When visiting a swimming pool makes you a pevert
Our local paper carries the story of a man aquitted of flashing at a pair of teenage girls at the local leisure pool. The man was accused of following the 14 year olds into the showers after using the pool, before dropping his shorts to reveal his erect penis.
Now if that had happened to me, or I hope my daughter, I would have gone straight to the pool management to tell them what had happened. But instead the girls visited the McDonalds restaurant opposite the pool and said nothing until their aunt came to collect them after they had eaten.
Now maybe I’m being unreasonable expecting the girls to have reported the incident immediately. I’m pretty sure that despite my appetitie, I could not have sunk my teeth into a Big Mac with the previous image in my mind! However the police had no such problems making an assumption which led to an innocent man being dragged into court and accused of being a pervert. One of the police officers involved in the prosecution had suggested to the court that a mature man who was not a good swimmer could only have been at the leisure park to get up to no good.
The pool is question is purely a leisure pool. There is nowhere to swim more than a few strokes, but there are plenty of flumes, rapids and other water park facilities. The accused man’s family were away on holiday and it was a matter of fact that he did not have sufficient holiday accrued to spend the fortnight with them. The court was told the defendant had never been in trouble before and the baker was a ‘gentleman’, who was well liked by the all female staff at the Co-op where he works as a baker. He had decided to try out the facilities after a hot shift baking last summer.
Perhaps we’re all as guilty as each other in this. Can enjoying a pool really make people assume that you are a pervert? What a sad level we have sunk to when a well-respected family man, who seems to have led a blameless life in a low-paid job, can be treated in this way.
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- Vince makes sense – again!
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Comments
02 July 2009, 10:47 am
The girls in question seem to have found it funny rather than serious. No doubt they have received a modern sex education, so know all about these things. If what they say is correct, they goaded the poor man into doing what he certainly should not have done. This was, if what they said was correct, after he unwisely pursued looking at them.
A male is going to find it pleasant to look at the female form in a swimming pool even if he did not go there expressly for that purpose. It would be advisable, however, for any man whose gaze lingered too long to very quickly cast his mind to other things rather than pursue it, of course. Should nature take its course and that reaction which is partly involuntary happen, he ought in particular to remove himself.
If this man was easily identifiable and the girls did not completely make up this story, it seems to me the law has taken it correct course. He behaved foolishly, but it can’t be proved that was his original intention all along. His foolish pursuit of looking at the girls became worse when they behaved in an inappropriate way to it. So, lessons learnt all round I hope, but no-one put away as “guilty”.