The Real Lolita
hazlitt.net
hazlitt.net
The book is about ugliness and mediocrity of so called modern society with its rigid set of dogmas and set in stone prejudices. It is about suffering. About inability in principle to catch that fleeting beauty, a spark of perfection. The moment you approach it you have already ruined it. Observer ruins the observation, or rather realizes the painful dissonance between his assumptions and actuality, but continued his futile attempts to catch it, because everything else is not worth of even a second look.
Dear gentlewomen of the jury. Do not attempt to judge things you probably never even understood.
On September 4, 1942, Frank La Salle was indicted in Camden County Criminal Court for the statutory rape of five girls between the ages of 12 and 14. He wasn’t arrested until February 2, 1943, though, and pleaded not guilty to the charges in court the following week. A little over a month later, on March 22, La Salle changed his plea to “non vult,” or no contest, and received a sentence of two and a half to five years in Trenton State Prison. Fourteen months later, on June 18, 1944, La Salle was paroled.
14 months in prison for the statutory rape of 5 12-14 year old girls by a 45-year old man. It's truly unbelievable how such an offence could be treated so lightly at the time.
This douche (plus his dad, and the judge)
Rapists tend to be highly preferential in their modus, but across typologies the victim profiles are insanely varied... except that the rapist feels they can dominate/control them.
"But is Britain unusual in maintaining the age of consent at 16, and how does we compare to the rest of the world?
In Europe, countries who have the age of consent set at 16 include Cyprus, Finland, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland.
Spain did have one of the lowest ages of consent on the continent at just 13, but recently agreed to raise this to 16.
For Austria, Germany, Portugal and Italy it is 14, and in France, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and Greece it is 15.
In China, the age of consent is 14, in Iraq it is 18, while in Japan it is five years lower at 13.
The likes of Brazil, Peru, Paraguay, Ecuador and Colombia all have it set at 14.
In Angola, the age of consent is just 12."
Interestingly, what people rated of their younger self was actually much closer to their current self than the actual ratings conducted by their younger self.
Myself, I think I probably had a lot more trepidation about say, Gay Marriage back in the 90s than I do today. But I only believe that because I'm aware my current self might be creating bias to my perspective of what actually happened.
https://www.cga.ct.gov/2003/olrdata/jud/rpt/2003-r-0376.htm
Statutory rape can be both very easy and very difficult to prove. DNA/blood tests are powerful, but limited by time. Unless the guy was caught in the act and evidence collected relatively quickly, prosecution will rely on the girl's testimony. That's a tricky case. Given that prosecutors are loath to put such girls on the stand, it will plead out at a much reduced sentence. What is different today is the sex offender registry.
This girl was certainly very young, younger than the norm, but girls of 13-14 marrying older men happened more often in the 50s than we like to admit. The lines between 'running off' and 'abduction' aren't clear today and certainly were not clear then. States like New Mexico still allow marriages at such ages in cases of pregnancy ... a shocking twist in the law. Marilyn Monroe famously married at 15 in 1944. That wasn't considered odd. Had this man been single and convinced the girl to go through with a marriage ceremony prior to her escape, or had they not crossed state lines, the entire case might have never have risen to any public attention. The girl would have been returned, the marriage annulled, and the entire affair quieted.
Note how she was rescued. Her rescuer did not go immediately to the police but instead contrived a scheme to move the pair out of their local support network. The rescuer wasn't taken aback in horror by the situation. She recognized what was happening and knew to take certain steps. Her getting them to cross state lines is either lucky coincidence or legal genius as she did not know of the pair's travel history. She was not surprised to the point of immediately marching down to the police station. She was aware of the difficulties because this was not something totally new in her experience.
Where I live, the state is doing a lot to fight sexual trafficking (I'd put this in the same category). http://humantrafficking.ohio.gov
I still think the allegory holds true and might be why Lolita finally worked with a U.S. setting. In any case can you really imagine Humbert Humbert as an erudite American? So much would be lost.
"the children have not been victims of the slightest violence, but have to the contrary testified before the examining magistrates that they consented"
https://web.archive.org/web/20050404190912/http://www.decadi...