What Mark’s daughter was wearing at the airport. Photo: Mark Fraunfelder
The girl in the picture is 15-years-old.
She is a high school student who was traveling with a group of kids from her school to look at colleges interstate, when she was approached by a security officer.
According to the girl’s father, the security officer was looking at the girl as she and her friends has their identification checked as part of ordinary processes.
He was ‘glaring’ at her, writes father Mark Fraunfelder and ‘mumbling’. The security guard then proceeded to ‘verbally abuse’ the teenager.
Why? Because of the way she was dressed.
This ordinary kid – dressed casually in black leggings, a white singlet top and a baggy, unbuttoned checkered shirt – was instructed by the security guard to ‘cover herself’ because she was ‘only 15’.
Say what?
The girl’s father, Mark Fraunfelder wrote on his blog Boing Boing that:
It doesn’t matter what she was wearing, though, because it’s none of his business to tell girls what they should or should not wear. His creepy thoughts are his own problem, and he shouldn’t use his position of authority as an excuse to humiliate a girl and blame her for his sick attitude.
The idea of shaming women for their appearance or how they dress is nothing new. What a woman wears has been named as a causative factor by the media and the community in sexual assaults, rapes, and even murders.
On his blog post, Fraunfelder quotes former Presidential candidate and US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton saying:
Hillary Clinton
“Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me. But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim.
“They want to control women. They want to control how we dress, they want to control how we act, they even want to control the decisions we make about our own health and bodies.
“Yes, it is hard to believe but even here at home we have to stand up for women’s rights and reject efforts to marginalize any one of us because America needs to set an example for the entire world.”
Fraunfelder is outraged that his teenage daughter was made to feel uncomfortable, embarrassed and ashamed in a public place, just because of how she was dresses.
He is seeking further redress from the airport and is demanding action be taken so no other kid has to put up with this kind of baseless, sexist critique. And fair enough.
