Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Good grief, I'm actually offended

by my stupid CALI lesson on Assault.

Man leans over woman lying in her bed and makes indecent proposals.

Assault, or not?

Assault is the deliberate creation of an apprehension of a harmful touching. (If the harmful touching occurs, that's battery. The intent can be to create apprehension of touch, or the actual touch.)

Here's an excerpt of why my 'no' or 'maybe' answers were wrong:

"In any event, the man leaned over the bed: that's an overt act. Also, I think the only reasonable assumption to make on these facts is the man is close enough to touch the woman, so this places her in apprehension of imminent offensive body contact."

The only point that might make it possible to infer apprehension of harmful (unwanted) physical contact is the fact that the woman in this scenario is in her bed. There's no context of any kind, and I'm sorry, as an educated Western feminist, "indecent" to me is not a code word translating to "unwanted".

A man leans over my bed and whispers something "naughty" in my ear? And that's assault? Did you read the actual explanation here? "[T]he man is close enough to touch the woman, so this places her in apprehension of imminent offensive body contact." You realize I can infer from that statement that any time a man gets close enough to touch a woman, that's assault.

Are you kidding me?

Right, and all sex is rape.

Let's have some context here, people, for Pete's sake. How about "A strange man"? Then I might say: bed, 'indecent', leaning, okay, that could be assault.

No comments: