by:Chelsea Schilling
A 15-year-old girl wearing leggings, a tank top and a button-down T-shirt claims a Transportation Security Administration agent humiliated her, telling her to cover up as she passed through an ID-check line at Los Angeles International Airport on Father’s Day.
“She said the officer was ‘glaring’ at her and mumbling,” the girl’s father, Mark Frauenfelder, told Yahoo Shine.
“She said, ‘Excuse me?’ and he said, ‘You’re only 15, cover yourself!’ in a hostile tone.”
He said, “It shook her up.”
Frauenfelder, who is editor in chief of Make magazine and founder of the blog Boing Boing, explained that his daughter, Sarina, had been traveling with a group of high-school students on a trip to explore colleges.
After the incident, Sarina began texting her parents.
“I’m furious!” she wrote. “He was so rude and hostile. He made me feel like a slut.”
“I’m furious!” she wrote. “He was so rude and hostile. He made me feel like a slut.”
Frauenfelder, who posted a photo of his daughter wearing her ordinary outfit, blasted the TSA officer on his blog: “It doesn’t matter what she was wearing, though, because it’s none of his business to tell girls what they should or should not wear. His creepy thoughts are his own problem, and he shouldn’t use his position of authority as an excuse to humiliate a girl and blame her for his sick attitude.”
Yahoo Shine reported a TSA spokesperson would not discuss the investigation, but said the agency was “looking into the matter.”
Just after Sarina reported the incident to her parents, they arrived at the airport and met with a TSA supervisor.
“I think that it is really dangerous for the TSA to do anything outside of their very narrow job description, which is to ensure the safety of passengers from violent attacks,” he said, telling Yahoo Shine it was a “huge abuse of authority” for the TSA officer to be “telling a girl that what she’s wearing is something she should be ashamed of.”
Many of Frauenfelder’s nearly 24,000 Twitter followers weighed in on the matter, declaring:
- “Wow. Give some people a uniform and, wow.”
- “There is nothing wrong with what she has on. Something should be done to the security officer. Not their business.”
- “Maybe the TSA can keep a stock of courtesy burkas on hand”
- “They always make me take off more clothes. Who made them arbiters of propriety?”
- “Wow. My flabber is gasted. What kind of pervert ogles a 15 y/o. Yeah, I said it!”
- “American Taliban”
According to reports, TSA screeners have lammed a woman into a table, pulled an elderly man’s pants down, told a child to remove his leg braces, strip-searched a young boy and a forced a passenger to remove her nipple ring with pliers. One breast cancer survivor was purportedly told to remove her prosthetic breast.
A frequent traveler became so frustrated with TSA’s screening process that he removed all of his clothing for the procedure in protest of the “harassment.”
A recent survey conducted by Frequent Business Traveler revealed 90.8 percent of frequent fliers think TSA is doing either a fair or poor job of managing security screenings at the nation’s airports.
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