Nobody likes the idea of a comfort break not in a toilet. Public urination is indecent, anti-social, suggests moral turpitude and – especially in Pattaya – can deter family tourists from visiting the city with a certain past. Anyway, that’s what the beach police say. The two cases reported in Pattaya this month have been hyped into a clear case of media amplification: illegal peeing has gotten out of hand. The quality of overseas visitors is going from bad to worse. Told you so.
A review of Google suggests that there have been just seven cases resulting in fines throughout Thailand so far this year. That’s small fry compared with Scotland’s one thousand two hundred cases in a typical year according to their crime statistics. In France they even have a phrase to describe the widespread habit: les pipis sauvages or wild peeing. Environmental concerns have become so serious in Germany that swimmers passing water into Eichbaum lake, Hamburg, are blamed for an algae bloom that has killed more than 500 fish.
Local authorities in Cheshire, UK, said fears that well-refreshed revelers after the pubs closed were causing irreparable damage to the city’s medieval walkways. That’s an offence punishable under the 1986 public order act or, if necessary, the sexual offences act of 2023. Exposing your genitalia, whatever your reason, is absolutely not recommended. Yet prosecutions against women are almost unknown anywhere in the world. Someone is said to be writing a sociological PhD on the subject.
American states are frantically trying to restrain the problem. In California and Arizona public lewdness can swell into a charge of being a sex offender and thus appearing on the dreaded register if found guilty. There was a case in Australia of a man prosecuted for peeing through a neighbor’s letter box. Mercifully, that case wasn’t in Pattaya or we would never have heard the last of it. What we need are more public toilets and a sense of proportion.
