We are forgetting the difference between harassment and assault
There is a wide gulf between sexual harassment and sexual assault. One is rude, obnoxious, wrong, pitiful, sad, and stupid. The other is criminal.
And I fear we’re merging the two into one.
After all, we put “TICKLE MONSTER” on the front page of this very paper Thursday, detailing the allegations against Mercer County Board of Social Services Director Jeff Mascoll who is alleged to have poked a senior employee in the stomach and commented that he “just wanted to tickle her belly button.”
Honestly? There’s no way this is front page news a year ago. Heck, it might not have even made the paper. Yet here we are, putting this guy on the front page for an alleged poke. A tickle, even.
Now sure, should a boss be poking (or tickling) anyone’s stomach? The answer here is a hard “no.” Generally speaking, no one should be poking anyone in the stomach, ever, unless ground rules and safe words are first hashed out.
But does this bit of harassment — please do not call this an “assault” — rise to the level of … well, much of anything? If it’s 100 percent accurate, what do we do with Mascoll? In this environment, lawsuits and firings aren’t out of the question. But really: Is that reasonable? Isn’t there a “punishment fits the crime” kind of thing we should be worried about?
*****
On Thursday, Moira Donegan wrote a piece for TheCut.com, detailing how she was the anonymous woman who started the “Shi*ty Media Men” list in October. It was a crowdsourced Google doc that detailed, well, shi*ty media men. She describes it in the first sentence as “a range of rumors and allegations of sexual misconduct, much of it violent, by men in magazines and publishing.”
Later in the piece, she describes the list as as “a place for women to share their stories of harassment and assault.” Yeah, about that ...
From Merriam-Webster: Harassment: to annoy persistently; to create an unpleasant or hostile situation for especially by uninvited and unwelcome verbal or physical conduct … Assault: a violent physical or verbal attack.
One is annoying and unwelcome. One is violent.
They don’t belong in the same sentence.
We’re losing sight of this.
*****
While Mascoll’s story was being written, Catherine Deneuve and 100 other French women penned a letter that appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde. It was a rebuke of the #MeToo movement. The first sentence pretty much sums up the harassment/assault divide: “Rape is a crime. But trying to pick up someone, however persistently or clumsily, is not.”
Later in the letter: “Today we are educated enough to understand that sexual impulses are, by nature, offensive and primitive — but we are also able to tell the difference between an awkward attempt to pick someone up and what constitutes a sexual assault.”
Poke poke tickle tickle.
***** Bottom line: There is no place in society for sexual assault. And we all need to do better in drawing the lines of what is true harassment.
But to lump it all together as one? It’s a grave error. Not only does it put harassers in the same light as the assaulters, but it also cheapens the pain of women (and men) who were legitimately raped, assaulted or otherwise forced into sexual activity they wanted no part of.
Seriously: Imagine what a rape victim must think when reading about an office tickle.