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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.
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.
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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