A MAN who spitefully lifted his ex-girlfriend's dress up in a Dunfermline bar has been ordered to do unpaid work.

Ryan McDonald, 19, of Inchkeith Drive, had split up with his girlfriend three weeks before the incident when he embarrassed her at Legends at East End Park.

Appearing for sentencing at Dunfermline Sheriff Court, he had previously admitted that on an occasion between May 1 and 31 this year, at Legends, he behaved in a threatening or abusive manner when he embarrassed and humiliated his former partner by pulling up her dress and exposing her underpants and bottom.

Depute fiscal Azrah Yousaf said the woman was on a busy dance floor with another woman. McDonald walked past her, grabbed hold of the bottom of her dress and dragged it up over her waist.

He started to laugh while she was very upset and left the premises.

Ms Yousaf added: "The complainer and the accused were known to each other. It is accepted that rather than being a significant sexual element, it was something done out of spite rather than for any sexual gratification."

Solicitor Gwen Haggerty said McDonald had been in a relationship with the woman, on and off, for three years and this had come to an end three weeks previously. "His emotions were raw and he had been drinking," she added. "He acted in a way he is now entirely disgusted by."

Sheriff Alastair Brown ordered McDonald to do 200 hours of unpaid work.

"I suspect that from your point of view this was, as the procurator fiscal says, an act of spite and you maybe didn't think too much of it," he said. "From the point of view of the young woman concerned, I suspect it was much more significant because what you and any other young man might regard as something funny or spiteful is likely to be regarded by the woman subjected to it as a form of sexual harassment and it is because you were deliberately creating a situation in which she was, to some extent, exposed and indecent for your gratification.

"It is demeaning, it is degrading, it is not funny, it is not fair and it won't be tolerated."