TSA agents become rapists

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Published time: December 08, 2011 20:11
Edited time: December 09, 2011 00:16

The next time you board a flight in the US, be prepared to hand over your luggage to government-hired rapists. Under the FBI’s updated definition of rape, agents with the TSA are as good as guilty of the crime.

A recent meeting of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Criminal Justice Advisory Policy Board led to the FBI changing their definition of rape following a series of complaints from activists who said the earlier wording wasn’t broad enough to cover many sexual assaults. When the Bureau officially adopts the new definition in 2012, rape will be considered “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim."

You know those “enhanced pat-downs” that Transportation Security Administration agents are always offering, often with unfavorable backlashes from airport patrons who feel humiliated, violated and disgusted with what the government thinks is an appropriate way to counter terror? Well, that’s soon going to be rape. And the TSA? Serial rapists.

Until the new definition goes in the books, the official wording of “rape” according to the FBI is simply “Carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” That’s what it’s been dating all the way back to 1929, the last time the definition was changed, despite a recent survey by the Police Executive Research Forum finding that around 80 percent of the hundreds of police departments they surveyed saying that the definition was outdated.

An FBI advisory board voted on the change on Tuesday, and Director Robert S Mueller III will have to give it the go-ahead before it becomes official.

“By taking this simple step and updating the Bureau's definition to include all types of rape, we can make a real difference in the fight against this horrific crime,” Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard wrote Monday in The Hill.

That fight is expected to begin at terminals across America and end up in courtrooms thanks to the change. Airline passengers have long rallied against the TSA for its enhanced pat downs, crying foul and deeming them inappropriate and unnecessary. Now they will be able to legally call it rape. That has been a claim made in the past but the TSA countered allegations with lawsuits.

Blogger Amy Alkon wrote on the Web back in March about an experience she had with a TSA agent behind closed doors, in which she says she cried and screamed while an agent, she says, “raped” her.

“I sobbed even louder as the woman, FOUR TIMES, stuck the side of her gloved hand INTO my vagina, through my pants,” wrote Alkon in her post. “Between my labia. She really got up there. Four times. Back right and left, and front right and left. In my vagina. Between my labia. I was shocked – utterly unprepared for how she got the side of her hand up there.”

In person she yelled at the TSA worker, “You raped me!” Online she called it a “government-sanctioned sexual assault.” When the TSA agent, Thedala Magee, came across the post, she hired an attorney to threaten Alkon with a defamation lawsuit and proposed a settlement of $500,000.

Next time, the TSA is going to need a much better attorney when they blatantly break the law.

Carol Tracy, executive director of the Women’s Law Project, says that striking that definition and adding the new one will “better inform the public about the prevalence of serious sex crimes and will ultimately drive more resources to apprehend sex offenders,” reports the Huffington Post.

“It’s a great victory,” Eleanor Smeal, president of Feminist Majority Foundation, tells the New York Daily News. "This new definition will mean that, at long last, we will begin to see the full scope of this horrific violence, and that understanding will carry through to increased attention and resources for prevention and action.”