Terry Prone: Sexual assault of women is still happening and still being defended

Now, anyone in any major city who has ever had to talk to a camera knows the likelihood of somebody giving them rabbit’s ears behind their head or stepping into and spoiling the shot to send love to their mother. That’s why the infamous sequence of Mike Murphy pretending to be a gormless tourist who constantly invades Gay Byrne’s report to camera fooled the maestro for so long: he was used to that kind of thing happening.

The same may be true of Isa Balado, whose attempt to keep going after the bloke abandoned the innocence invariably attributed to bystanders was brave and admirable.

This one clip, however, all 57 seconds of it, is rich in detail, rich in recorded behaviours which may provide answers to the inevitable questions about how this kind of thing could continue to happen — and in public, at that — after MeToo and the quantum leap the world was assumed to have made in respecting the bodies of women.

Leaving aside the not-so-innocent bystander for a moment, let’s look at the woman at the centre of a triangular encounter between him, her, and the anchor back in the studio.

Her first reaction is a marvellous mix of conciliation and professionalism. She favours him with a smile, gently tries to move him away, and concentrates fiercely on continuing her PTC (that’s internal jargon for Piece to Camera.) This presents the two men involved with choices. The bystander could have walked away and quit bothering the reporter. As later footage showed, he stayed put, albeit just off camera, post bottom-pat. The anchor could have gone along with the reporter’s clear intent and concentrated on the original story. That would have been professional. It might also have been interpreted as collusion, indeed as acceptance of what had happened. That would seem to be behind the decision he made to disbelievingly seek confirmation of what he and the viewers had just seen. He saw a live story and went with it, instructing the reporter to bring the bystander back into shot, which, if you think about it, argues a certain insight on the presenter’s part into the man’s behaviour: after seeing him for just a few seconds, he figured the guy would stay observing the consequences of his action, and that’s precisely what the guy did.

Still within one minute, the recording shows Balado obediently challenging the man on camera, her hand flattened against her upper chest in what may be self-abnegation or self-protection, or both. He denies it.

That denial argues an amazing lack of connection with real life. He knows this is TV. He knows it’s LIVE TV. Ergo the camera has recorded the truth. Yet he says it didn’t happen. And as if that wasn’t odd enough, he then invades Balado’s space all over again by “caressing” her hair. He isn’t violent in so doing. He doesn’t need to be. He is bigger than she is, one of her hands is clutching a microphone and her attention is visibly split between him and the anchor. What he does to her hair is what people who believe they like children do to kids they’re bigger than, more powerful than. It has nothing to do with affection and everything to do with contempt.

And yet. And yet. A shocking aspect of the entire event is that Ms Balado apologises to the studio for what’s happened.

“No, you have nothing to feel sorry for,” says the guy back at the main desk. “It makes me so mad.”

The first statement is spot on. The second, not so much. He doesn’t say it makes him mad that a colleague has been publicly mocked, self-evidently for being a woman.

 So she’s apologising — as women do every day — for a situation she neither caused nor provoked, and he’s mad for no specific reason.

 Meanwhile, the guy who created the situation has gone off to molest other women as he walks the city.

Inevitably, the lawyers defending Bottom-Patting Bloke will point to the gentleness of the two physical contacts, suggesting that the feather-light caresses could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be interpreted as assault. Wasn’t it obvious from Balado’s smile that she didn’t mind it, possibly even liked it up to the point where the anchorman intervened? Her question to Bottom-Patting Bloke was just inquisitive — she asked him why he felt the need to touch her — rather than offended. He did not hurt or coerce or restrain her in any way.

Older Irish female broadcasters will see as familiar this line of defence. That’s because, live on air, they would have been discommoded by a charming male colleague who entered their studio, smiled at them, and then very quietly removed his clothing below the waist. Once he had done this, he would sit down opposite the presenter for fifteen minutes, before dressing again and departing with a friendly wave. When some (and it’s worth stressing that it was never more than a minority of the women thus molested) of the female broadcasters complained to management about this, they were met with either astonishment tinged with disbelief, or a shrugging suggestion that it probably wouldn’t happen again and was it really worth making a fuss about? He hadn’t actually assaulted them or anything, had he?

Many decades later, despite all the consciousness-raising in the interim, as shown live on Spanish TV, it’s still happening and still being defended.