Why did crowds tolerate sex assaults?
We’ve seen videotapes of indiscriminate beatings, and debated whether race played a role in Seattle’s Mardi Gras violence. But why did it take nearly two weeks to start talking about what happened to women in Pioneer Square that night? Picture this ugliness. Two dozen young men are crowded around a woman who has been pushed flat on a slab. Five men are fondling her breasts. Four others are at her crotch. Two more are pulling off her pants. Another grips her right elbow. Most of the men are smiling. The woman appears dazed. Her left arm flails about. The woman, shown in a series of images captured by a Seattle Post-Intelligencer photographer on Fat Tuesday, fights to get up. Several men pin her down. At one point, there are 19 hands — white, black, Asian, Hispanic — on her body. The P-I can’t publish those photographs without violating the privacy of the woman, who apparently was able to slide off the slab and escape. Or how about this one: A woman on a friend’s shoulders is trying to
