Many of you may have heard about the story above where a man called a McDonalds claiming to be a police officer and had a young female employee strip-searched and sexually assaulted claiming that it would help an ongoing investigation concerning her as a possible suspect.
Naturally when the story broke people were just sure that the manager who sexually assaulted the girl must have been in on it, but a rash of similar cases quickly followed. Another incident involved a manager stripping naked in front of a customer when a phone caller ensured her it would help them solve a case by tempting the customer who was believed to be a sexual predator.
One Apple Bee's manager conducted a 90 minute stripsearch of an employee even though the caller, claiming to be a district manager, had called collect, and in spite of the fact that he had received a corporate memo regarding hoax phone calls of that exact nature. The list goes on. The article sites 68 cases in 32 states.
This story seriously makes us rethink the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments. It is easy to criminalize people who succumb to an authority figure but these cases remind us how powerful suggestion, fear, and obedience to authority really are.
While I was assistant manager of the Kum & Go in Grundy Center, IA, 4 of our female employee's reported receiving phone calls from people claiming to be supervisors or law enforcement officials asking them sexually inappropriate comments, or to strip naked, claiming they had video footage of them selling illegal products to minors. The police said they received complaints of this nature constantly.
One burning question in my mind is how can we limit the repercussions associated with the findings on obedience to authority? Knowledge is surely power in this case, when you know and can critically think you have a better chance of resisting. However, male and females alike have strip searched people, young and old, educated and ignorant. On numerous occasions people who should have known better, didn't. In the case of the tragic McDonalds incident it was a 58 year old 9th grade drop-out working as a handy man who eventually intervened saying "This is not right." What is going on here?
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