Originally Posted by
Fredd
Sympathies to your wife and you and best wishes for the future.
It's yet another example that subjecting yourself to the X-Ray scanner isn't a free ticket to avoid the invasive search.
We fly a lot and Mrs. Fredd in particular is finding the search more and more distasteful each time we undergo it.
Let me remind everybody that it isn't a "pat down," despite the TSA's appropriating that term. It's more of an invasive custodial-style search.
It's possible your wife could have dealt with the type of brief secondary pat-down wanding used in other countries.
I hope you can think of some positive way to address this, for example by writing your federal representatives, without experiencing any further sense of loss-of-privacy violations.
I always describe it as a "full-body rubdown with genital contact."
Friends and family who don't fly much and haven't experienced or witnessed an Enhanced Pat Down scoff when I show my contempt for the procedure... until I describe it in detail, after which some of them simply refuse to believe that such a thing could ever be done, and most of the rest are horrified.
Personally, I will never, ever allow it to be perpetrated upon me. I have that luxury because I only fly 2-4 segments per year, and my home airport has MMW with ATR so I have no worries about radiation or perv exposure. But, as many have said, going through the AIT is no guarantee that I will never be selected for a "random" sexual assault, or that a false-alarm anomaly on the AIT won't steer me into one. I will refuse, absolutely, categorically. I will never allow myself to be sexually assaulted.
OP, you and your wife have my deepest sympathy for your horrible experience.