Young Italians are livid on social media after a judge let a school caretaker walk away without a punishment since the groping incident involving a teenager was short-lived.
The victim in the case was a 17-year-old student at a Rome high school. She was walking up the stairs to go to class with a friend when she felt her jeans being pulled down. She realized a hand was yanking at her underwear and rubbing her bum.
“Love, you know I was joking,” the man teased as she tilted her head towards him.
Following the sexual harassment, the student reported Antonio Avola, the 66-year-old caretaker, to police. He confessed to groping the student without consent but shrugged off his actions as a joke.
A public prosecutor requested a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence, however, the caretaker was excused from the sexual assault charges. Based on the judges ruling, the event at school “does not constitute a crime” since it lasted less than ten seconds.
After that case verdict, “palpata breve,” known as a brief groping, became a trending topic on Instagram and TikTok in Italy. People were using the #10secondi hashtag to bring awareness to unfair judgment.
Italians have shared clips of themselves staring at the camera and touching their intimate parts for ten seconds. Time is a relative thing and ten seconds can feel long which is the point the videos were trying to drive home. Touching without consent can make a person feel uneasy and violated.
An influencer, Francesco Cicconetti, wrote on TikTok: “Who decides that 10 seconds is not a long time? Who times the seconds, while you’re being harassed? Men don’t have the right to touch women’s bodies, not even for a second — let alone 5 or 10.”
He continued to explain that the judge’s decision to let the caretaker go displays how normalized sexual harassment is in Italy.
Based on the judge’s statement, the caretaker did not linger with the touch and it only lasted for a few seconds, where he engaged in an “awkward manoeuvre without lust.”
“The judges ruled that he was joking? Well, it was no joke to me,” the student said. “The caretaker came up from behind without saying anything. He put his hands down my trousers and inside my underwear.
“He groped my bottom. Then, he pulled me up — hurting my private parts. For me, this is not a joke. This is not how an old man should ‘joke’ with a teenager. That handful of seconds was more than enough for the caretaker to make me feel his hands on me.”
The young lady feels led down by the justice system which let the man go without the appropriate punishment. It only perpetuates the problem for other women who may be scared and uncomfortable in a public setting that should be safe.
The woman said disheartened: “I’m starting to think I was wrong to trust the institutions. This is not justice.”