Trump: Just a red-blooded bloke?
The headline reads: ‘‘Women ‘never safe’ from groper’’. One might be forgiven for thinking it refers to a certain US presidential candidate.
In fact, our story today (p5) is about David Benjamin Carline, a Hamilton man jailed for sexually assaulting seven different women in public places. Justice Edwin Wylie called him a ‘‘recidivist sexual predator’’ and sentenced him to preventative detention – but now the Court of Appeal has overturned the sentence.
His ex-wife Kelly Biddick warns of her ‘‘heartbreaking’’ fear for other women: ‘‘If he gets out, it’s just going to happen again.’’
The Court of Appeal acknowledged a risk of serious harm in the reoffending – but it did not accept the individual assaults were in themselves serious. Indeed, the Court described them as being at the lower end of the scale. This, despite evidence his victims suffered significant emotional harm; that he attacked one woman twice in 10 days.
This distinction between the gravity with which two different courts viewed Carline’s string of criminal harassment and indecent assaults is a timely reminder of a rift in the wider public.
In New Zealand, we saw a deep divide between those who viewed the Chiefs’ treatment of stripper Scarlette as reprehensible, and those more inclined to blame her. Lads will be lads, they said.
In the United States this week, we see half the nation stand back, aghast, as women come forward to disclose Donald Trump’s unwanted approaches, groping, kissing, boasting of grabbing them. And we have the other half of America convinced it’s a conspiracy to discredit a candidate whom they regard as simply a good, red-blooded bloke.
On the campaign trail in Florida this week, our reporter Ben Stanley meets some staunch Trump supporters (p7). ’’I don’t think he disrespects women,’’ says Paula Pettit. ‘‘Yeah, he said it, but it doesn’t affect the way he would run this country.’’
How can two halves of a nation have so little comprehension of each other?
In part, it’s because we’ve stopped talking to each other. Facebook and other social media allow us to share our news and views faster than ever. But an unfortunate quirk is that, instead of relying on news outlets that at least try to present both sides of a story, it is all too easy for us to only listen to the views of our friends, to read the news shared by those with whom we agree.
Those who would tolerate the Chiefs’ behaviour and those who condemn it are not talking. Trump and Clinton supporters have stopped communicating.
Novelist Ian McEwan said it rather well in Sunday magazine: ‘‘The life of the mind has become tribal and people don’t like to meet anyone who doesn’t have the same view as their own. We see it in the Twittersphere, how furious and enraged people are. That intolerance seems pretty locked in at the moment.’’
It doesn’t bode well when, as communities, we can’t talk intelligently to each other about such seemingly basic questions as how men should behave towards women. It’s only through talking that we can all learn.