Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Vector]

I'm sorry, but you seem to not understand that people who are raised as girls have that particular piece of information drilled in their heads from the first moment that they can understand human language.  I was lectured on the importance of not getting pregnant or having sex when I was five.  When I was thirteen, it wasn't "Oh, Vector, you're turning into a woman :3", it was "Hey, Vector, you're now in the juiciest rape range, so be even more careful, okay?

Women pass each other these tips.  How to dress, how not to dress, how to be sexy (society requirement) but not too sexy (also societal requirement), how to always stick your car keys between your fingers if you're going into an enclosed space alone, how to never stop scanning the perimeter, which strangers are usually safe to ask if you're in trouble, which strangers aren't so safe, greet strangers at night so that they know you're paying attention to them, constantly, constantly scan the perimeter and walk through lighted areas and avoid places where someone could be hiding (scan them, carry a flashlight), carry mace in the handbag and an alarm around your neck or on your keys, take self-defense classes, check every day when you get off the bus to make sure that no one is tailing you.  Never open a door unless you're absolutely certain that the person on the other side of the door is someone you know and not being coerced.  Keep a loud, deep-voiced dog.  If someone's at the door, call through, don't even open it an inch.  And if you're worried about someone at the door or on the phone, let them hear you calling or talking to a man, even a made up one.  Spread signs of a male presence around your house so that attackers will think that there's a possibility a man will come out and take them down.  Never leave your food or drink unguarded.  Carry a knife.  Don't walk alone, and if you're going to, at least pretend to talk on a cell phone or have one in your hand so that people can see that you can contact the police... check around corners before you enter rooms to make sure you want to be in there, and avoid stairwells, elevators, anywhere small and separate from the rest of a building.

And if you ever lapse in any of these areas, your assault will be considered your fault.

You got any other hints to add?  This is what I had drilled into me before I hit puberty, and much more.  If you don't realize that women are relentlessly educated in the topic of their own safety, I'm not sure if I can help you.

[Capntastic]

This is from another forum where someone was defending Ron Paul's statement that if someone is being molested in their workplace it's their own fault for not quitting their job on the spot.  I really can't believe how difficult it is for people to realize that blaming the victim is absolutely ridiculous in these sorts of situations.  The thread in question was mainly debating Ron Paul and libertarian ideology (which is heavily based in "fuck you, got mine"), so it's not entirely on topic.  But it still ties into the general mindset of blaming the victim:

First, where are you getting 'most' from?  Over half of the United States is below the poverty line, we're at around 10% unemployment, and if you up and quit without notice you can lose your accumulated benefits.

Further, even if everyone in the US could exist without pay, implicitly defending rape by arguing that the victim has the choice to leave is going completely against the non-aggression principle that Libertarians claim their ideology flows from.  Someone is doing harm to you, and putting you in a situation where you either tolerate it or lose your job.  It's coercion, and unlike the 'violence of law', it's coercion you did not agree to.

Saying that not getting raped is better than losing your job, and one should abandon their livelihood for it is arguable, but why should it be a choice?  If you're being molested by your employer, they should be punished, and your job shouldn't be at forfeit for someone going out of their way to shit on your rights.  If Ron Paul groped your ass and you didn't work for him, that is clearly his fault.  Why should it be different because you work for him?  Is it because you become his property?  Does your personhood vanish the moment you sign on to work for someone?  Can your personal rights, which he and other libertarians see as being inherent above all else including law, be bargained away?  Is that not wildly inconsistent?

Saying that "well you were wearing those clothes, you were on the bad side of town, you were asking for it" to shrug off someone getting raped is indefensible.  The only person responsible for the rape/molestation is the person who did it.

You don't see libertarians saying "well of course they were asking to be robbed, having such a big house with nice stuff in it." Rich people too have the choice to not be conspicuously wealthy, they can move to a secluded area, etc.  And yet their suffering is not passed off as being their own fault when misfortunate strikes.

Why are tangible property rights to not have their golden toaster stolen from their home ranked higher than the right to not get tongue-kissed by Ron Paul because you work for him?

[kaijyuu]

@vector
There are more assault victims than women, and more forms of assault than rape. The original situation was crossdressers in school, for example.


But regardless: your argument is there is more than enough information about prevention being passed along. I'll accept that for most cases, though maybe not all. However, that prevention information is useful, and I'd rather we be oversaturated with it than under.

I really can't believe how difficult it is for people to realize that blaming the victim is absolutely ridiculous in these sorts of situations.

Here's the mindset as I understand it. Analogy:

A boat sinks through no fault of the driver. The driver was not wearing a life vest and drowns.

We've already established the boat sinking was not the fault of the driver, so 0% of the blame for that should go to them.
However, not wearing a life vest is pretty damn stupid. Thus, some blame for something should go to them.


Similar for assault victims. The assault isn't their fault, but they're still being called stupid for not following with (presumably) reasonable preventative measures.


So the "blame the victim" thing is a bit of a mislabeling, I think. It's more that these people are pushing for completely unreasonable preventative measures, like quitting your job or not wearing <insert type of clothing here>, than blaming the victims for the assault itself.

Certainly there exist people who ARE blaming the victims, but unless they say something along the lines of "they were asking for it" I don't think that's a given.

[Vector]

All of that stuff wasn't just about rape.  It was advice for not being mugged, not being assaulted, and so on, and so forth.

I know very well that there's other assault victims than women, but the conventional assumption in the social narrative is that women are being raped and it's because women just don't understand how to keep themselves from getting attacked.  My post was an attempt to suggest to anyone who might want to pull something like that line of assault that perhaps we do know something about self-protection, and perhaps it's no longer edgy and transgressive to tell women that their lives are constantly in danger.

[Capntastic]

Analogy:

A boat sinks through no fault of the driver. The driver was not wearing a life vest and drowns.

Similar for assault victims. The assault isn't their fault, but they're still being called stupid for not following with (presumably) reasonable preventative measures.

In your analogy there's one person acting, who makes a lapse in judgment which costs them.

It is very different than a situation where there are two people, one acting specifically to harm another.  Say, a person lobbing a firebomb at a person's boat, and the person, without a lifevest drowns.  The hostile actor in this scenario is still specifically to blame for the death, regardless of the person not being prepared.

Yes, I agree that people should take precautions, but the onus for responsibility is still on the person who commits the crime.

Especially when someone aiming to assault someone might stalk them until such time that they can't 'reach their life vest'.

[G-Flex]

Regarding "rape prevention", I see one major issue there as it being simply condescending and, in fact, quite awful, to put so much of the onus on victims to protect themselves while 1) like Vector said, they have this stuff drilled into their heads already, and 2) such little effort, by comparison, is made at criticizing the actual circumstances, social institutions/situations, or perpetrator-centric issues that actually cause the rape in the first place. People have a tendency to talk too much about the self-defense angle (which is probably surprisingly irrelevant in plenty of cases anyway, depending on how the act occurs) and not enough about, well, any angle that doesn't involve what the victim could have hypothetically done better. That, and the fact that we shouldn't expect women (or anyone, really) to spend their lives in a constant state of self-defensive paranoia, lest they be criticized for someone committing a crime against them.

[Capntastic]

People need to tell their children not to molest or hurt anyone just as much as they need to tell them that people may try to molest or hurt them, is what I think everyone can agree on.

[G-Flex]

Not only that, but there are a lot of social institutions that make (certain types of) sexual assault far too easy/common. University life is pretty bad regarding that in general, isn't it?

[scriver]

The level, or what you might call it, "rape prevention advice" should be at is of that of say, keeping your credit card unstolen. You're advised to always make sure nobody's looking over your shoulder when at an ATM and be careful if somebody's following you away from one, but nobody would ever put any blame on the victim if you did get mugged anyway. Clearly, these aren't really on the same plane, unfortunately.

[Frumple]

You got any other hints to add?

Don't forget the concealed weapons permit; for the knife and the small holdout (or large fuckoff) pistol you should have sequestered somewhere. They're absolutely sickeningly easy to get (at least in Florida) if you can afford the processing fee. Gun's not legal to have on college campuses, but then again neither are knives.

Incidentally, apparently paranoia and fear of (non-sexual, though rape's an issue for guys, too*) assault can lead to a person picking up most of those without direct instruction. The key thing is interesting, though. Definitely wish someone would have bothered to actually teach any of that to th'male half of the gender. Regardless of the social implications of needing the information or the blaming the victim (utter) bullshit, the lot of it's good self defense advice.

I'm trying to not even consider the psychological effect of considering everyone around you as potential threats, though, especially if it's genuinely endemic to the female side of our culture.

*Not nearly as much -- everyone here knows that the sexual assault numbers against women in the states is fucking disgusting and that we, as a society, should be goddamned ashamed -- and generally limited to more specific areas (prison, particularly), but it's still there.

[Heron TSG]

Analogy:

A boat sinks through no fault of the driver. The driver was not wearing a life vest and drowns.

We've already established the boat sinking was not the fault of the driver, so 0% of the blame for that should go to them.
However, not wearing a life vest is pretty damn stupid. Thus, some blame for something should go to them.


Similar for assault victims. The assault isn't their fault, but they're still being called stupid for not following with (presumably) reasonable preventative measures.

Rivers can't make conscious decisions. People can. If the river consciously chose to sink the boat, it would be the river's fault. People don't just 'happen' to get raped. There has to be a person choosing to rape them somewhere along the line.

(rape's an issue for guys, too*)

*Not nearly as much -- everyone here knows that the sexual assault numbers against women in the states is fucking disgusting and that we, as a society, should be goddamned ashamed -- and generally limited to more specific areas (prison, particularly), but it's still there.

Actually, America is the first country in the history of the world to have more male rape victims than female victims, and that's not even counting serial rapes. (This is due to our fantastic prison system. The one in which the public expects to be raped in if they go there.)

[Frumple]

Mentioned the prison thing. Mind you, that... that doesn't exactly make things somehow better? The whole fucking disgusting, should be goddamned ashamed still applies. It applies to the prison system, too. S'also a less pervasive thing for males; we're definitely not taught to be eying the shadows (metaphorically speaking; most sexual assaults come from people you know) for someone wanting to molest us. Rob us, kill us, yes, but not molest.

Also kinda' unsure about the numbers, there; last I remember getting hit with a fact sheet it's something like 25-50% (Honestly, I can't remember the exact number. Could have been 1/4th, could have been 1/3rd.) of women in the states have been sexually assaulted (not necessarily raped). I find myself doubtful (but willing to be enlightened) that the number even approaches that for men. The prison situation might throw that doubt into doubt, though.

E: Entirely possible the male rape numbers specifically has surpassed female rape numbers, though. You didn't say specifically sexual assault, just rape.

[ChairmanPoo]

And it's victims vs incidents. It's not impossible to have a bigger number of female rape victim survivors, and still have more male rapes (with the same people getting raped over and over again).

Barbarossa is quoting an odd article from a blog, if I'm not mistaken, though. I don't know how good the sources on that site were...

[Virex]

People need to tell their children not to molest or hurt anyone just as much as they need to tell them that people may try to molest or hurt them, is what I think everyone can agree on.

And you think men rape women because they have never been told it was wrong? Rapists are not ignorant monsters, they're upstanding, apparently moral men who know damn well what they're doing and are too callous to care. Repeating what they shouldn't do only gives them more inspiration.

If you take a copper thief and say "it's wrong to steal cables from unused office buildings for the copper", what is the first thing he's going to think of?

One of the main thing people are always forgetting is that rapists are normal men, not some rabid savages that need education.

Also kinda' unsure about the numbers, there; last I remember getting hit with a fact sheet it's something like 25-50% (Honestly, I can't remember the exact number. Could have been 1/4th, could have been 1/3rd.) of women in the states have been sexually assaulted (not necessarily raped). I find myself doubtful (but willing to be enlightened) that the number even approaches that for men. The prison situation might throw that doubt into doubt, though.

I seem to recall that the number was at least 10%, but that's based on police reports.

[Willfor]

And you think men rape women because they have never been told it was wrong? Rapists are not ignorant monsters, they're upstanding, apparently moral men who know damn well what they're doing and are too callous to care. Repeating what they shouldn't do only gives them more inspiration.

I'm going to attempt to be polite here:

Please do not start talking about this subject, Virex. We have been down this road so many times, and the position where you've decided to start is only going to make this a more entrenched debate. One that will last more than fifteen pages, and where no one is going to give any ground because it's impossible to do so.