Rough Justice

You cannot travel around Europe as an American these days without being asked what you think of the Strauss-Kahn case.  Back in the 80s everyone asked you about Reagan and at some point I just stopped talking about his politics, because the assumption is that you as the American are going to defend Reagan, or in this case the "Perp Walk."  The French outrage has focused on this admittedly humiliating violation of the defendant's rights to privacy and to being presumed innocent until proven guilty.  (I am not sure if he got the full Perp Walk treatment or if he was simply photographed in a court setting where anyone could be but most people are not.)  The Perp Walk amounts to parading the arrestee only for the sake of the cameras.

But the European shock and dismay at the New York police force is fairly overstated.  Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is shown on most major Western European televisions.  The first night I landed in Germany, I had the weird sensation of channel surfing between coverage of Strauss-Kahn and watching Ice-T dubbed into German.  Europeans all know how Law and Order works; they were just surprised at who made a cameo last week.

The key thing is that critics over here think that Americans don't realize that the Perp Walk is archaic.  Once you admit that it is, explain that it goes back to the days of arresting gangsters in the early 20th century, that it completely violates rights, but that it is a rough local custom, then some of the heat is off the attack, and there is the chance that our talk can turn to the issues of the alleged crime itself.

We know little about the details in the hotel room, but some things are worth considering:

Both alleged attacker and victim speak French.  They may not have known that at the time.  Whatever exchange there was, would probably have taken place in English.  The fact that they were both native French speakers points to the former colonial relationship between countries of origin, but the fact that these two people met in New York was more a result of global economics, the regulation of money flowing between wealthy and poor nations, producing and consuming societies, and the inevitable movement of people these relationships produce, whether it's financial managers or impoverished emigrants.  The guy tried to regulate the global flow of capital, the maid was carried along by the current.

The second global aspect of the case is tied to the financial, but runs on its own rules: the media coverage. 

The French media are using the opportunity to hammer at the Americans for being puritanical and disrespectful of human rights; the Americans are mocking French hypocrisy.  In an earlier age, say two hundred years ago, this case might have led to war.  Everyone can read about how the others are representing the case.  So we get British summaries of the French press, French recapitulations of the American.  In the end, French anti-Americanism seems to trump feminism.

Little is said in defense of the alleged victim, quite simply because the media does not know how to discuss someone who does not play along with their practices.  If you don't give interviews, avoid the camera completely, reject public statements, then there is little the media knows to say.  The alleged victim, nameless in the US, but described in France, simply refuses to participate.  The French media violates her right to privacy, just as the American media walks all over Strauss-Kahn's.

Justice will in the end be applied locally in New York to two people born and raised in foreign countries.