on one side or the other (due to size-and-strength, or organizational power, or relative socio-economic power, or any other advantage) puts responsibility for the burden of No/Stop-comprehension in that position.

are opressed.

Do they expect everyone to perfectly intuit each other's intentions, personality, and intimate behavior at first glance? Just not go on dates, or risk having sex? Or sign a contract at the door, saying they forfeit any right to call the police until 2AM or such time as the date shall be conceded to be over by both parties?

WTF?

If you have three seconds to cum, and she says "stop," you had damned well better stop, especially if she's saying it because her back just went out or she's having an aneurysm.

As soon as something tragic befalls someone, we look for reasons why it will not happen to US. It is a defense mechanism. So, women find reasons why THEY will not lose control.

I too do this. Someone dies. I look for why, so I can conclude why I will not do likewise. The women doing this cannot be faulted too much. They are not thinking in terms of compassion, or the good of society, just self preservation.

Men have OTHER motivations for their judgmentality.

rape, and not blaming the victim, this is still the result.

and this was done in london? actually, if it were done around here, I would not be surprised, considering how many ultra-conservatives and fundies we have here.

The tendency to blame rape victims has resulted in competing theories to explain those conclusions reached by fault-finding observers. Observers' motivational needs have been broached by the "just world" theory (Lerner & Miller, 1978) and the need to protect one's own sense of invulnerability." (Schneider et. al., 1994).

The most well known theory behind victim blaming is the just world hypothesis. "Individuals that have a strong belief in a just world can have this belief challenged when they encounter a victim of random misfortune such as a rape victim. The individual wants to believe that the world is a safe, just place where people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. Even when evidence suggests otherwise, the individual is very reluctant to give up this belief that the world is not just. In the face of contradicting evidence, research suggests (Kleinke and Meyer, 1996) that people with a high belief in a just world will do one of two things: either they will try to eliminate the suffering of the innocent victims or else they will derogate them for their fate. Since it is impossible to reverse the crime of rape, and thus relieve the victim of her suffering, the rape victim is often subjected to derogation and blame. In this manner, the person who believes in a just world can maintain this belief as there is no longer a suffering person, but a woman who deserves her misfortune."

The invulnerability theory states that rape victims are a glaring reminder of our own vulnerability. No one likes to think they could loose control over their own body or life. By deciding a rape victim did something concrete to deserve the assault the observer creates a false sense of safety. If they can avoid doing that particular thing or action then they create the illusion of invulnerability for themselves.

According to the World Book Encyclopedia 2007 entry for "Rape" only 2% of accused rapists are convicted. In contrast FBI studies indicate that only 2% of all rape reports are false. "Low conviction rates result from insufficient evidence to prosecute, dismissal of trial due to technicalities and reluctance of victims to testify. For these reasons, low conviction rates do not imply false reporting". According to The New Encyclopædia Britannica rapists also have high acquittal rates due to the fact that there are often no witnesses to the crime.
http://www.ibiblio.org/rcip/vb.html

This is why I think the 1-in-4 women will be raped or attempted to be raped number is bs. In my experience it's more like 3-in-4.

amongst us. one of us had never been raped.

i read somewhere and dont have the info that 80% of women have been sexually assaulted or attempted rape

IIRC Sexual Harassment/Cat calling is dependent upon the neighborhood. A woman living in an urban environment will have a different experience than one living in an upper-class suburb. UN-surprisingly that parallels crime stats with the poor more frequently victimized.

IMO we need more detailed breakdown stats to determine if the statistical data is consistent with personal experience or not.

you are in the real world.

Actually checking some data points shows
Brookline, MA 5.4/100k $67k/person
Brockton, MA 66/100k $20k/person
Belmont, MA 17.1/100k $55k/person
Deerfield, MA 0.0/100k $31k/person
Chelsea, MA 91.1/100k $21k/person
Greenfield, MA 56.7/100k $22k/person

Numbers are from 2010 crime stats as posted on homefacts.com
Forcible Rape per 100,000 and Income per capita.

At the moment we can only speculate if the unreported cases track this distribution.

that women who are sexually assaulted are victimized in their home neighbourhood.

I imagine that many women who live in Brookline have lived elsewhere, worked elsewhere, gone to school elsewhere ...

Yes, a majority of women who are sexually assaulted knew their attacker.

The reason for the high income in Brookline is to a large extent the high level of education of the residents. I doubt that many of the high earners went to Newbury College in Brookline.

I don't disagree that multiply disadvantaged women (disadvantaged by class, race, disability status, etc.) are at higher risk of sexual assault.

But the figures you posted really don't mean that a woman currently living in Brookline has a lifetime risk of sexual assault that is 10 times higher than a woman living in Chelsea.

find me that person.

i gave you example of regardless of where a woman may live, or girl, how even then, she dares to go outside of that safe space for a number of reasons.

and doesnt that, in and of itself, sound pathetic.

I have seen many people who were born, have lived and will probably be buried in the same town. The locals call me a "blow in" because I have only lived in my current town for 15 years.

What seems most difficult to accept is that we have any idea what the form of the data should take without any evidence indicating one way or the other. Of-course I am biased and expect in mathematical terms the lifetime risk is a summation of the time spent exposed to each individual risk level. 1 day in Chelsea contributes X, one day in Deerfield is Y, and one date with male not otherwise specified is Z. Which I expect to produce something like a normalized distribution curve when plotted for each woman's individual lifetime risk. Either way knowing is important. Strategies for combating and evaluation the results of such depends upon accurately understanding the form of the data.

As to what started this. Assuming 20% of women in the US have been victimized. The probability that in any random group of 4 women exactly 3 have been victims is 2.4%, or 2.56% for three or more. Not unheard of but not common. If the rate is double either as a result of under reporting, location or by changing from random to 83yr old women (assumed life expectancy). Then we get a 25.6% probability of exactly 3. Thats just an FYI for you, I don't want to know your details.

To me fixing the problem is only hurt by assuming and/or guessing what the data must be. We can speculate as to causes and possible fix's. But without objective data there is no way to prioritize actions and measure results.

for me, as a woman, is experiencing it a life time and a man telling me the numbers are what is important.

you are purposely being obtuse using a small, high income town as the be all, end all of the issue.

purposely ignoring the fact NO ONE is cloistured every moment of their life in one little space.

done

i dont try, with closed mind to support a belief being defended.

I believe you mentioned earlier that the figures do not take into account non-reporting.

Intra-family sexual abuse of children, a majority of whom are girls, has an extremely low reporting rate.

There is no evidence that such abuse is less common in high-income households than in low-income households; there is evidence to the contrary in fact, that socioeconomic status is not a relevant factor. The same is true for spousal sexual assault, obviously a severely under-reported offence.

On the other hand, socioeconomic status does have an influence on mobiity. As I pointed out, a large proportion of the high-income households in Brookline will not consist of people born and bred locally. They will probably have been born elsewhere and attended postsecondary institutions in a different place again, for example, settling in Brookline because of the employment opportunities, and women in university are at relatively high risk of "date rape", for example.

So the data as you presented them simply fail to take into account a lot of things that are directly relevant here.

I don't know why you are "assuming" that 20% of women in the US have been sexually victimized. That assumption is completely out of line with any estimates based on actual research.

In my own immediate circle, I was a victim of a "classic" stranger rape: abducted, choked into submission, escaped with my life but just by the skin of my wits. My best friend was a victim of date rape in university. My nephew's mother was abused by her father. I could go on. I'd be hard pressed to name a friend who has not been the victim of sexual assault -- and, like the Canadian Criminal Code, I don't distinguish between vaginally penetrative assault and other sexual assault. All forms of sexual assault can be equally traumatizing for the victim, all of them have chilling effects on women's presence and participation in all spheres of our society.

and lectures me on the relevance and importance of numbers.

Mary Koss has decent data but it's old coming from 1986. http://www.soci270.carvajal.ca/documents/KossTheScopeofRape.pdf That work supports rates of 54% in this Self Reported study. The 20% figure comes from my memory of another self reported study. And it was more or less consistent with a comment upthread disparaging a statistical 1 in 4 (source unknown) with their personal experience.

Personal experience is based on knowledge of maybe a few hundred people, and a intimate knowledge of only a handful. We often times don't know if we are the exception or the rule. Although human nature is to assume our experiences are typical. I am truly sorry about your personal experiences and those of your friends. What statistics tell me, or can tell me, is how universal that experience is.

Not sure what I could have done back in college in the 80's when the Koss study was done. But it would of been nice to know about the scope of the problem then and not 30yrs later.

Peace and apologies for any offense I may have caused.

is what your goal here is.

It seems to some of us that it is to minimize the incidence of sexual assault against women, and that you are using questionable tactics to do that.

Did you read the title of the paper you linked to? And yet you didn't mention it?

The Scope of Rape: Incidence and Prevalence of Sexual Aggression in a National Sample of Higher Education Students

That is not an attempt to measure lifetime risk of sexual assault. It measured the experience of a group of people aged 18-24 in relation to experience since age 14 (an odd choice, since girls experience sexual assault and abuse before that age) and in the preceding year.

http://www.amptoons.com/blog/2010/07/31/no-ms-magazine-never-hired-mary-koss/

And I assure you, if I had wanted to be patronized, I had a stats professor who could have done that job a lot better ...



My nature is to think, when I hear virtually identical reports from virtually every woman I ever encounter -- that each of us would be hard pressed to find a woman in our acquaintance who has not been sexually assaulted -- that something is probably going on there.

Here's another anecdote, just because I feel like sharing. My mum was sexually assaulted by her obstetrician -- just a bit of "fondling", y'know. (A word I despise; molestation is not "fondling".) Some 10 years later, I was placed in an advanced elementary school class that I spent the next three years in. I was one of a handful from the wrong end of town; most of the others were from the leafy enclave in the north end where the school was located. The son of the obstetrician in question was in my class. For three years, my mum was faced with that scumball at every school function they both attended (and there were a lot of them: dramatic presentations, field trips, museums, festivals, weekend travel, parent meetings ...). I didn't know until much later, of course. I don't know whether my dad knew; probably, but now that I think about it, I'll have to ask her. There isn't any chance the pig in question even remembered my mum, an insignificant, unassertive, unconfident 22-yr-old working class woman who momentarily crossed his privileged, wealthy, older male field of vision. But his few minutes of victimizing my mum, and how insignificant and valueless that made her feel, have never left her mind.

Fortunately, by the time I heard about it, she had matured into a more confident woman with a proper analysis of the situation: that she had been victimized as a woman and especially a low-status woman, by a pig. Just as I, fortunately, was an assertive, knowledgeable 21-yr-old feminist when I was victimized, so I didn't experience any shame or self-blame. Not until the psychiatrist I consulted for post-traumatic stress a week later told me I had a rape wish and death wish, anyhow ... and a few months later when defence counsel had me confirm repeatedly that no reasonable person could have thought I was consenting and after answering "no" three times, I left the witness box wondering whether the man who had driven me to an abandoned quarry in a car with no interior handles and choked me into near-unconsciousness when I tried to kick out a window might really have thought that my subsequent nonchalant assertion that he'd only had to ask and I did that sort of thing all the time was "consent" ...

The sexual victimization women and girls experience comes in all colours of the spectrum and leaves very few of us untouched, and to try to minimize the incidence ... I don't know, why?

When I saw a post claiming distrust of statistics because it doesn't match personal experience. I referenced that we need to have Data, comprehensive data. There is a sad lack of data telling us exactly what the current situation is. How has it changed recently? etc. Your giving me anecdotes is like telling me everyone you know is voting for Obama. I'll feel better if the Suffolk University poll tells me everyone is going to vote for Obama.

I would like to know if the increased reporting requirements for teachers etc is making a difference? What about other programs in the schools to help young girls who are being abused by family members?
Has the dating scenario changed since 86. Are boys more respectful or less?

Honestly I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't want to know if we are making life better for our young girls or not. I do not understand the reluctance of some to obtain anonymous comprehensive data.

P.S. The study I linked to highlighted that 54% of women aged 18-24 had been the victims of sexual aggression. And again since there is no comprehensive set of statistics available we don't know how this has changed over the years or what a woman's true lifetime risk is.

The "data" you referred to -- the (antiquated) Koss study -- did NOT say what you depicted it as saying. You minimized the findings of that study horrifically and completely inaccurately.

The "assumption" you made, that 20% of women in the US are sexually victimized in their lifetime, is a number you apparently pulled out of a hat and conflicts with every actual study I've ever encountered.

Actually, I'd be pretty confident that the personal experience reflects the huge and completely well known under-reporting of sexual offences against women. Since that phenomenon is so well known and established, we don't know why you're offering up data that disregard it.


I don't have a clue what you're talking about, that's what I don't have. What would you like us to do, go stand on the streetcorner and stop every 10th woman and submit a series of questions you have approved?


Your speaking to me like this is like you presuming to teach your grandmother how to suck eggs. I'm not liking it very much. If you want some nice numbers to crunch, why don't you go find some? instead of looking specifically for anything you can find that will discredit the knowledge and experience of the women here? (the Brookline etc. list really didn't help your credibility any more than the misportrayal of the Koss research ... which you have failed to address ...)

stuck his hand between my legs and pushed up my vagina.

just the first. at 12. that i remember.

i can keep listing them out if i need.

that is called..... sexual assault. not ..... boys will be boys.

Yes it's called sexual assault now. And supposedly boys get expelled for it now.
Has it fixed the problem?

One assumes you did when you first posted in it.

How have you got to where you are now in this discussion?

What's with the Socratic method here? If you have a point or points you would like to make, do you want to just go ahead and make them?

IMO we need more detailed breakdown stats to determine if the statistical data is consistent with personal experience or not.

Although you and seabeyond have encouraged me to do my own research.
Seems the Boston area Rape Crisis Center and the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network are in agreement on a woman's lifetime risk.

that puts me off a little. Maybe the complete absence of any analysis.

http://www.ntn24.com/news/news/rape-touches-one-five-us-women

That's so way far off what the RAINN site says (appreciated if you provide the actual links):

http://www.rainn.org/statistics



Once again, of course, the survey focused on a very specific form of sexual assault, and does not take into account events like my mother suffered -- which sounds trivial on the retelling ... to someone not paying attention, anyway.

It also appears not to take into account the fact that rape is underreported even in such surveys because women often do not describe what they have experienced as rape, even where it meets an actual legal definition.

And of course that "nearly one in five" refers to the experiences of the women surveyed to the date of the survey, and not subsequently.

raped. you are miminalizing the womens experiences in harassment, assault and rape. we are pointing out to you repeatedly that women experience this from the youngest of age, and beyond.....

that is the discussion of the post.

unless you are moving the goal post.

who have not experienced unwanted sexual attention, from cat-calls all the way to stranger rape. On top of that, all the women I've talked to about this also say that they know very few other women who haven't been through the same exact thing. And the stories are all the same; an unwanted touch, completely inappropriate comments at work, horrible things screamed at them from complete strangers, drugged in a bar, almost forced into a car by a group of strange men, date raped after they said "NO!", stalked, having some guy try to break into your house even if you caught him doing it before, a boyfriend raping them when they were asleep, etc, etc, etc. And I didn't even get to all the shit that happens to women during childhood.

ETA: I wanted to chip in because I think it was my 1-in-4 post that might have started this sub-thread. I was referring to the Koss study, which I though everyone here would know about since it is the Feminist Group we're all posting in.

Today, I have no words. I feel so beaten down by the responses to the latest 'discussion' of rape in General Discussion that I am too exhausted to keep going today. Yuck. And shame on anyone who won't look at rape as the exclusive fault of the rapist.

Any attempt to examine the thought processes that would lead to the comments that have been made and defended will be avoided at all costs. The energy extended for the sole purpose of obfuscating the issue is at once unbelievable and tragically all too familiar.

That's how deep-seated this shit is. That's how important it is, to some people, to avoid seeing it.

Women blaming other women for being raped, because of how they're dressed or when or where they are. The implementation of the rape culture has been very successful.

Shows how well we condition women to act a certain way. And to come down hard on anyone who doesn't conform to gendered norms.

we don't think it will happen to us. its not so much an issue of internalized sexism but an end result of the constant fear of being raped.

She was a younger, 20-something woman and I was in my early 40s. So we are of different generations. She was adamant that even if a woman goes to a frat party, gets totally smashed and is date-raped (or aquaintance-raped), then it's totally the guy's fault.

My deal is this: I am not really concerned about "fault." Would you rather get raped or be right? I would rather teach women ways in which rape is MORE LIKELY to occur, so they may PROTECT themselves. This does NOT let rapists off the hook or suggest that in any way, shape or form, women would EVER deserve to be raped.

If you drink to excess (maybe at all, given the drugs which can easily be slipped into drinks), you make yourself more vulnerable. If you go off to a guy's dorm room, same thing.

the rapist, raped.

That isn't actually an entirely reasonable thing to say. Our society does concern itself with fault. All human societies always have. We have laws and we punish lawbreakers. We assign blame and consequences.

It is reasonable, I agree, to help people protect themselves. If anybody had sat me down and somehow managed to get it across to me that the world was not all like me, that hitchhiking around the country wasn't a matter of just exposing one's self to random "bad rides" and the low odds of encountering them -- that there were real bad people out there looking for me (which was what did happen) -- I might have thought twice.

Same thing for many risks we are subject to. If kids were actually talked to about what the risk of unwanted pregnancy is and means, rather than just being told not to have sex, or told to be careful, they might be more successful at avoiding unwanted pregnancy. Equipping people with knowledge and strategies to avoid risks is not a bad thing. It's a good thing.

It needs to be accompanied by the lesson that failing to avoid a risk is not grounds for feeling shame. I've said this about unwanted pregnancies a lot: that what women feel now, when they have an unintended pregnancy, is stupid and unworthy. The same applies to women who are sexually assaulted (who of course may also suffer the shame often imposed on women who engage in sexual activity at all, even coerced). They failed to avoid a risk they could have avoided if they had only ..., and this makes them to blame for what happened to them, because a more intelligent, more worthy person would have avoided it.

Myself, I was excessively smart, but also young, naive and obstinate. And broke; never forget that women don't always have better choices available than the one that led to the problematic event. It would have taken a fair bit of work to persuade me that the risks involved in hitchhiking on a lovely sunny August day with a male friend in peaceful southwestern Ontario on a well-travelled highway, rather than spending the cigarette budget on a bus ticket to visit my parents hours from where I lived, outweighed the benefits.

The lesson I did need was to trust my instincts. That's a really important one for women to get. My male friend wasn't going as far as I was, I didn't like the ride because he was dull and had already given off a slightly creepy vibe, I was going to get out where my friend did and pick up another ride before my route veered off from what the ride had said his direction was a couple of hours farther down the road, my friend said it was a good ride and why not stay with it, and I did. My gut sent me increasingly stronger messages after that, but it was too late.

Give people the knowledge they need in order for their instincts to work, help them devise strategies for avoiding risk and dealing with situations when it materializes. Help them to be agents, to direct their own destinies. In all imaginable ways.

But if they don't manage to acquire those skills, or fail to apply them in some given circumstance, and that is the time someone else victimizes them, never ever let them accept blame, let alone use any discourse of blame in talking about it. Help them to learn lessons from the experience, about themself and about the world.

And acknowledge that no matter how savvy a woman is, there are situations where her strategies will not succeed. Women do not always have alternatives; some women have to work late at night, some women have to live alone without adequate security measures. And all women just have to go out into the world all the time and cannot predict who else is going to be there and cross their path. And women do have to trust other people, and misplaced trust is not always a personal failing.

I'm saying all this because I think it is really important to focus on women's ability to protect themselves, rather than on the normative discourse of how women should protect themselves or are responsible for protecting themselves (and not saying it directly in response to the post above). Given information and help to strategize, that ability will be enhanced. Just saying women oughta do it will not necessarily help them to avoid risks, and it may lead to further self-blaming by women.

that another poster made a thread about in GD? The poll that was really just flame bait? What is up with those kinds of posts I've been seeing lately? They all seem to involve the same posters and also seem to exist just to taunt feminists. But I'm probably just getting my panties in a twist.

seem to want to taunt.

but i dont have the answer to your question.