Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Another False Claim of Hate Crime

I can't claim to even being slightly surprised.  From March 5, 2014 Yahoo News:
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Police, civil rights activists and school district officials in the San Francisco suburb of Hercules responded aggressively when a transgender teenager showed up at his high school health center saying he had just been beaten and sexually assaulted in a school bathroom.
But on Tuesday afternoon, the 15-year-old student who alleged the attack recanted, acknowledging during a follow-up interview with a detective that he had fabricated the whole tale, Hercules police said.
This has been such a boringly repetitive pattern that I no longer take seriously any claims of LGBTIQQXYZXDQ (do I have all the currently correct letters there?) individuals about hate crimes.  Doubtless they happen, but there are so many that turn out to be completely made up.  You could almost get the impression that someone just wants attention.

UPDATE: A little deeper into the article:
Mario Trujillo, spokesman for the West Contra Costa Unified School District, said school officials are less concerned with punishing the student than making sure he gets the support he needs.
Since November, Hercules High has been dealing with the fallout from an on-campus fight involving another transgender student and three girls that was captured in a cellphone video. Jewlyes Gutierrez, a biological male who identifies as female, was charged with misdemeanor assault and said she had repeatedly complained about being harassed at school before she fought back.
I don't tend to think of girls as violent attackers.  Was this transgendered student insisting on using the girls restroom?  Was that the origin of the conflict?

3 comments:

  1. I don't tend to think of girls as violent attackers.

    Historically, perhaps, but I'd caution against assuming the norms from your childhood remain constant today. The most extreme types of violent attackers select for a very specific subset of characteristics, but modern culture is raising quite a fair share of young born-female psychopaths. In this particular case there's cell phone video of a low-scale scuffle with pulled hair happening well-away from any obvious restrooms, so it's probably more just idiots being idiots. That part's mostly noteworthy because the transgender kid got charged with battery by the local DA.

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  2. It is getting to the point that the pronouns make these news stories self parodies.

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  3. It's not just sex-related hate crimes. I assume that any "hate crime" which gets reported as such in the media is a hoax anymore.

    So far the only recent one where the wheels haven't fallen completely off is the one about the kid in Oakland who was set on fire on a bus. It appears the crime actually happened, but that the motivation wasn't actually about the victim's sexuality.

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