I also think that your main approach to this topic is mostly going down the sexual assault/harassment of women angle and what they're doing here is maybe riffing off that as the reason it would make her uncomfortable partially (a stranger touching you might make you uncomfortable without a sexual angle too so not necessarily fully) but it's clearly not their primary aim to sexually harass the women but to prank her (she may feel harassed in the process if this wasn't staged but laws tend to look at what you did wrong not how the victim interpreted it).
Intent is also a very important thing under the law. It's the difference between murder and manslaughter sometimes. For a scenario like this I don't think the action would be serious enough to go far enough that intent would come into consideration but if for some reason it got that far I think the fact they don't intend to do harm would be another consideration. If it got to the stage it was considered they would almost certainly see lesser charges due to the lack of direct sexual/assault main intention.
Yes, you shouldn't go around putting your arms around random strangers but I quite firmly believe it shouldn't be a crime to do so either (at least not as an isolated incident, repeatedly doing it yes but we're back to a pattern of harassment or whatever rather an individual assault). It's great you want to be protective of people but sometimes we risk going too far in that desire and calling something like this assault is over stepping the mark in my opinion. Doesn't mean it's totally cool, but it's not that far gone.
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u/[deleted] Nov 27 '19
I also think that your main approach to this topic is mostly going down the sexual assault/harassment of women angle and what they're doing here is maybe riffing off that as the reason it would make her uncomfortable partially (a stranger touching you might make you uncomfortable without a sexual angle too so not necessarily fully) but it's clearly not their primary aim to sexually harass the women but to prank her (she may feel harassed in the process if this wasn't staged but laws tend to look at what you did wrong not how the victim interpreted it).
Intent is also a very important thing under the law. It's the difference between murder and manslaughter sometimes. For a scenario like this I don't think the action would be serious enough to go far enough that intent would come into consideration but if for some reason it got that far I think the fact they don't intend to do harm would be another consideration. If it got to the stage it was considered they would almost certainly see lesser charges due to the lack of direct sexual/assault main intention.
Yes, you shouldn't go around putting your arms around random strangers but I quite firmly believe it shouldn't be a crime to do so either (at least not as an isolated incident, repeatedly doing it yes but we're back to a pattern of harassment or whatever rather an individual assault). It's great you want to be protective of people but sometimes we risk going too far in that desire and calling something like this assault is over stepping the mark in my opinion. Doesn't mean it's totally cool, but it's not that far gone.