Hildegarde

One of the more bemusing thing about living in a largely rural area is watching the vast disconnect between local and national news.

Last week, two tornados touched down in Connecticut.  One of them hit in Greenwich-Stamford, but the other hit just outside Hartford.  The local CBS station, WFSB, is in Hartford.  The tornado became their lead story for days, in spite of the fact that it was an F0, only sporadically reaching an F1, and not much damage was done, and nobody died.

Yesterday, I was looking almost desperately for news about Egypt, never mind about Brazil and Portugal and the eighty other places around the world that seem to be mired in riots and coming apart at the seams.

The big headline on the local news stations was about a man, aged 25, who had been picked up “acting suspiciously” in a local amusement park, and whose camera had later been discovered to have pictures of the chests and rear ends of numerous “teenaged” girls,  some of them more girls than teenaged.  Some of them, in other words, seeming to be about eleven.

I say seeming to be because the incident is even more bizarre than it seems on the surface.

If you want, you can go here and read one of the longer and more detailed news pieces:

http://www.wfsb.com/story/22762989/pd-man-accused-of-taking-photos-videos-of-teenage-girls-at-quassy-beaches

There is definitely a creep factor here that is more than the usual sort of thing–hiding in the woods, that camera full of what amounts to child pornography (if soft pornography), the various aliases.

The story itself is, I think, a little confusing. 

The very first headlines out of the case harped insistantly on the picture taking angle, but the story itself seems to indicate that what initially attracted the attention of staff at the park was other behavior entirely. 

Granted, that behavior was equally bizarre, if not equally creepy. And it was certainly exacerbated by the way the man behaved once the police caught up with him.

I’m  not even going to do that thing where I fret about criminalizing this kind of behavior.  Quassy is privately owned and run.  It can admit and retain, or refuse to admit and eject, anybody it wants to.

Given all the reports, if I’d been the Quassy staff, I’d have wanted him out of there, too.

What’s been puzzling me over the last twenty four hours are the charges. 

Granted that my sons are right and the issue, at the time, ws to find something they could use to lock the man up and keep him away from the park and the very young girls while they sorted everything out, the “voyeurism” thing makes no sense to me.

What voyeurism means–or what I thought it meant–is that thing where you drill a hole in the wall behind one of the stalls in the women’s bathroom, or peak through somebody’s windows at night when they’re not aware that you’re there.

In other words, I thought the entire point of voyeurism was that the perpetrator invaded somebody’s private space, a place where the victim had a reasonable expectation of being unobserved.

 But the last place you could have a reasonable expectation of being unobserved is a beach which is open to the public, no  matter how privately owned.

If I was this guy’s lawyer, I’d be all over the “reasonable expectation” thing.  I don’t see how they can make that one stick, and I’m wondering why they’re even bothering to try.

They seem to have even otherwise to hold onto him–forgery, giving false information to a police officer, etc–and they might eventually end up with more.

It looks to me that they’ve  held back from filing child pornography charges because they can’t yet prove that any of the pictures belonged to an actual child.  The one intelligent thing the man seems to have done is not to take pictures of faces.

The one person whose face he did take a picture of seems to have been definitely over the age of eighteen, although if she knew nothing about the video he took of her, that would at least be voyeurism as I’ve always understood it.

Part of the time, I’ve been wondering how else you could structure a law to make this kind of thing illegal, and all I come up with are “solutions” that aren’t really solutions.  To make it illegal to take pictures of people you don’t know and without their permission would not only shut down photojournalism, it would put a lot of completely innocent tourists in jail.

Part of the time, I’ve been thinking about something else.

For centuries–and still, in many parts of the world–women and girls did not leave the house “scantily dressed” precisely because we were worried about who might be watching and with what intent.

We devised and enforced dress codes for children that clearly demarcated children from adults, sort of like big neon signs yelling JAIL BAIT for everyone to see.

The last of those I remember disappeared in the early Sixties, and I remember, at the time, being glad to see them go.  That was the ban on nylon stockings on girls who were not yet out of high school. 

Until you left for college, you were supposed to be restricted to bobby sox and knee socks, and that was that.

Then  Lynn Clark showed up in sixth grade with nylons and ballet flats, and the school did nothing about it.  By the following fall, we were all struggling with garter belts.

I am not in the least bit interesting in going back to that way of life–although I do think panyhose were an invention of the devil–but it continually surprises me that we have so  much changed our underlying understanding of human nature that we’re shocked when things like this happen.

I have a gut feeling that this actually says something good about  us, something about how were are not as decadent or depraved or as sinking into the abyss of destruction as I sometimes think we are.

On some level somewhere, our day to day lives are still mostly well ordered and trustworthy.  Faced with what I would call ordinary scuzz ball behavior, we respond to it as an anomaly.

In the meantime, we’ve managed to lock this guy up where he won’t bother anybody in the immediate future, and I’d be willing to bet we’re going to be able to lock him up long term.