A Florida woman is facing felony charges for allegedly posing online as a homeschooler to sexually assault an underage boy.
22-year-old Alyssa Ann Zinger was arrested in Tampa on Nov. 24 and taken to jail; she faces two counts of lewd or lascivious battery and five counts of lewd or lascivious molestation. The police do not believe this was an isolated incident.
“It is disturbing and unsettling to see an adult take advantage of a child and prey on them,” Chief Lee Bercaw said in a statement. “Anyone who may have been a victim of Zinger’s, we encourage you to come forward. The Tampa Police Department will support you and ensure a predator like Zinger doesn’t cause you or others additional harm.”
Police say they were tipped off that Zinger allegedly had a relationship with a child between the ages of 12 and 15, and that following an investigation, they learned that she “communicated with the victim primarily through an online social media platform.”
That’s the second time in about a month I’ve seen it described as sexual assault / molestation / predation when it’s a woman doing it.
Usually news outlets bend over backwards to call it a ‘relationship’ or a ‘romp’ or otherwise put a positive spin on it.
Colour me impressed.
Police say they were tipped off that Zinger allegedly had a relationship with a child between the ages of 12 and 15…
They call it a “sexual relationship” regularly when it is between a man and a teenage girl as well.
Once AGAIN! Not a Drag Queen!
Rape. It’s called rape.
While that’s definitely what happened often the legal definition of “rape” in a state explicitly requires penetration with a penis. So a lot of things that a normal person would consider rape are classed as sexual assault and have to be reported as such in the media. You can see this in the recent E. Jean Carroll suit against trump. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/07/donald-trump-rape-language-e-jean-carroll
While that’s definitely what happened often the legal definition of “rape” in a state explicitly requires penetration with a penis. So a lot of things that a normal person would consider rape are classed as sexual assault and have to be reported as such in the media.
The Department of Justice redefined rape a decade ago. The revised definition includes penetration with any object. I think it would be fine to call an act rape if it meets the federal definition of rape, but does not meet the state definition.
A man who receives oral sex without his consent or is made to penetrate without his consent would still not qualify as rape under the revised definition however.
If you call everything rape, the word loses all meaning. Obviously there is a difference between violent physical sexual assault and sending nudes to someone, and ages and context matters.
You are not being “brave” by pretending that the world is 100% black or white, and it’s getting ridiculous with this echo chamber where everybody is competing over who hates rape the most, it’s fucking childish, talk about the least controversial opinion one could possibly have.
Like wow, are you against pedophilia too? That is SO very bold of you!
Upvote this reply if you hate cancer!
(If you do not upvote you will have bad luck for seven years!)
Jokes, too, people need to rationalise that aspect. rape jokes can be hilarious
wtf kind of point are you trying to make? Are you trying to defend this adult raping a minor?
This is a third party claiming “rape” aka Statutory Rape.
statutory what again?
there’s a huge difference between forceful, painful, traumatizing rape
if you’re under the impression that so-called “consensual” sex with a child doesn’t traumatize that child then you’re unsalvageable.
Thank you, florida woman.
Florida man has been dominating the eccentric-wild news segment but I see you have stepped up for the cause.
I already don’t understand pedophilia, but I especially have a hard time wrapping my head around a person in their early 20s that’s into grooming and sexually assaulting people who are not that much younger than them to begin with.
For the same reason it’s illegal… while there might not be a huge difference in age between someone 22 and 14, there’s a vast difference in maturity, experience and vulnerability to manipulation. While I’m not a psychologist, it seems like for some people, it’s based on opportunity (easier to manipulate a younger person) and others it’s based on a psychological impairment regarding their own sexual development. For this lady perhaps it’s a combo.
I’m not trying to quarrel with the legality at all. There is no question in my mind that it deserves to be illegal. I just can’t wrap my head around the psychology of this. This wasn’t opportunity, this took effort.
I didn’t think you were questioning the illegality. I agree; you’d think it would be easier for her to find someone her age. Except for what I was saying earlier… some people go for minors because they can manipulate them more easily. And then, if she’s warped in the way that she’s particularly attracted to younger people, that explains why she’d seek one out.
Just spitballing here, but a young attractive woman like her probably gets a lot of unwanted attention from men who have sought to control her. Maybe she wanted someone who didn’t pose a threat. Still illegal, and she still needs to go to jail. It doesn’t matter what turns one into a predator.
I did time in prison for growing mushrooms and had the unfortunate privilege of living with pedophiles for two years.
I’m sure some don’t give a fuck. But I know a few who are basically children mentally due to trauma or mental disability. They believe children are sexual beings and basically project their attraction to kids, onto kids.
In other words, they justify their actions by believing children want to have sex and take innocent things like an affectionate kiss on the cheek, as flirting.
It all just sounds so alien to me. It’s just such a way of thinking so wholly different from anything I ever think that I have trouble even comprehending it.
Thankfully, I was never preyed upon as a child myself so I’ve only heard accounts from others who had been, but I’m sure it’s hard for a lot of victims to wrap their heads around it too. I would probably spend the rest of my life trying to understand the mind of someone who did that to me. Not as some form of forgiveness, more of a probably hopeless search for a deeper motive even if it was purely a crime of opportunity.
Ugh. The world is so horrible.
Someone close to me was raped the first 5 years of his life by a relative, and has been in therapy (very successfully) ever since. When someone that young experiences ongoing trauma like that, it fucks all the developmental areas in life including the reward/feel good parts of the brain. There are things that the brain becomes wired for that can’t be undone, but with effective treatment can be managed.
Under the best circumstances recovery is incredibly hard, without therapy and proper support it’s not surprising someone could go off the rails like this. Not saying that this predator was abused because I don’t know, but it’s statistically likely.
From what I understand for some it’s just the tools they have at their disposal to get affection or sex in a very low effort or ego flattering way. To a teen, having a car, a place where there’s no parents calling the shots and any kind of income is a huge and enviable power gap. The person’s experience with other relationships means that they don’t tend to go all in on the younger partner either the way a person experiencing love for the first time does. So you have someone who remembers that all consuming need to hold onto that first sacred relationship enough to mechanically exploit it so they can either shift all the work onto their younger partner and keep them on the back foot by threatening to end things or push their younger partner to do exactly what they want because to them the relationship is just one of a potential many. That disposition towards relationship fungibility means you have solid leverage.
Youngsters also don’t have any real experience with autonomy. A kid is used to being told what to do and accepting inequity in power balances as normal. Rebelling in the face of adult authority structures also means there’s a lack of seeing adults as peers to whom they can seek advice and benefit and trust their experience and more as just unfair weilders of social power that need be avoided so to transgress means you ditch the social structures that are the most able to spot the red flags.
Shit, this comment deserves to be Best Of’d. An incredible breakdown of the exact problem with this kind of abuse, and absolutely destroys the “hurr teenage boy horny tho” idiots.
Why thank you! I had some acquaintances and friends who fell victim to these power dynamics and I noticed often it seemed to stem from them essentially being used to thinking of adults only really in terms of authority and obstacle… but my folks were awesome and always treated us as “adults in training” where our concerns were valued and our circumstances negotiable. We could argue our points and expect that if they were good, well thought through points that passed all the safety concerns our parents would conceed. It made us view parents, teachers, older friends and relatives and so on as essentially just our more experienced peers…and we were very VERY aware of the advantages we had when navigating sketchy shit.
I did get to see this dynamic play out in real time to disastrous effect with people I knew. I realized my home circumstances were unusual and sometimes my parents ended up basically becoming friends with my friends who I think benefited as well by an adult just treating them as another adult who was non-judgemental about the hazards they encountered. There are people from my highschool days who still show up to my parent’s place at Christmas. It’s made me regard myself as a bit of a self case study as to what happens when at all ages you are treated as a being who is worthy of and expected to practice mutual respect.
There’s a huge difference between 12 and 22. The power imbalance means there can’t be meaningful consent.
