Some women really need to get a grip, I’m afraid
Imagine going on about having been groped in 1970, 44 years ago, when you were 18 and your groper was 40, and when you are now 62 and he is 84.
Hands up all reasonably attractive women (or who were attractive at the time anyway) aged 40/45+ who have never been groped at some time or other. We forget that it’s only in the last couple of decades that things have really changed so that men who grope or try it on are shock-horror criminals rather than disgusting idiots to be hit away, dodged or yelled at if you didn’t fancy them or if they were strangers, but to be gone along with if you did fancy them and they weren’t strangers.
Now even the latter run the risk of the law if years later somebody decides to squawk.
Call me Old School, but every woman should know how to deal with unsolicited and unappealing groping, and it’s most certainly not by going to the police (though if he’s your superior at work and making life difficult, you should report the matter to the appropriate person in the organisation).
This isn’t rape we’re talking about, for heaven’s sake, and not even attempted rape. The man pushed himself onto her, and when she rejected him, he apologised and stopped immediately.
To me and my contemporaries, that was normal life. Men pushed themselves onto you all the time. They actually seemed to think it was expected of them, or that this was the way to do it. Actually, I think the main reason this kind of behaviour is not so common anymore, with the result that younger women think it exceptional, is not because of political correctness but because of education and better socialisation. There isn’t that much ignorance among men anymore about how to approach girls and women.
Most of that groping and launching themselves at you was due to ignorance and not a desire to assault. Rolf Harris would know now not to do that, and not because of a fear of the law, but because he would understand that it’s not the best way to get results out of a woman.
This is so sad. I mean, what on earth is it all about and for? What is the point? If all women of my generation had to even try to recall the number of times they’d been groped and who by, with a view to reporting it to the police (fat chance), we would be in court from here to kingdom come. We were very clear in our minds that it was neither rape nor a precursor to rape, even if it was just a pest in the street.
This woman must either have been spectacularly sheltered (difficult to believe, given that she was 18 and holidaying in Malta with a boyfriend, something quite rare in those days) or has simply decided to take advantage of the situation and get her day in the spotlight before she fades away altogether: “Rolf Harris groped me in 1970, but then apologised when I told him to stop.”
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Reply to Scarlet Click here to cancel reply
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140520/local/woman-claims-indecent-assault-by-rolf-harris-in-malta.519809
At 40, the groper could be hardly called naive. I’m sure he would have discovered by then the most suitable way to approach a woman.
I’m actually surprised at the way you’re taking this. A wrong action can never be called right. Bear in mind that this is an English man we’re talking about not some backward Maltese hulk from the 70s. He should have known better.
[Daphne – The situation was common to all societies in Europe back then, Natalie. It was normal. It is just one of many, many factors directly linked to women’s subservient and inferior place in society and you really can’t take it out of context or judge it anachronistically in terms of today’s world.
You might as well express horror because parents gave their sons a proper education but not their daughters, or because sons were allowed to stay out all night but daughters had to be home at 9pm. It was a different world, and you had to live in both to know just how different. Of course it didn’t only happen in backward Malta. Don’t you ever watch Mad Men? That was in New York City, and a very accurate portrayal of attitudes towards women that lasted at least until the 1980s.
How can people know better if what they know is the norm?]
If I were to experience anything of the sort, I would certainly report the person. It would give him a good shaking up.
[Daphne – You should never do that. It’s completely undignified. Report to whom – the police? Report to your boss, yes, if it’s chronic. Otherwise it makes more sense all round to deal with it in a graceful manner. Most men, when rebuffed, will never come back for more. Also, you get more respect from them if you deal with the situation firmly and severely yourself rather than by ‘reporting’, which has shades of the schoolyard.]
However I do agree with you that a woman in her 60s calling foul after more than 40 years is ridiculous. She’s just trying to get some attention. If she wanted to do something about it, she should have done so before. After all, as you said, this isn’t rape.
Or rather the word I was looking for was ‘oaf’ rather than ‘hulk’. I know of very few Maltese men who can be described as large and impressive.
I know that you and your contemporaries had plenty of such experiences and got used to them, but it doesn’t mean that they were ever acceptable or tolerable. Such men disgust me.
Rolf Harris is Australian, not English.
One may well want to do it gracefully,however that only creates more space for that person to err. And to continue in that behavioural pattern.
Such behaviour was not correct then and is not correct now.
Today it is far worse in fact, because reporting gives rise to the victim getting more exposure than the wrongdoer.
E-reputation is a very limiting factor to reporting, and actual action against the wrongdoer, in Malta, is a laugh.
What about cases where the wrong doer is the boss, who is about a big a liar and more than Joseph Muscat with just as much visibility?
In such cases, the wrongdoer/ boss buys out any witnesses by offering them an even better job.
Sadly, few are those who refuse.
Harris is not British, he’s Australian.
Daphne, I cannot agree with you more.
In England these allegations have taken on a farcical twist.
Many of these elderly women seem to me to be acting out of nostalgia for the good old days: “I might have a few kilos of silicon and a litre of botox on me now but in the mid-twentieth century I looked good enough for so and so to grope me.”
They are, however, getting a lot of people into serious trouble.
It is a bit rich for women to complain about the death of chivalry when touching a woman’s arm can end up with a scene about harassment. And no, I am not referring to Malta.
Asking a woman if she wants to be kissed, even when all the signs are there, instead of just going ahead and kissing her, is the biggest anti climax but, quite frankly it is preferable to a ride in a police car.
Exactly. Harris will be another one on the list of exonerated, aging stars if this kind of absolute pish is the best the prosecutors can come up with. Just who is the victim here?
I’m just a few years older than you, Daphne, and my, do your words bring back memories! Personally, I used to take the groping attempts in my stride and learned to keep certain men at arm’s length.
Did you ever sit on a bus, squeezed into the window with a lout holding his arm akimbo pointed directly onto your breast? Or standing in a queue with your ‘space’ invaded by these one-track mind thrill-seekers?
I hated the experience, but it was ‘normal’ at the time. I wonder what your younger female readers would have to say. Is groping still as rampant as it was thirty – forty years ago?
Undoubtedly, in this particular case, I guess someone appears to be trying to win a lottery.
When I read that story, I thought it was a misprint. It never even occurred to me that the incident did actually happen decades ago.
Soon he’ll be hauled for singing ‘dirty’ songs in the 70s.
I’m half expecting someone to give a new interpretation of ‘Jake the Peg with the extra leg’ and ‘Tie me Kangaroo down boy’ which he once sang in Maltese on TVM. The words became ‘aqbadli il-fenek tieghi Ray’.
Why do men always think that they could push onto women?
[Daphne – Because women were inferior at law and generally subservient in fact.]
The reverse is now true. Again, not talking about Malta.
It’s a very good point you add. I would also like to add that from experience even as a young man one had to learn to deal with being groped by older men. Of course men avoid this subject with of course a lot more embarrassment as for us it’s akin to showing weakness and vulnerability.
These stories are coming out because they show how Rolf Harris abused his position as a celebrity to sexually assault women and children without fear of being prosecuted over a vast number of years. Take a look at the UK news. Rolf Harris is currently on trial for multiple counts (14 I think) of sexual assault, some on girls as young as 11.
Lately there’s been also something about Woody Allen going on. It’s his step daughter who is accusing him of child abuse.
The question is why was the Harris/Savile generation so randy to begin with?
[Daphne – The proper question is: why is the more recent generation not? This has been debated to death already: it is a mixture of changed social mores that have strengthened women’s position, harassment laws, constant bombardment of politically correct messages, and apparently, the general environment (food, chemicals, whatever) that has also caused a drop in male fertility.]
The widely-respected Travison study has shown that testosterone levels in men are falling at the rate of 1.2% per year.
Very, very worrying indeed.
Not if you own a didgeridoo it seems.
This is rich !!
DCG declares the ‘norm’ acceptable!
Very unexpected, seeing it comes from someone who’s all the time ranting against everything that has, after all, become the ‘norm’ now in Malta.
Progress has always implied not accepting the norm, rebelling against what was until that moment ‘acceptable’.
I am a 49 years old and I do have fond memories of Rolf Harris (as a TV personality I hasten to add, before you jump to conclusions) and I do find it disturbing that such a man can be accused of such behaviour. That does not mean, however, that just because he and the society around him considered such behaviour acceptable it was not wrong.
If the victims of such abuse feel strongly enough about it they are entitled to have their say, however long ago it as been and no one has the right to try to beat them back in their corner.
[Daphne – You are as ridiculous as that woman and everyone else who is making a fuss about it. An unsolicited grope 44 years ago, for which the man apologised when she pushed him off, is the sort of thing a woman takes in her stride and forgets. The apology is key. It is absolutely, utterly graceless to behave this way after an apology, more so 44 years after an apology.
Do you imagine for one moment that at 62 I am going to remember who groped me or tried groping me when I was 18? Men even used to follow me and hassle me when I was 13, because I already looked 16 at that age. It wasn’t much different for my friends.
The only reason this woman remembers at all is because it was Rolf Harris, and that’s the only reason she spoke too – literally jumped on the bandwagon. And yes, I repeat, attempts at groping, fondling, touching, pinching, grabbing, snatching (and I don’t mean handbags) were quite literally the norm.
If they didn’t try anything physical, then they’d do something verbal. You couldn’t walk down the street without a chorus of ‘Aw gisem’, ‘Aw lajf’, ‘Aw sax’, ‘Kemm int saxy hi ejja mieghi’, ‘Trid tarah?’, ‘Ha nurihulek hi’.
And in those low-traffic days, Ford Escorts Mark I would screech to a halt behind you, sl-o-w down and kerb crawl after you with the driver leaning out of the window in your direction instead of looking at the road and passing obscene remarks in that hissy voice they thought was so appealing. You just crossed the road, changed direction, walked on looking straight ahead or, if you were with friends, you laughed at them and mocked their cat-calls. And who gives a damn now.
When my contemporaries and I remember, we laugh about it – the episode involving a friend who fell asleep while sunbathing on the rocks in Sliema only to open her eyes and see a man standing over her doing you know what is especially, hysterically funny. It was probably momentarily disturbing and disconcerting, but made for a great narrative to have the entire room splitting their sides.
The thing is this: we didn’t feel preyed upon because there was never any sense of danger. These things happened literally in public. Yes, it probably seems odd now, but guess what, the idea of women laying out their husband’s slippers when he gets home from work in the 1950s seems odd to me now, but it’s not like I’m going to suggest that all those women who felt they had to be their husband’s servant should now get all irate and sue.
That was then and this is now. Different times, different attitudes. You can’t make something a crime in retrospect, or even changes people’s views in retrospect. Things have changed now, but you can’t judge even the recent past by the standards of the present. ]
Daphne, what you are referring to are pointers to an uncivilised place but it doesn’t mean that they are acceptable behaviour.
This lady might not be too sensible, but Harris – like many other high profile British personalities – is facing several child abuse accusations from several alleged victims.
[Daphne – Rolf Harris’s other cases are irrelevant. They don’t justify a woman of 62 popping out of the woodwork 44 years later to claim that he groped her at 18. She was an adult on holiday with a man, not a child.]
Nobody ever comes out in public to claim that fifty years ago they were groped or sexually assaulted by the dustman or even the postman for that matter.
Does this mean that dustmen and postmen had sexuality or testosterone level problems then?
This is all a ludicrous sham.
The Rolf Harris case does not stop here. There have allegedly been children involved and his case is part of extensive paedophilia discoveries involving British independent schools, politicians and celebrities.
I was 10 years old in 1970 and I had the pleasure to spend time with Rolf Harris for weeks – I even slept for days at his house in London. He was always very nice to me and never ever did anything wrong to me. I am really sorry for him to hear such bad news.
Spot on, Daph. I almost feel nostalgic about those days, and remember sharing anecdotes with friends and having a good giggle. However it’s no use trying to explain to boring, politically correct types though – they’ll never understand.
And yes, we used to deal with these situations ourselves, without much fuss. It was part of growing up in a much safer world – funnily enough.
Nowadays one has to be a gay man of 20 to be groped.
My thoughts exactly – when I heard the accusations I thought, ‘whats all this fuss’.
I’m a woman in my early 40s and during my student-worker days at Telemalta there was this one guy who, whenever he came to have a chat with me at my desk, used to rub his crotch against the corner. I always thought it was hilarious – rubbing down a boner.
And every bus ride had some sort of pervert or other on it. Times have changed since then (thank God) but it’s all about an experience that makes you stronger and you move on.
He must have tied his kangaroo down by now and is playing his didjeridu good old Rolf.
Read the following statement:
Speaking outside the court, DCI Mick Orchard of the Metropolitan Police Service said: “[Harris] committed many offences in plain sight of people as he thought his celebrity status placed him above the law.”
“I want to thank the women who came forward for their bravery, I hope today’s guilty verdict will give them closure and help them to begin to move on with their lives.”
Compare the opinion piece above and its comments to the following:
“Today’s case and verdict once again shows that we will always listen to, and investigate allegations regardless of the time frame or those involved.”
Jenny Hopkins, of the Crown Prosecution Service, praised Harris’s victims for coming forward. “The victims in the this case have suffered in silence for many years … I hope today’s verdict provides other victims with the courage and confidence to come forward no matter who is alleged to have carried out the abuse and when,” she said.
…and when you’ve compared the two, think about what message you would like to give the children and adults around you…
The opinion piece written by Daphne is unfortunately a very narrow-minded, ill-informed piece which sends a very blurred message to young people who may already find the subject of sexual boundaries confusing.
Regardless of age, a person does not need any justification to speak out to the police about an incident which may or may not be relevant in a major case against someone suspected of committing a crime.
Speaking to the police about an incident does NOT mean the person has “squawked”, and reporting does NOT have “shades of the schoolyard”. Reporting is one way of sending a clear message to anyone who thinks they are above the law that they are not.
If a child in Malta is groomed and later abused by an adult figure of authority or status, and if the alleged abuser is brought to trial for their actions, the citizens who care about that child and every other child have a responsibility to approach the police about any incident that may shed light on the abuser’s character. It is then up to the law to decide which information is relevant and which is not. The same applies if a case is brought to trial about suspected sexual assault on an adult.
But if you send a message to society that those who report these incidents “need to get a grip”, then you are condemning more and more people to a life of silence and ongoing abuse in a society that has no faith in its legal system to convict these abusers.
[Daphne – I am not talking about children here, but about grown women making a fuss because some man (who happens to be VERY famous) put a hand on their bottom or between their legs 40 years ago when they were already grown up.]
Daphne, my sentiments exactly.
Every woman has been groped at some time in her life starting from a young age and if the offenders were charged there would be no room left for any other prisoners.
What is wrong with these women to act as though their lives are over because they had a breast or bottom squeezed.
Sexual abuse is not just about a squeeze here or there. Yes, being groped is degrading, revolting and disgusting but for heaven’s sake, to carry on with the agony aunt stuff is sickening.
Watch them put their hands out for compensation. Putting an old man in gaol for groping is beyond me. Let’s worry about the real sexual predators. You only have to look at the child prostitutes in the world to see that. Just check out Brazil.