Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Authority

If you take the political compass test one of the statements is "All authority should be questioned" and you strongly agree, strongly disagree or somewhere in between. I've taken it a couple of times, and each time I strongly agree. If anyone ever asked me why I'd talk about how important it was people use their own critical judgement and have an awareness that their interests, and the interests of those

Now I'll just point them to this case of a McDonald's Manager who imprisoned and strip searched a McDonald's worker because someone at the end of a phone line, who claimed to be a cop, told her to. The Manager then left her fiancee in charge of the worker. The worker proceeded to assault and rape the worker. Ampersand has a reasonably good summary for people who can't handle reading the whole thing.

The segment was about an incident that occurred at a McDonalds in KY. A caller phoned the shift manager, telling her that he was a police officer who needed her help in conducting an investigation of a teen employee, then on-duty, believed to have stolen a purse from a customer. The caller then made a series of instructions over about a three hour period, that led to the girl being strip searched, spanked, and humiliated. Finally, the supervisor is asked to bring her fiancé in to watch the girl, while the supervisor returns to work at the counter. The "police officer" then instructs the fiancé to have a girl perform a sex act on him, which he complies with. The girl is crying throughout this ordeal. At no point does anyone question the authenticity of the call, except for one teen worker who leaves in disgust, saying it's all BS. The security camera in the office, captured the entire assault.
While I believe that fiancee would have raped in any other situation where he was given the opportunity it's entirely possible that the manager was just following orders. If we're taught 'because I said so', then we stop asking 'why', and we must always ask why.

3 comments:

  1. dear Lord, that is horrendous.

    bloody good example Maia.

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  2. i can't believe they were all such sheep! that's just outrageous!! makes you wonder about the long term working environment in that store if no one was prepared to challenge this behaviour, and the only person who had suspicions walked out...

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  3. yes, which is why we ended up there last week at 2am completely stoned pink panda?! ;)

    Span - and that the person who walked out didn't phone the police straightaway! Incredible.

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