The lights dimmed. Couples skated purposefully onto the ice. And at the command of an unseen deejay, teenaged lips touched in defiance of what even authorities here have grudgingly come to call “the Kissing Law”.
“The law to me is nothing. I don’t think it’s going to stop anyone,” said Bianca Secchia, 14, who participated in the demonstration last week and shared another less-political smooch afterward with her boyfriend Attie Nortje, 17, at the darkened Northgate Ice Arena.
The protest on the northern suburban fringe of Johannesburg hardly amounted to a signal moment in South Africa’s storied history of liberation politics. Most of the two dozen young demonstrators settled for scattered group hugs that prosecutors would have struggled to deem criminal even under the new law, which made illegal any physical, romantic contact involving anyone under 16, regardless of consent.
But the controversy that news of the looming event generated — first on the social networking site Facebook, then in radio and newspaper reports — led authorities to announce that they had no intention to arrest or prosecute violators of a law enacted just three weeks ago. It amounted to quite a victory for legions of cyberlinked high school students not yet old enough to drive themselves to their own protest. Strictly speaking, the law criminalized a remarkably broad range of adolescent behavior, including mouth-to-mouth contact of any sort, or any other form of touching that could cause sexual arousal among those under 16.
The law, which authorities said was intended to make it easier to prosecute sexual liaisons between adult men and much-younger girls, and assaults on the mentally disabled, made actual prosecutions of consensual encounters between similarly aged teenagers unlikely, requiring explicit approval from the country’s top prosecutor.
Yet news of the law triggered a powerful backlash among thousands of students armed with little more than computers, Facebook accounts and an acute sense of outrage at what they regarded as the clueless behavior of repressive adults.
The organizer, or at least instigator, of the movement was Frances Murray, 14, an exuberant denizen of online-networking sites. Shortly before Christmas, with just a few weeks to go before starting 10th grade under South Africa’s scholastic calendar, she learned about the law from a friend while chatting via instant messaging, she said.
Murray said she messaged many of her friends, urging them to take up the cause. After one day, 166 people had joined the group. Then it was 664 on the second day, and she soon began suggesting in her postings a mass action of some sort. As the New Year arrived, postings by other teens began calling for a month of public kissing demonstrations at malls across the nation, at noon of every Saturday in January. The membership in Murray’s group, meanwhile, is more than 14,000.
The Washington Post
