

Or maybe teach them that sexual exploration is normal and they can say sorry not interested

Ah so this is the gist of the problem, when did the strong women of the 70s and 80s yield to this current feminine submission. I'm not surprised there is widespread porn usage and misogyny
When there is a power vacuum men will seize it.
Young girls need to be taught to despise porn and boys who use it, they need strong female role models and to be taught professional self-defense to assert themselves.

My local uni offered free women's self-defense to stop date rape, intoxication rape, etc I went with a friend. The policeman offering the class brought his niece but the turnout of 20something coeds was very low. He was upset.
Girls need a wake-up call to empower themselves. Fantasizing that their Nigel wouldn't behave that way needs to be addressed.

This.

The Boy said "If I don't go back (to the school) they will have won". Who, the girls he touched? Won what exactly, the right to go to school without being inappropriately touched maybe?