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The disturbing rise of ‘gooner’ assaults at Dollar Tree stores: ‘They find it funny to degrade women’
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
418 points (96.7% liked)
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Our society has broken down to the point that we legitimately have to bring back mob justice. I'm so ashamed to be a human right now.
Nah, the entire reason mob justice doesn't work is because it doesn't actually target the people who deserve it most of the time. It tends to catch innocent people far too often, which just makes people even more antisocial.
The only mob "justice" I remember in recent memory is what happened in Maryville Missouri, and it was against the victim. They burned her house down (allegedly) after she reported sexual assault. So... Just a mob. No justice.
Both of the women featured in the Netflix documentary also committed suicide. The mother of one of the victims also committed suicide. One of the men accused of the assault was connected to a politician. I can't think of a real life scenario in the last decade where mob justice was actually just.
Has it broken down, or is the basic level of degeneracy just amplified?
I think a lot of people lose sight of the fact that society is still at the most advanced level it has ever been, violent crimes have dropped steadily across most of the world. But now when isolated incidents like the above happen, the internet amplifies them into being a bigger deal than it really is on a population scale.
It's a pretty big fucking deal for men to be encouraged and celebrated for publicly ejaculating on women.
16 cases nationwide. This is not an epidemic. It's a handful of people on one of the chans egging eachother on. And yes, they are degenerate creeps and should be punished but this is not "A THING". It's just more polarizing man vs woman bs.
16 documented cases at that retailer alone. The article said nothing about the actual prevalence of the crime, nor did you. So you're drawing conclusions based on no data.
What were the other 47? Do I even want to know?
Various sexual assaults that were encouraged in these online gooning communities.
You're really going hard defending these gooners in here.
But they're not defending the gooners. They're pointimg out that, while this is absolutely disgusting behavior, the frequency, or lack thereof, is not indicative of a social pandemic.
They’re downplaying the crimes that are happening here and in turn defending these guys.
They're doing neither.
They are directly downplaying the crimes.
Comments like this:
They are absolutely downplaying the seriousness of these crimes.
I think they're saying that there were always at least 47 rapey creeps doing this horrific dehumanizing and agency stealing SA act, but now we hear about it strung together.
There's way more than 47 cases of sexual assault. They pulled cases that are similar to show a pattern, not all sexual assault cases total.
It's a valid critique that the larger social pattern of ironic dehumanizing misogyny that this represents is the real story, and the article does not make that clear.
I think someone who separates concerns about how disgusting and high-priority an assault like this is, from how frequently it occurs based on how the article describes it, is rightly confused if they aren't reading much about similar aspects of patriarchy.
That commenter should know now, I expect. Often propaganda or just ideology uses isolation of events or uncovered problems to obscure larger patterns of oppression.
These commenters have a pattern of misogynistic comments. Lemmy is not very big and I've had multiple run ins with them. They actively choose to remain ignorant about the sexism issues that women still face to this day.
Trying to downplay these crimes and waiving away these victim's testimonies and calls for justice is just another way they use to discredit women.
Is sexual assault a national problem and deserving of being addressed? As a survivor and advocate, absolutely.
Is there a national epidemic of sexual assault in Dollar Tree stores? Not statistically, no.
Is every sexual assault a horrible crime against someone? Absolutely.
Maybe don't be so quick to attribute misogyny where none is intended.
Thanks for immediately proving my previous comment true.
Found the gooner
You sound like this guy:
There's always room for improvement. Like I thought that was the entire basis of Critical Theory is that there is no end to history, there is no perfect society, we can always improve, and improvement must come through rational and thoughtful critique of the status quo, whatever the status quo may be.
Sure crime may never be zero, but acting like the solution is to just throw up your hands and say "what's the big deal if some women are mentally scarred, it's only a few of them! Why would we make the world better just for them?"
The answer to that question is because they are a part of that world too.
It's not isolated when it has a whole online culture devoted to it.
It happened to me and it's happened to people I know.
time to break out the hats.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hatpins-mashers-self-defense-history-women-hats-fashion
The problem becomes that for all the benefits that instant communications enabled by the internet brings, it also enables people that once would have been the isolated weirdos previously keeping their nonsense in check through public pressure to find each other as well.
The net effect is that they then feel validated in their actions, same way people in your everyday social platforms get a little bump by doing some recent 'challenge' that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Assholes realized they can either profit from being an asshole for social media links or in life because if they get assaulted they can sue.
Really need to make new laws and assaulting people who are doing shit like that ok