women's opinions wanted

[Sugar_Kayne]

Hey all!

As a newbie, I hope my reply here is not out of place or unwelcomed.

On the night of our first confined water dive, before we ever got in the water, my instructor broached the subject of "gropes" in a rather unsubtle manner. He said that he would need to hold on to us students while we sat on our knees at the bottom of the pool to hold us in place while we performed certain skills. The easiest place to hold us was the front strap of our BCD, obviously being the only female in the class, this meant virtually right above my boobs. He asked if this would be a problem and if so, we could try to work out some alternate means. Personally, his professionalism made me feel that this was not an issue and I told him so.

Not one time during my training did I even notice him holding my BC strap, much less copping a "squeeze". Then again, I'm not very uhm... well padded, so why would he? LOL

KAYNE

 

[Amanda]

In a thread that begun approx. 6 months ago, I wrote what happened to me in Corsica in details, I won't do that again, but just give you an idea of what it was all about.

I was working at a dive center with many male DM and Instructors, all of them very nice but a bit "machist". I got a ton of remarks about breasts, about me being alone in the night in my camping-car... I tried to deal with it as well as I could, everyone seemed to calm down and be more respectful (I was doing a great job at the center, so it might help to get yourself repected)

...until the day where this legionnaire (also an instructor), the only one who hadn't stopped hassling me, went too far, so I just shouted at him and went in the boat. No details, he came after me, tried to rape me and when I finally slapped him hard, he began beating me.

He was fired from the center and I went home too, I needed my boyfriend near me.

It's shocking, I'll never forget that and ever since, I'm even more discreet and "unsexy" when I go diving. But of course not every Instructor is like that, I've worked in many dive centers and this man is the only "dangerous one" I've met.

All the others were kind and very respectful. I still trust the "Divers are a big family" spirit, and I hope everybody on this board do.

 

[cat]

Amanda related...
...until the day where this legionnaire (also an instructor), the only one who hadn't stopped hassling me, went too far, so I just shouted at him and went in the boat. No details, he came after me, tried to rape me and when I finally slapped him hard, he began beating me.

He was fired from the center and I went home too, I needed my boyfriend near me.

Well, I'm glad he was at least fired - my question is - why wasn't he ARRESTED and CHARGED?!

I sincerely hope there weren't any other people watching, because then I'd have to wonder why they didn't interfere.

This isn't an instructor/DM issue at all (although it makes it worse that he was one of your instructors and thus in a position of trust). It may be hard to decide if a grope during training was accidental or not (does this ever happen to males with female DMs?) but what you've described is a criminal act, with no doubt as to intent.

The group of instructors that put me through my OW paces was all male and all behaved as if they didn't know which gender we were (class was more than half female). Only gender-related complaint is that they did too good a job of this - the store didn't stock women's wetsuits and I'm too tall in the leg and short in the torso to fit a mens one. I'd take a course from them again, but I'll look elsewhere for rentals