Fear of Flying
When I first heard about the new TSA security policies I thought it was a joke. This can’t be true, I thought, because despite its faults, there is no way the American government could be stupid and cruel enough to approve full body X-ray machines in airports and force travelers who want to opt out of being scanned to endure an “enhanced” pat down that basically amounts to sexual assault. But I was wrong. Apparently my American government is that stupid and is that cruel.
Well, that didn’t work. I’m more educated about the policy but still just as scared and pissed off.
Then I read an opinion piece by Naomi Wolf that opened my eyes to an even bigger concern – the effect this could have on children:
Years of sensitive educational outreach have finally made it the norm for American children to understand that their bodies are their own, that adults should not touch them intimately or in ways that make them uncomfortable, and that they can expect to be protected from such violation. By desensitizing children to sexually inappropriate touching, the pat-downs are destroying those hard-won gains.
It gets worse. TSA officials have been advised to tell small children that the sexual pat-downs are a game. To anyone who has ever counseled survivors of childhood sexual abuse, this should set off alarm bells: the most common ploy of sexual predators is to portray the abuse as a “game.” As Ken Wooden of the organization Child Lures Prevention puts it, the TSA’s “incredibly misinformed and misguided” advice “is completely contrary to what we in the sexual-abuse prevention field have been trying to accomplish for the past 30 years.”
Some believe the government will amend the new policies due to the uproar, but I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, I guess I’ll have to stick to road trips.
I thought I was the only person outraged by this crap! Our government really is creating a problem. It’s a H-U-G-E problem that I have no choice but to be violated if I choose to fly, but it’s an even larger problem that our government continues to ignore the privacy of the average citizen over the pursuit of a ‘greater cause’.
Chantay