A New York mom has been arrested and charged with child endangerment for hiring strippers to perform at her 16-year-old son’s party.
33-year-old Judy Viger of Gansevoort, New York, has been arrested and charged with 5 counts of “endangering the welfare of a child,” according to the Saratoga County District Attorney’s Office. The charges stem from a birthday party Viger threw for her 16-year-old son early last November, at a local bowling alley what involved two strippers that were allegedly hired by Viger for entertainment. district Attorney James Murphy said in a statement that “the parents of five teens who attended the party reported the presence of strippers to police,” after discovering photos of the party on Facebook. CNN reports that one of the photos shows Viger herself receiving a lap dance, and another which shows “a young male with another nearly nude dancer on top of him with her legs around his head.”
Murphy said, “As difficult as it may be for us to have to weigh in on these kinds of cases, certainly exposing the unsuspecting children to this sort of ‘entertainment’ goes beyond the pale when it comes to what is appropriate for 14, 15 and 16 year old child.” And difficult it is, considering the many different facets of a case such as this. Obviously the other parents were unaware of Viger’s plans for the party, and more than likely would not have allowed their children to attend if they had known. But in the comments section on the CNN report there are many who are lauding Viger as the “coolest mom ever.” What do you think?
When, if ever, is it appropriate for a parent to expose their teenage son to an overtly sexual situation such as this?
Do you think this qualifies as child endangerment? Why or why not?
How would you, as a parent, handle a situation such as this if your underage teenager had attended a party that was going to have strippers without your prior knowledge?
Photo: South Glens Falls Police Department
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Am I just a jaded sexist jerk because I think this is a mountain made out of a molehill?
Such an uncultured approach by both the mother and the police. Such a lack of imagination.
Have the party at a gallery, and refer to the “strippers” as “interactive performance artists.” They are not officially sex workers, but are artists exhibiting their latest work, work which challenges the traditional distinction between subject and object through the use of human movement, inspired in part by a rich tradition of artistic portrayals of the human body. Watch as highly talented creative people challenge the bourgeois boundaries between viewer and participant. All culturally uplifting and with great expansion of the intellect. The community would be downright tumescent with the excitement of such creativity in their midst.
Then you might be able to get away with it, and you’d get po-mo cred. You could make it into a free speech case. These are options we yuppies in the big city have that people in small towns often don’t. Anywhere but a bowling alley, for heaven’s sake.
Apropos of nothing, but I didn’t see in the story if the dancers were also charged with a crime. If the mother committed a crime by hiring them, then they should be charged as well. Just in the spirit of fairness, if what she did really was an unpardonable offense, then they are accessories. They are not just sex workers, if they are paid to commit what turns out to be a crime. Unless the community is *selectively* sex positive….
Oh, Wellokaythen, surely you know the default assumptions about most sex workers. Most members of the community would assume that these performers were grievously abused as children, that do this work to feed their raging drug addictions, that they have abusive, parasitic sexual partners who make them do this kind of work, and that their clients rape and assault them as a matter of course. And as you can see from the tenor of the comments, most people are not view the minor male person as the true “victim” of “endangerment.” Rather, the sex workers in this incident were the “victims” of the minor male person’s sense of sexual entitlement. The minor male person was only in danger of becoming a sexual predator, that is if he isn’t a predator already.
And probably a lot of “sex positive” people hold a similar opinion. For some, “sex positive” does not apply if it conforms to heteronormativity and partriarchy and such. So regular run of the mill striptease may not always have “sex positive” credibility. To be definitely “sex positive,” the nude person would probably have to doing some kind of unpleasant postmodern performance artist spoken word poetry denouncing the hierarchies of the day.
If they were at a BOWLING ALLEY, and the strippers weren’t NAKED, (because they’re in a BOWLING ALLEY), then there’s NOTHING WRONG with any of it.
Perhaps the strippers were being degraded. I can’t help but notice the passive construction of this previous sentence. To be precise, if they were being degraded they were degrading themselves. (I assume they had free will in booking the gig.) If they were involved in a crime against women, in part they did it to themselves. Funny how it’s “society” degrading women when a woman makes a contract with other women, but it’s men degrading women when a man books them.
To be blunt, not all things that are immoral should be illegal. Something should not be made illegal and prosecuted with jail time just because it is degrading in any way. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I see a very valid reason to persecute people for making sexual advances on people below the age of consent. For me the issue is that her son could not fully consent because he was under the age of consent. It doesn’t matter if a person enjoyed it or asked for it if that person is below the age of consent. Whether it’s degrading to the person who chooses to do it is a separate question, and not something that the police have to be involved with in every case.
Maybe I’m just a libertine. I don’t think there should be laws enforcing a particular sexual morality, beyond protecting people’s rights or beyond ensuring that acts are consensual. I don’t think there should be laws enforcing moral virtue. There shouldn’t be laws protecting the social standing of a particular gender in someone else’s eyes.