Manchester Teen Faces Sex Offender Status for Touching 17-Year-Old on the Arm, Waist
"Touching someone's arm to get their attention, I would have thought was normal."
LENORE SKENAZY | 10.11.2019 12:09 PM
Harassment
(Tinnakorn Jorruang / Dreamstime)
Last fall, in Manchester, England, an awkward 19-year-old male student touched a 17-year-old female classmate's arm on the street during the daytime. He later said he had wanted to make a friend.
This rattled the young woman so much that she went to the police. Now the young man is facing possible jail time and could be placed on the sex offense registry.
"The complainant's evidence was very clear, logical and without embellishment," a magistrate told the young man. "We can think of no motivation for you to touch the victim other than sexual. Had she not taken evasive action the assault was likely to have been even more serious."
At his hearing, student Jamie Griffiths was convicted of two charges of sexual assault, in part because the accuser, now 18, said that she had "no doubt" that had she not moved away from him that first time he touched her arm, he would have gone on to touch her breast.
As she told the court, according to The Manchester Evening News:
"I was just set on getting home and [reviewing] for my mock exams, but as I was coming over the bridge I saw him facing a hedge and I thought it was really weird. He wasn't doing anything. He was just facing the hedge, staring at it.
"As I walked towards him, I was watching him and he suddenly swung round so he was facing me.
"I remember it happening fast. As soon as he moved, I moved, and I said: 'stop' and he touched me on my arm. I sort of jolted out of the way and I went into the road to avoid him and he very quickly walked away…
"I forgot about it for a while because I had my exams. I just thought it was weird behavior."
It does sound like weird behavior. Does it sound like a crime punishable by possible jail time and placement on the sex offense registry?
The accuser reported the incident to the police. In a second incident, the young woman was walking to school when Griffiths walked in front of her and touched her side. "It was quite a while—three to five seconds," she said. "He smirked at me, he didn't stop, he just touched me and walked off and I broke down crying in the street—it was quite traumatic."
The accuser had since read about some other incidents on a local Facebook group (we don't know what those were) and thought that perhaps this encounter was related to them, so she and her mom filed a crime report.
Afterward, she said, "Every time I started working I would cry because I would think of it. I felt very unsafe, even in my own home."
She was applying to college—Oxford University—and was hampered by this stress. Both incidents happened when the accuser and accused were at school together studying for their A Levels, which are more-or-less the English equivalent of the SATs.
As for Griffiths, he had been dealing with something on the side. Unbearably lonely, he told the magistrate, he googled "how to make a friend." It was good to start off with a joke, he read, and decided to give it a try.
"I went to touch her arm to start a conversation and she just walked off," he said. "My intention was to make a friend. All my friends had left. I was lonely. I just wanted to speak to someone," Except, he explained, "The words just didn't come out."
What she read as a smirk he says he intended as a friendly smile. As for the physical contact? "Touching someone's arm to get their attention, I would have thought was normal," he said.
Normal or not, touching someone in public, on their arm or on their waist, does not seem to rise to the level of sexual assault. Just because something is abnormal or upsetting doesn't mean it's a crime.
The magistrates in Manchester disagree. Griffiths now faces a possible maximum sentence of ten years in jail and registry as a sex offender.
It is indeed hard to make friends, or interact with other people at all, if awkward but brief encounters like this are considered criminal behavior.
Tim Pool covered this in a recent video and I'm sourcing the original article. This is personal for me. I don't know if I qualify as borderline high-functioning autistic as I've never received any kind of diagnosis, but I was shy, awkward and didn't know how to talk to girls or avoid accidentally creeping them out. And studying in the UK. That guy could have been me. I could have been arrested, tried and convicted for stalking/sexual harassment, jailed, labeled a sex offender in the same category as pedophiles and rapists, and deported from the UK for life for the "crime" of closely following a classmate I liked a few meters behind but not knowing what to say to her and being overcome by nervousness, acutely aware that I could be screwing up big time, or poking her one too many times on Facebook when the poke feature was still around, or the thought "crime" of wanting to be close to her and have sex with her because I fucking like her, like any straight guy would.
I struggled to understand irony or comprehend unwritten social conventions both online and offline at the time. (Mass inviting everyone to join multiple Facebook groups is considered "spamming" apparently.) How could I have known any better? I didn't realize how uncomfortable she felt until she said so directly, and it's possible she may have blocked me on Facebook. I felt betrayed and heartbroken to the point of tears at not having my feelings for her reciprocated and being rebuffed so harshly and abruptly, being the young, emotionally brittle snowflake I was at the time, but also embarrassed, angry and ashamed at myself for apparently creeping her out, by accident. I was upset at the idea that she may have viewed me as some sort of stalker. I am NOT that kind of guy and the suggestion that I am makes my blood boil.
But I moved on eventually. I forgot all about her and got on with my life. Do I have any regrets? Yes. Could I have done things differently? Absolutely. I just want to forget that any of this ever happened, and it fills me with embarrassment to this very day just thinking about it. Does my inexperience make me a pervert and a potential rapist who should be locked away? Fuck no. And I'm one of the lucky ones. My classmate could have pressed criminal charges. She could have gone to the university administration to get me expelled from college and deported. That guy in the article could have been me. I don't know what vulnerable younger me would have done had he been jailed for stalking and sexual harassment. Suicide would have been on his mind for sure.
And it's not like any of this stuff is new. I remember reading a Metro article on the London subway all those years ago. Some guy was friends with a female work colleague online and they got along just fine, right up until he disclosed his feelings for her by email. His colleague promptly ceased all communication and her brother told him to go kill himself. And kill himself he did. This guy is now buried six feet under and his work colleague faces no repercussions at all for driving her friend to the point of suicide. Instead of giving him the cold shoulder and treating him like some kind of potential rapist, she could have just told him she wasn't interested and carried on as before. I hope her conscience keeps her awake at night for the rest of her life.
I think feminism, specifically Third Wave feminism, definitely has something to do with this. Women are now able to belittle, humiliate and criminalize men on the flimsiest of pretexts with complete and utter impunity because they "feel uncomfortable", regardless of whether their feelings are grounded in reality or not. This is what the mainstream of Western society has embraced in recent years, and things have apparently gotten so much worse ever since I left the UK, and I find it extremely terrifying. I don't blame women for this. I blame feminists for enabling it. We need to fight back and speak out LOUDLY and OPENLY against this kind of hateful, discriminatory, misandrist nonsense, baseless insults of "sExIsT" and "mIsOgYnIsT" aside, before it breeds a whole generation of bitter, disillusioned MGTOWs and incels who do blame and demonize women and are ready to rape and murder their way to infamy.
A girl who breaks down in tears because a guy in her class smiled at her and touched her arm to get her attention is in serious need of psychiatric intervention. Fuck the judge who sided with her and convicted him based on a baseless and speculative claim the accuser made, without evidence or regard for due process. This guy's conviction should be quashed on appeal immediately with monetary compensation and a sincere and heartfelt apology from his classmate and her mother for attempting to ruin his life just for being shy and awkward, and she and her mother should be sued to bankruptcy in retaliation. Being a vulnerable snowflake doesn't give you the right to discriminate and infringe on the rights of others. Imagine the reaction if a white woman had slapped a black man for winking at him.
If I want to move to a Western country, I have to know that shit like this isn't going to happen to me or other guys like me simply for the thought "crime" of liking girls, because what straight guy doesn't want to have sex with a girl he likes? I will NEVER surrender to this feminist bullshit. NEVER.
And with that, I turn the floor over to NSG. Is this guy a victim of misandrist persecution? Has feminism gone too far? Or is he a future rapist like all men apparently are, and should "kIlL aLl mXn, especially creepy autistic perverts" be the norm in society today? Should autistic men be discriminated against for being autistic around women? Have people grown too soft that even the mere thought of something totally harmless gives them literal, recurring nightmares? Do we all need a good spanking to toughen us up? (I don't mean literally, of course. God no.)
