Young Italians object to the acquittal of a school caretaker who admitted groping a teenage student.
Many young people in Italy are expressing outrage on social media, after a judge cleared a school caretaker of groping a teenager, because it did not last long enough. The case involves a 17-year-old student at a Rome high school.
That is such an idiotic take. Truly unbelievable a court would actually say something like this and acquit somebody. The judge should be open to standing in the public square and letting anybody grope him, as long as it is under 10 seconds.
If someone beats the fuck out of the abuser’s head with a baseball bat for 9 seconds, then tells the same judge that it was a joke, would they be acquitted?
The idea of putting a time limit on what constitutes a grope is dumb to begin with. But, if somehow someone decided that was the right approach, 10s is absurdly long.
There are situations where there might be some disagreement over whether something is a grope vs. an accidental touch. Say squeezing past someone at a crowded bar, or on a bus/train at rush hour. But, that contact is on the order of 1s or less. If there were going to be a time limit for groping, a more reasonable idea might be that if it's longer than 1 second, the chances of it being an accidental touch are much lower. If it's under a second, then maybe the person being accused has grounds to say that it was just an accidental touch.
This is disgusting and I hope that something is done to rectify this quickly, before things get out of hand in Italy. They've basically handed every creep in the country a free pass, as long as it's a done quickly.