https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/29183314-post35.html
What do you expect when you make a violation of basic human standards routine?
What do you expect when you make a violation of basic human standards routine?
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TSA -- enablers of pussy-grabbers everywhere
- Thread starter Loren Pechtel
- Start date
How is this not child abuse?
Why is a parent not equally guilty and bad if they prioritize their vacation over their daughter's personal integrity? No should mean no for the child, regardless of what beach you want to go to. You have a choice to go and voluntary subject yourself to the TSA agent's touching. So should the child.
Why is a parent not equally guilty and bad if they prioritize their vacation over their daughter's personal integrity? No should mean no for the child, regardless of what beach you want to go to. You have a choice to go and voluntary subject yourself to the TSA agent's touching. So should the child.
fast
Contributor
It's so easy to become desensitized to having to endure ever so slight increases of unacceptable behavior, as there's a mighty convenience to just justify dealing with it (as a frog might say to his pal sitting in increasingly hot water), but that father would not have stood for a more substantive egregious act (as it would be like a frog being suddenly dipped in the throws of excessively hot water). In that circumstance, he would have chosen to not fly, despite it all, had that been the choice to make. It's unfortunate, but if you care but not so much to make the hard decision to not fly, then unreasonable are the rest of us to choose otherwise? Nay, didn't think so. No riots or anything. You just turn to your daughter and say "take it honey," under the cowardice delusion that you had to fly. Kind of makes ya wonder where the hyperbole actually lies. It mustn't be all that bad, given the ease of making it habitual to allow your kids to repeatedly endure it. Time for another job, I say.
Stories like this. I don't know. I hear the message, but it's tainted.
Stories like this. I don't know. I hear the message, but it's tainted.
Don2 (Don1 Revised)
Contributor
I'm a little skeptical about the op. If you found this out, your first instinct wouldn't be to post it on the internet, especially a flyer website. That'd be like a 1000th after thought and counter-instinctual due to privacy and protection of your child. First thought would be to call police.
Nothing says they didn't call the police.
And note they didn't post under a real name nor include any meaningful personal information. No privacy issues. I rather suspect that it's a a more regular user of the board who created the account to post it anonymously.
Don2 (Don1 Revised)
Contributor
you post a lot of unverifiable information.
Exactly. You don't HAVE to fly. You are making a choice to fly and to subject yourself to the TSA agent. If forcing the child, you are not giving them that same choice. If what the TSA agent is doing is so awful that it really upsets the child, I say that is child abuse and you are to guilty of it.
You think the post is fake?
Don2 (Don1 Revised)
Contributor
How did you verify it?
Malintent
Veteran Member
<sigh> NOTHING in that article said anything about "vacation".
How about this reply to your post....
You would endanger that child by denying her the necessary medical treatment she was receiving on those trips?... just because the mother was unable to explain the difference between a TSA agent pat down and sexual assault from a complete stranger?
See how all I had to do was just invent "necessary medical treatment" to make your response seem totally out of line? and change "friend" to "complete stranger"...
Factually, we do not know why this family "is traveling more frequently now". It didn't sound optional to me, but that information was not provided.
ronburgundy
Contributor
Definitely something rather fishy about it.
[P]"I have to accept being touched by strangers now?" and I said yes.
..
So our social norms have gone from "nobody can touch you there" to "anyone can touch you there and you shouldn't complain about it".
[/P]
Really? One instance in a very particular public context where the dad and police officers were present, and he tells his daughter that from now on she must accept being touched by any stranger anytime? What a horrifically bad parent. If it were true, they should lose custody, but more likely the absurdity of their response is because its bullshit and they are trying to sell us the implausible idea that a girl accepted being molested by everyone because of a TSA pat down.
Oh and then this.
[P]Fast forward to now, and she's totally used to being fondled by the TSA. She just accepts it as part of life and doesn't complain any more. As you say, I can't tell her to trust her instincts because of what was said before, because she's been trained to accept invasive touching by strangers. [/P]
So, his daughter is getting groped by the TSA on a routine basis? Unless he's putting metal objects in her vagina before heading to the airport every week, the odds of more than 1 pat down ever are extremely low. I'm 48, travel 5 times a year and have never been patted down, and don't think I've ever seen a kid patted down.
It said nothing about the trip being vital to the point of justifying child molestation either. It was not written as a special case. It was written so as to be routine and generalizing it to a concern we should all share about our kids becoming acclimated to it.
It sounded optional and general to me because the writer is writing it as a general concern for a new generation of children, and not just for sick kids.
Seems to me the onus is pretty heavy on the writer to justify why the child is being subjected to unwanted touching, which if it is as bad as the writer is saying may constitute a crime in another setting.
You don't have to be hiding anything. General TSA policy these days seems to be that anything suspicious in your stuff causes a pat-down. In the past medical stuff didn't cause this, now even that tends to. It's utterly stupid as when one has a traveling companion they take your word for whose bag it is--if you really were trying to slip something by you would have the person not carrying it get the grope.
Note that "suspicious" doesn't mean dangerous or prohibited. Any reasonably large undifferentiated package of organic matter will likely draw a swab and grope.
We are careful about how we pack to minimize gropes and baggage searches/thefts (too bad the screener didn't turn out to be allergic to the bag of nuts he helped himself to out of our suitcase) but even with that we've both drawn gropes. (In her case, a bag we picked up at our connection, mine due to medical liquids.) Her case bothers me because they asked how long we had before our flight and seemed disappointed when we had gobs of time.
Expect to be groped if you do anything but be a good little sheep. Plenty of gropes appear to be retaliatory in nature, especially if you have the gall to defy them (even if you are within your rights--say, by not letting them leaf through privileged information) and plenty of reports exist of such actions going way to far in the sexual realm and plenty of reports of utterly unwarranted levels of force--bringing the hand rapidly up into contact with the genitals.
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It occurs to me--suppose the parents are divorced, share custody and live far apart. The daughter is going to fly back and forth a lot.
In that case we would be weighing the bodily integrity of the child against the custody rights of the parents. In family law, usually the interests of the children come first. This should be no exception.
The courts are very unwilling to do anything about the TSA abuses. To recognize it was a reason not to require the travel would be to admit the TSA is in the wrong.
Underseer
Contributor
Wow, is Loren actually admitting that sexual assault is a bad thing without blaming the victims?
Malintent
Veteran Member
not to put words in your mouth, but it certainly sounds a whole lot like you just said that the real problem is why the kid is allowed to go on airplanes, since it is just inevitable that the TSA molests people.
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I think Jolly_Penguin had the victim blaming covered already
Close, but no. I was saying that if we accept the writer's claim that the TSA agents are touching the children against the wishes of the children, and the claim that this should cause a concern about the violation of the bodily integrity of the children, then the writer is admittedly complicit in this violation. I personally do not live in the USA nor do I travel often. I don't know what TSA agents do or if they really do touch children where children wish not to be touched.
Who do you see as the victim here? The TSA? The writer? Or the child?
Where did I blame said victim?
ronburgundy
Contributor
None of this explains why a 9 year old would be getting patted down on such a constant basis that she would assume (as the father claims) that anyone anywhere is now allowed to touch her genitals and she'll get in trouble if she complains.
And it doesn't explain why during the very first pat down the father told her that she must now accept being touched by strangers in general.
He is either a terrible father or a liar.
Malintent
Veteran Member
both the child and the writer... the writer was a parent.. .so, my answer is "parent and their child".
here:
and then again here:
It's dad's fault that the child is molested because he has the audacity to bring her to the airport.
Just like it is the subject of a rape who is at fault for being out too late at night or in too short a skirt. note I didn't; say "victim of rape".. the rapist is the victim because heck, if you are visiting an airport (I mean, out late at night) then you are asking for it... so why pic on the TSA (I mean rapist).