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Does anyone know how to get confirmation / denial from the police or prosecutors as a random nobody from another country? We might be getting a update on the Braveheart incident.
Highly sophisticated Twitter anons are now claiming that Fatos Ali Dumana has been charged with assaulting a minor:
Now, this isn't new information per se, as @FistfullOfCrows pointed out "it has been alleged". I can't find the link to where I first saw the allegation, but I've seen it, and remained skeptical thinking "shouldn't there be a medical report"? Lo, and behold, there seems to be one attached to the above tweet.
Ok, it's still trivial to fake something like this, it would be nice to get some sort of confirmation from a disinterested source.... oh, look (Turn off javascript to read. I tried archiving it, but they seem to have countermeasures) a local newspaper is saying that """Two further people""", """a man and a woman""", have been charged as a result of the incident. No names are named (funny how you can dox a little girl, but somehow adults are a step to far), so who knows, maybe it's the girl's parents that are being charged, but with all the other irregularities around the incident, and the newspaper's cageyness around the names of the suspects I wouldn't bet on it.
So... does anyone know how to go about confirming / denying this? @self_made_human, you're in Scotland, would you be willing to make some phone calls?
EDIT:
I feel like further details will just indicate that this is a deranged Indigenous Chav v invasive Chav situation but also it's hard to come up with many good reasons for why the United Kingdom needed to import a Fatos Ali to occupy one of its esteemed council houses
My guess is she’s going to turn out to be carrying a hatchet to impress some 16 year old petty drug dealer, this Turk from Bulgaria confronted her and it escalated into a confrontation with Florida-man efficiency.
I'm taking bets at this point. Most girls don't behave that way, and the ones that do don't look and act like her.
Ma'khai Bryant is an existence proof of immature girls with a melee weapon being a legitimate lethal threat, but she was sixteen, not twelve. YMMV on the relevance, but I'd say a twelve-year-old girl with knife/hatchet is still a deadly threat, and register confusion with arguments in the previous thread that the idea of a twelve-year-old girl being able to seriously harm someone with a large knife or hatchet is somehow laughable. In my view, this is an exceedingly rare occurrence because of the normative psychological incapacity toward killing wrath of twelve-year-old girls, not because of any innate physical incapacity. Edged weapons greatly magnify the harm a given amount of force can inflict.
When I watched the video after reading a fair amount of discussion, it updated me against the girls somewhat; it did not look to me like clear-cut, innocent self-defense, more like belligerent brandishing. I thought it was at least plausible that the girls were in the wrong and the guy was trying to get evidence on camera. On the other hand, I was fairly disgusted by the general assumption by many that self-defense was illegitimate a priori, and I think British laws against arming oneself for purposes of self defense, even by kids, even in public, utterly farcical.
So, basically, at this point I'm breaking out the popcorn and would love to see more evidence.
FWIW, I may have somewhat conflated physical and psychological attributes and the specific girl in the Scottish video case. That specific 12-year-old girl, given her frame and behavior, seemed eminently not dangerous.
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Epistemic Status: I have zero experience with knife fighting and plentiful experience playfighting with children.
This is a thing where my brain just declines to recognize the danger. Even aside from the strength issue, most 12 year old girls are just not terribly coordinated. An athletic girl from say, the top 10%? Yeah, ok, she has solid odds of making it hurt. Less likely to be somewhere vital, because I'll have about a foot of reach, even discounting the length of the blade. But my mental model of a median 12 year old says I'd be more likely to accidentally hurt her trying to disarm her than to be seriously injured in the process.
But I fully admit that this might be a "I can totally wrestle a black bear" situation. I'd try to do the marker test with my own kid, but I'm honestly worried about going too hard and accidentally hurting her.
Maybe that's the issue. A 12 year old girl can feign vulnerability and get in close for knifework. IIRC, that was what the Japanese were telling their schoolgirls to do if the Americans invaded back in the day. Under real world conditions, I would probably try to be gentle, and maybe suffer sorely for the sake of chivalry. Because if bloodlusted, I feel confident that I would wreck any 12 year old girl in a fight, knife or no.
You see, she doesn't even have to feign vulnerability, the biggest danger to you is your own desire to minimize the amount of violence. It's the American cop problem in reverse.
If you memorize the rule that you don't go for the weapon even if your opponent is a child, then defeating a knife-wielding 12-year-old girl in a fight is easy. Trip her or knock her down.
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My thinking is less from playfighting girls, and more from a childhood spent playing with knives and cutting myself a fair bit in the process. Sharp knives require very little force to cut or to pierce, and the motions needed are natural and instinctive. Fuck up the disarm and you can do all the cutting yourself, just bumping into the edge whilst trying to get to the limb behind it. And sure, a tweener girl is likely to have the aggressive mindset to go on the offense, and may be uncoordinated enough that you can just grab her wrist before she can flinch, and probably that knife is even pretty dull because she probably doesn't know how to sharpen it. Probably.
My claim is not that a girl so armed is certain or even likely to win a fight with an adult man. She is not. My argument is that a tweener girl brandishing a ~7-inch chef's knife is making a very serious threat, because a knife can hurt you very badly with very little force.
The marker test is going to tell you mostly about the point. Get a cardboard box and a hot-glue gun, glue together two layers of cardboard and then cut out the knife shape with a boxcutter. paint the edge with food coloring or acrylic paint or whatever. tell her she gets ice cream if she gets a line on you. there's a big difference between trying to get past a quarter-inch of marker tip, and trying to get past six or seven inches of blade.
I was a den leader through cub scouts. The day we did Totin' Chip, the first boy showed up and I set him at the dining room table with my own boy, and then walked into the kitchen to finish gathering supplies. When I came back, not even 20 seconds later, the both of them were bleeding. It was one of those "I'm not even mad, that's almost impressive" moments.
But yeah, I get that this is likely a situation where my gut confidence is ignorance and arrogance. And yet...
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If the girl is not actively on the attack, just brandishing the knife (as in the video), you have first-mover advantage. So long as she's within reach and you act first, you can get ahold of her wrist 100 times out of 100. It's the same concept as quickdraw guys who can draw and fire a holstered double-action revolver before an alert adult can react, so long as they choose when to draw:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ELaiJZ8tjSk&t=249
This doesn't win a knife fight against somebody strong enough to fight back once you've got a grip on them, but in the case in question it's pretty hard for me to see much (physical) risk.
Do we know how much of that is from practice though? And genetically faster reflexes/selection bias if you're interested in being a "quickdraw guy"? Can the average man really reach to disarm a knife faster than the knife holder can cut the disarming arm? I'm asking because I'm not sure, I don't know the answer here?
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Surely this isn't in question. The question is whether, after you've wrecked her, you're going to find you've got an artery gushing out.
The old saw about how "the loser of a knife fight dies in the street, the winner dies in the hospital" probably wasn't taking scared little girls into account, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was still enough of a risk to worry about. IIRC one comment here talked about taking away her hatchet and ignored the knife; slip up like that in reality and you're likely to end up with one hand holding a hatchet and the other hand holding the first hand's sliced up wrist.
The kid's probably too young to have heard the phrase down the road, not across the street, right? You'd probably be fine.
Whoever said that had it exactly ass-backwards, unless she's a surprisingly talented sharpener in her spare time -- that kind of ax isn't even supposed to be very sharp, they work better for splitting wood if they have a somewhat obtuse edge (compared to a knife or something). I doubt she could break the skin with that one even, and a skinny 12 y.o. can't generate enough blunt force to do much damage unless you offered her your noggin or something.
Grab her knife arm and twist it behind her back, end of story.
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And his answer is "no". Guys... I used to be a shoved-in-the-locker nerd, and the stuff people are saying here makes me want to start shoving people in lockers. We're talking about early-teenage girl here. Sure, if she goes into berserker mode, loses all social inhibitions and fear of pain, taps into some forgotten animal instinct that tells here which vulnerable spots to go for, she just might get lucky and do actual damage. Now look at the actual video, none of these things are likely to happen by my estimation, but even if they did, I'm putting my money on the adult man kicking her teeth in, and walking away without a scratch.
The most likely way for the guy to get hurt would be the "feigning vulnerability" route that Iconochasm mentioned.
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Yeah but she's black. I recall an Uber driver in New York somewhere who got killed in a carjacking by some black girls. Plus another such case:
https://people.com/3-teen-girls-plead-guilty-killing-woman-73-dragged-carjacking-8405687
I can't easily find similar hooligan-style violence by white girls against random people they don't know. They can certainly torture and kill their fellow peers but that seems like more of a personal/emotional/passion thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Shanda_Sharer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Skylar_Neese
Ma'khai Bryant and Briniyah shouldn't generalize to Alice and Emma, the base rates seem very different.
This wasn't Alice and Emma. These were Chav girls- the British equivalent of football names.
Let's be frank here - Lola and Ruby sound like straight-up hooker names.
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Well, are Chav girls known to be super violent? I put 'Chav girls UK violent attack stranger' into my search engine and all I find is the Southport stabbings, grooming gangs...
Are we really supposed to believe that these white teen girls are going around menacing, only for heroic Turks from Bulgaria to stand up in defence of decency? Man bites dog, I want to see evidence that this is a sort of thing that happens.
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According to the GiveSendGo:
I don't know if it changes your opinion if Lola wasn't walking around with the weapons, but retrieved them during the attack.
Of course, how on Earth does one retrieve weapons fast enough to return before the end of a scuffle between a 13 year old girl and two adults? How long does it take to attack a 13 year old girl?
I think the statement was carefully written to avoid further legal trouble and Lola "retrieved" the axe and knife from somewhere on her person.
If she lives in a flat that faces that playground, it could be a matter of about a minute or two. I wasn't retrieving knives and axes, but I've done this sort of thing plenty of times as a kid.
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That description does not seem like a match for what I saw in the video. If there had already been a physical altercation before the video took place, why didn't the two girls run away?
It seems clear to me that there was some kind of altercation which took place off-camera before the video starts in which the girl showed the hatchet and knife to the migrants. It was only after this that the male migrant started filming, which is why he already knows about the hatchet and knife when the video starts. Since the girls stick around and engage in trash talk rather than running away screaming, we can presume that no significant blows have been exchanged before the video begins. If there was violence then it must have happened after.
I would also not be surprised if a fundraiser bent the truth a little bit to make the victim more sympathetic.
There were three girls, one of them concussed (according to the girl's family) and maybe unable to move quickly.
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A relevant factor in the case is that hatchets are difficult to conceal and twelve year old girls are not, in general, very large. It seems unlikely that she was carrying this weapon on her person and more likely that she had it stashed for some reason.
hatchets like the one she has are quite easy to "conceal" in what she's wearing. handle down the back of your pants-leg, belly of the blade hooked over the hem, shirt covering the blade. It'll almost certainly print in a variety of ways and make moving and sitting a bit awkward, but nothing prohibitive.
The one that's going to be hard to conceal is the chef's knife, unless she has some sort of sheath, which in my experiences knives like that don't tend to have and kids don't tend to think of making. A long blade sitting against your flesh is not a recipe for safety. There's also not enough structure to hook the hemline reliably, and you don't want one of those dropping down your pantleg along your thigh and calf and into your ankle and foot at an inopportune moment.
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The statement is interesting to me to the extent that it's the girls' story, and therefore something fixed that we can measure against further solid evidence. I'm skeptical about how "retrieving" a hatchet and chef's knife works, but it's at least plausible. But as for the rest, it's he-said-she-said; I disagree with comments here that kids brandishing blades isn't a lethal threat, we have no actual proof of the inappropriate sexual remarks and I learned a long time ago the hazards of "Listening and Believing", but also I'm keenly aware that foreign males treating native girls like whores is in fact a serious problem and one the current establishment has proven they will expend significant resources to cover up; but then, this guy making passes at kids in front of his sister seems pretty odd.
At this point, as far as I can tell, all the points that seem morally significant to me have zero solid evidence behind them:
What we actually have on video is pretty much useless for answering the above questions. Notably, I'd argue that knife-and-hatchet brandishing can in fact be morally-legitimate self defense, and so can knocking a minor assailant down and then kicking them while they're down, including in the head. Whether the weapons were carried or retrieved seems entirely irrelevant to me.
I'm given to understand that Urban England does not suffer from a paucity of security cameras. I have a strong presumption that this event was captured on video. I want to see that video. If it shows anything other than the girls approaching the adults and immediately brandishing or initiating assault, the girls are, in my opinion, in the right. The longer we go without seeing the video, the more my priors shift toward the girls being in the right. I see no reason to blindly trust the authorities or presume that their secret judgements are valid, and my priors on their interest in an incident like this one are fairly strong.
Just to point out in other cases the CCTV is often never released. For example the Rivera case where three teen girls killed a Bolivian man in London, was mostly caught on CCTV, but only a few heavily blurred stills were ever released. Interestingly there too the girls claimed the man harassed them, but witnesses contradicted that and all three girls pled guilty to manslaughter.
So I am not sure CCTV not being released should change your priors much one way or the other.
Also it was in Scotland not England. Which doesn't really change the point about the cameras but might save you some harsh words from some of my more nationalistic brethren.
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This isn't Urban England! It's Urban Scotland!
When I first set foot in London, several years back, I was distinctly unsettled by the sheer number of security cameras around. In the central parts, there were more of them than the stop signs.
Scotland? Far, far fewer. You can hop into Google Maps like I just did and check out that bit of Dundee, the only cameras I can see are private security cams, and not that many. That is not the same claim as saying that the police don't have footage, they likely do, but even the UK isn't a homogenous surveillance state.
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The GSG excerpt above talks about three girls; the two sisters in the video, plus their friend Ruby -- who was allegedly attacked. If she'd taken off while Lola was arming herself, the video more or less adds up?
Someone else in the thread has cited hospital records of treatment for a concussion, so it looks like there was in fact violence inflicted on at least one of the girls.
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If this happened they way the anons / crowdfunders describe, I'd guess she took off after Lola showed up. The dude was tormenting Ruby, Lola comes back armed and tells him to leave her alone, he turns around, takes one look and says "oh, ain't that cute, let me get my phone, I have to record it".
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Apparently the child was treated for a concussion and there is a hospital record to prove this
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I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying the Scottish girl doesn't seem to fit the profile for that sort of thing, that I built up over the years. That said I'm just going with my gut.
What does your profile consist of here? I'm really lost on what could be missing or contraindicated within what we know.
Her behavior. I don't know how to describe it, but she's not acting like the sort of person that has it in her to stab someone.
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