On a 16th birthday most youths find themselves lucky to get a license or even a car as a gift from their parents.
A New York mother decided that her 16-year-old son’s birthday needed a little something more. While a car might be normal for that age, it stands to reason that a stripper at a birthday party is not so normal.
That’s right, the son of one Judy Viger got a birthday gift that most likely made him the subject of envy for a lot of his friends and fellow young men around the country.
Viger is facing five counts of endangering the welfare of a child after she allegedly hired two women from a company called Tops in Bottoms to perform lap dances on the party guests in a private room at the local bowling alley.
Estimates from New York Daily News have 80 people attending the party, including a 13-year-old and many adults who later claimed they were outraged at the performances.
Yet none of them did anything to stop it. The only reason it came to the attention of the police was that parents of some guests in attendance found photos of the event on Facebook, according to CNN.
While this parenting decision might not be one that most parents would make, calling it child endangerment is ridiculous.
A woman in lingerie giving a lap dance to a 16-year-old is nowhere near putting his life in danger. The sad thing is that there are a lot worse things that teenagers are exposed to on television on a daily basis and we’re not rounding up parents or producers for child endangerment.
Teenagers seeing things you don’t think they should see is not putting them in danger. Was it wrong for Viger to hire the women for the party? It might be in the eyes of some but it’s not really something that should lead to putting a woman in jail for a year.
Our society is too focused on slapping jail time as a punishment for anything that is done that we think is not socially acceptable. The issue at hand is only called wrong or taboo because we made it so.
There are numerous countries across the globe that would not even bat an eyelash at this. Our fear of the human body and exposure of it to our youth has created a society that craves the taboo because we’re told we should not.
Viger might have made a poor parenting choice but that’s all it is. It should not be a crime that puts another person in jail for even a year.
It’s a sad world when people accused of domestic abuse or robbery can end up spending less time in prison that someone that facilitated lap dances.
