On Sunday, September 24, the tabloid "Alo" published on the front page, and on the inside pages, photos and a text stating that an employee of the First Basic Prosecutor's Office had inappropriately photographed herself at her workplace. Someone "smart" in this tabloid thought it was a good idea to publish on the front page that the photos of an unnamed employee of the prosecutor's office had been circulating in prosecutor's and lawyer's Viber groups and emails for days.
What would the Criminal Code say about that? Here's what: "A person who publishes or displays a document, portrait, photograph, film or phonogram of a personal nature without the consent of the person who compiled the document or to whom the document refers, i.e. without the consent of the person depicted in the portrait, photograph or film or whose a voice recorded on a phonogram or without the consent of another person whose consent is required by law and thereby significantly interferes with the personal life of that person, shall be punished by a fine or imprisonment of up to two years, as well as if the act is committed by an official services, shall be punished by imprisonment for up to three years."
Translated into the language of the common world: whoever without the permission of the photographed person shares their pictures without their knowledge or permission, can get two years in prison. If this is done by an official while at work - three years!
Very quickly, the First Basic Public Prosecutor's Office came forward and denied that the pictures were taken on their premises. And really, when you see the background in the photos, that interior is hardly anything other than a private apartment.
What actually happened here?
We all have bottoms, but for some reason, the female bottom is often an object of fascination, and even more often a tool to humiliate and manipulate the woman to whom that bottom belongs. Because there are some people who would rather be in a zoo than in a residential building, who forget that the fact that a woman gave them, only them, her bottom for inspection, only means that they got it for inspection, and not permanent ownership. A woman's bottom is still only hers, to dispose of as only she wants and thinks she should.
Women, on the other hand, have, imagine, a sex life. The point of a sex life is (besides procreation, but that's off topic) to be fun. Women meet men and want to have fun with them, but it is not easy to distinguish between a man and a zoo resident: they look the same, act the same, dress the same. The difference between a man and a member of the zoo is that a man will never abuse the trust of a woman who gave him her bottom for inspection. A man, hurt because he was left, will not need to shine. And he's especially not going to use the limited logic of primates and try to discredit a woman by announcing to everyone that that woman, imagine, has a butt.
We don't know how many people are in the lawyers' and prosecutors' Viber groups, and how many people belong in the group. We know that the High Council of the Prosecution has formed a case, so they will investigate how the photos were created, and who shared and misused them all. That's good. It is bad that they had to be warned about the existence of a criminal offense by "Journalists against violence against women", because they did not notice it themselves, even though they are holders of judicial functions.
Or, they didn't want to notice.
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