Now, this story about a Down Under Ghosthunter is really sort of sad. The Hobart Mercury reports that last year, a Tasmanian man decided to set up a camera in his kitchen to try to catch evidence of "paranormal activity" (otherwise unidentified). He was probably prepared for orbs or moving chairs or boxes or cereal flying across the room. He wasn't prepared for what he actually saw. When he looked at the video later, he saw his girlfriend, the mother of their young child, and his son from another relationship engaged in, um, inappropriate behavior.
Thus, he asked her about it. She apparently shrugged it off, even though she and his son had had somewhat rocky interactions in the past. But when he asked his son about the incident, the son confessed that he and Dad's girlfriend had had sex, and not just once, but three times in the past few days. The truth finally came out in interviews with the police: the woman admitted to a sexual relationship with the teen, who is sixteen, which had taken place (apparently) not just in the home but in a hotel room. However, she said she thought the age of consent in Tasmania is sixteen.
She is being sentenced this week.
However, what I find a little ironic is the ages of the original pair of folks in this siutation. We don't know his age at the time, but she is now 28 and they have been involved for eleven years, so she would have been 17, which is (magically) the age of consent in Tasmania. If she had been even a few weeks younger, she would have been under the age of consent. (Note also that Tasmania has a Romeo and Juliet clause). But the statute of limitations has probably run, even if she were underage at the time, and in any case, I'm not suggesting that the man (who is the father of the teen) is guilty of anything here. On a related note, I think people who object to women who are involved with men younger than themselves are engaging in some gender stereotyping. Admittedly,here, we do have criminal activity, but the woman may truly have believed that the age of consent was 16, and she might have believed it given the age at which she herself began a relationship, even if she were herself 17 at the time.
I also noted that a number of people were commenting on the original Hobart Mercury newspaper article that the woman in the case was involved in the young man's life since he was five years old, so their involvement was rather like incest. That is a little creepy, but only if the teen lived in his father's house or spent a lot of time there. We don't really know how close he and his father have been over the years. If he and Dad were estranged, is it as creepy?
Also a little odd--that Dad didn't tell her or his son about the camera in the kitchen. If I were looking for paranormal activity, I don't know of any reason that I would hide the existence of the camera from people I live with in the house, unless I suspected them of creating the phenomena. Is that what was going on? The ghosts can't see the cameras, can they? Or was it something else? Was the relationship the something else? But then why set up the camera in the kitchen?
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