I’m now going to wade in where
angels fear to tread; the ‘letters to the editor’ department may swell as a
result.
It’s all about this Roast Busters
saga. I just can’t get my head around it. For instance what is the meaning of
the phrase “Roast Busters?” A play-upon-words from Ghost Busters, but what is
the tie-up with the activities of the group?
Is there a teenage language out
there that I am blissfully unaware of?
I Googled the lyrics of Lorde’s universal
hit Royals and have concluded that the
young do now speak in a dialect quite different from the rest of us.
But the Roast Busters?
First off it seems the dastardly
deeds took place a couple of years ago. Back then the young men in question
would have been fifteen; the girls we are told were thirteen. We were informed recently
that Family Planning want condoms to be supplied to girls as young as thirteen
due to the alarming number of teenage pregnancies that are occurring.
The same press release said that
14 year-olds are being taught how to put condoms on plastic penis’s as part of
the secondary school curriculum.
I’m blushing as I am writing
this.
So lovemaking at that level is commonplace,
but the Roast Busters were ensuring success by first getting their young victims
inebriated. That trick has been going on since time immemorial, but we are reliably
told that in this case the sex was taking place without the consent of the young
women.
In America, having sex with an
underage girl is called statutory rape. In this country it has the less
dramatic title of unlawful carnal knowledge. The age of consent in New Zealand
is sixteen, but it varies worldwide. I note that in Spain it is thirteen, in Brazil
it is fourteen, and in France fifteen.
I remember as teenagers we used
to regularly buy the Truth newspaper
which came out weekly on a Tuesday. Apart from the page three girls we would
pour over the salacious reports of the court hearings which inevitably featured
a number of young men being charged with having “unlawful carnal knowledge.”
I haven’t seen a report like that
for years.
If there are vast numbers of
thirteen-year-old girls getting pregnant then there must be an identical number
of young men committing this crime, yet getting off scot free.
I asked a member of the judiciary
some time ago why this once-regularly-reported criminal act now seemed to have disappeared
of the court lists and he told me that it was not really considered a crime
these days, particularly if the perpetrator was of a similar age as the
defendant.
And it’s no good me trying to
defend the Roast Busters. A young lady named Amy, who said she was a Roast
Buster victim, rang Radio Live where Willie
Jackson and John Tamihere dared to ask her what was she wearing and was she
sure she hadn’t consented. They both subsequently lost their jobs. Their first
question was totally unacceptable, but isn’t it entirely possible that a young girl
who has consumed too much alcohol may be incapable of saying no?
Now there is no doubt that being
raped is an indescribably traumatic event for a woman. For most it is a life
sentence of ongoing anguish. And yet the police person who interviewed the
three complainants - and remember she was a female - found there was not enough
evidence to bring the perpetrators in for questioning.
To some extent the stupid young
men are a product of the times. They will have no doubt watched pornography
that makes women appear like sex objects and even though the girls were under
age, there was virtually no risk of them being charged.
And so we reap what we sow. Young
people now have easy access to alcohol with the world’s most liberal drinking
laws, and are part of a society that all but encourages sex amongst school age
children and then makes no effort to charge anyone who breaks the age-of-consent
laws.
If the Roast Busters hadn’t
boasted on Facebook about their disgraceful behaviour, they’d still be
laughing.
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