Last week, a 28-year-old man from Guelph, Ontario, Canada, was sentenced to sixty days in jail simply for asking seven different women to kick him in the groin.

Isn’t that pretty far down the list of things that need to be criminalized?

A court heard evidence that, on seven different occasions last year, the man approached women in city parks and asked them to kick him in the aforementioned groin. According to the report, and somewhat surprisingly, only one took him up on it:

One of the women, afraid of what the man might do if she refused, kicked him repeatedly. [The man], an Oshawa native who moved to Guelph several years ago, thanked her and left on his bike.

He did what now? Repeated kicks to the groin, and he just tips his hat and says “Thank you, madam, and good day”? Seems like there are a few facts missing from that story.

There were some missing from the sentencing report given to the trial judge, too. For example, the article described him as “frustrated” that the report “offered so little insight” into the motivation for doing this. (His answer: “curiosity.”)

It is not at all clear to me what law was broken here. The women described the conduct as “disturbing,” which it certainly is, and said it left them reluctant to use public parks.  But does that explain the charge on which he was sentenced—one count of “mischief to property”?  There was mischief done to somebody’s property, that’s for sure. I’m just not sure whose.

After the 60 days is up, he will then have two years of probation, during which he will not be allowed to use parks or the Internet. Hopefully, his curiosity about this matter is now satisfied.

Link: Guelph Mercury

2016 Update: I noticed recently that the link above now points to a 2010 article headlined “November Housing Starts Strengthen,” which is interesting but certainly not what I originally linked to. Other sites had the same link at the time (and still do), but it goes somewhere else now. I also could not find the groin-kicking story or a reference to the guy’s name anywhere else on the Mercury‘s site (although there is a person by that name in Guelph, interestingly), and most of the reports that show up in a Google search are not great sources, frankly (other than me). If this were a brand-new story, all that would lead me to suspect this was a bogus report, and I probably wouldn’t have written about it. Since it’s already posted, I’m leaving it, but I have edited it to remove the name.