"What about the men that get raped?"

'any bloke whose gut reaction to women organising against violence is to go on the defensive about how badly done to men are is a massive nobhead. as on the internets, so in real life. '

I find this so insensitive. How does the op know whether or not her friend has been a victim of sexual abuse or rape? Feminists on the whole know how difficult it is to report rape and why. They know the trauma which can be caused by sexual assault. And they know the trauma caused by others refusing to accept that rape and sexual assault happens. Why would this be extended to male victims just because they are male? This is exactly what it looks like to me.

Yep.

I sometimes feel a bit bad about not speaking out about when I was raped.

But I just can't face it. Not because of the rape, I've long got over that, but I don't want to see that look of disbelief. Couldn't face it.

If all of us did, would that disbelief go?

and what posts have brought you to that conclusion lynette?

HB - yes and no. I told nobody at the time and not for years after. An abusive boyfriend told my mother as an act of spite about ten years later. For some reason I have told partners but none (apart from the current one) have been able to process the information and were unable to offer any help which is probably what I was looking for when I told them.

I've just finished a year of counselling which has been amazing. Really hard but life changing. I've talked to my sisters in the last year about it all and found out that of the four of us 3 have been sexualy abused. I think that if everyone was to speak out on one day about their abuse then it would be impossible for society to refuse to see the epidemic of abuse that we are in. But I understand why victims wouldn't/ couldn't speak out publicly. My life went much the way of your friend's and thoughts of what might have been if I hadn't been raped have driven me mad tbh. There's no way of knowing.

Would you like to evidence that LS.

LOL at SF. Oh so true.

Yes I did think of that Vesuvia, but I'm not sure if the attacks happen in town centres do they? Don't they happen away from areas with lots of people around? So young women are perfectly happy to wander round the street in a town centre where the streets are busy and everyone is out and about, but they make up the majority of the taxi-queue at the end of the night - they don't walk home by themselves.

I think drunken attacks are often caught on CCTV, but deliberate targeting, in order to rob or rape someone, usually happens where there are no witnesses or cameras.

The truth is, many women calling themselves feminists don't believe men and women are equal.

Men are way down there with pond life.

This thread makes that clear.

HerBeatitude wrote - "how could you take a demographic snap-shot of who is on the street at any given time?"

CCTV cameras are watching our every move in town centres.

Earwicga, my friend had an incredibly loving, supportive mother who was convinced that if she reported it, she would feel better because she would have "done something" about it, even if they never found the attacker and it never got to court.

I'm not sure that was the case tbh, I think for many years the way she was treated by the police traumatised her so much that maybe she would have been better off not bothering. (She took drugs, got into abusive relationships, etc.) But who knows, pthere's no way of knowing what effect taking one road instead of another has, is there?

I hope you got all the support and love you needed. So many women don't.

Well of course it is, no one on a feminist thread would argue rape is acceptable.

Although it's quite incredible how many people outside this space find it acceptable. They pretend they don't, or they genuinely think they don't, but they refuse to recognise rape when it happens. Or if they do recognise it, they say victims are partly to blame.

It's true that young men are more likely than any other demographic group to be attacked on the street, but I read somewhere that that is purely because they are more likely to actually be on the street - if you analyse how many women are on the street at the same time as young men, you might find that in fact, young men are being attacked according to their proportion on the street, IYSWIM. I'm not sure if anyone could ever do that analysis, because how could you take a demographic snap-shot of who is on the street at any given time? Anyway, that's what RtN is about isn't it - the fact that the streets are inhabited by young men at ngiht, because no-one is telling them that it's their fault they get attacked, because they should have had the sense to get a taxi, while women are restricting their lives, their opportunities for exercise and spending their hard-earned money on taxis when they would walk if they didn't have the fear of rape.

I dont' know that it is HB. I think it is impossible to quantify. I didn't report. Your friend was so brave to report, she was the same age as me. What bastards.

Yes LittleRedDragon.

It is still unacceptable, surely that's the important thing!

Earwicga, sorry to hear about your experience, but stranger rape accounts for 25% of reported rape. Given that the vast majority of rape goes unreported, it is rare - stranger rape is one of the rapes where a victim is more likely to be believed and treated sympathetically by the police and courts and more likely to get a conviction, and so of course women are more likely to report it. (Although a friend of mine who was fourteen years old at the time was told to go away and stop wasting police time with attention-seeking when she was raped by a stranger, however that was 30 years ago now.)

But between 60% and 85% of rape goes unreported and most of that will not be stranger rape.

No worries seth - I shouldn't get insulted and it's not like ISNT meant to be insulting. Some days I am more sensitive than others.

so sorry to hear that Earwicga.

'Stranger rape is rare, yes,'

It's not, stranger rape account for 25% of reported rapes. Every time I read a comment like this I feel insulted. I was raped by two strangers. Thousands of women are. It's not rare for all of us.

This is from the website:

'Men can support the Reclaim The Night march by joining the London Pro-Feminist Men?s Group solidarity demonstration. Meet by the Edith Cavell statue, opposite the National Portrait Gallery at 6pm on Saturday 27th November to make your protest against violence against women.'

ANd also, at the risk of sounding like a man-hating paranoid, let's not forget that some bad men really would love to get in on a march like this, because the excitement of terrorizing a woman who has previously been traumatized but now thinks herself safe - well that would be serious jollies for a certain type of extremely bad person. As Dittany suggested, it would have been quite feasible for the man who killed those women in Ipswich to have gone along on the protest march and had the time of his life feeding his disgusting twisted little ego.

It's not just about rape though it's about a whole range of abuse and assault that (mainly) women are subjected to.

And about the significant minority of men who behave like this. Stranger rape is rare, yes, but being followed, having some random grope you, having a group of men shout stuff, all of that stuff is pretty common. So there must be quite a few men out there doing it - and it's all of that stuff that makes your average women feel cautious/nervous/scared.

I also think that OP's friend misunderstands what it is about.

Oh FFS the OP's friend is a bellend! 'Bwaaah, wat about the MENZ?' is one of those arguments that every feminist (and every woman who ever wonders aloud about any kind of evidence that women are not yet treated as fully equal human beings) gets very tired of hearing.

Even though it appears that, statistically, men walking the streets at night are more at risk of attack (not sexual assault but being mugged, or set on for having the wrong colour football shirt on or whatever) than women, men are rarely advised to stay at home after dark, or blamed for becoming victims of muggers. It's not that I have no sympathy for men who do get raped or suffer domestic violence, I wouldn't wish domestic or sexual violence on anyone and I appreciate that a male rape victim may feel that he won't be believed and that there will be no support for him etc. That's bad, and your friend is at liberty to, for instance, get involved with this organisation. However, trying to muscle in on an event for women who have been victims of male violence is not helpful to anyone. Especially not the women. And they matter.