R4 interview with woman raped by her father

abigailsnan · Today 12:15
I am so sorry, that is horrific. 💐🫂

Probably family rape is the easiest of all to get away with.

There may well be far more cases of rape than we think.

And we are not permitted to feel safe. There are no places in which women can refuse entry to men. Not at home, not at church, not in women's groups, not rape crisis centres...nowhere.

So why should prison sentences for abhorrent perverts such as this be stringent? When society in general is telling women just how little they matter- why would it demonstrate the opposite by imposing the harshest measures?

abusive men are completely free to assault women and girls with no consequences, or next to no, consequences

This ^ we need to realise this is the world we live in. This is our reality. We live in a rape culture. Only 1 in 1000 rapists get convicted.

@abigailsnan I am so very sorry 💐

Finding this thread has brought back horrific memories of my childhood which I have always had of a father who would encourage my mum to go out with our next door neighbour to the local bingo for a couple of hours when he took the opportunity to abuse me he also took me to the cinema and did the same thing in a secluded part of the seating area.This went on for a few years with the threat that me & my sisters would be sent into care if mum found out,when I started questioning him he stopped the abuse but I am convinced he then started abusing my younger sister & also my younger brother,I told my mother and got the hiding of my life for telling lies.i am now 74yrs old and the memories still haunt me

When I worked in a care home for adults with learning disabilities, we had a young woman come to live there who'd previously lived at home in the care of her father and older brother after she'd aged out of the residential college she'd been at. She was severely mentally impaired, mostly non verbal and had somewhat limited mobility.

When she arrived, a staff member who'd known her at the residential college mentioned that she seemed far more withdrawn than they remembered and that she refused to be near male staff, which she hadn't previously.
About a month after she arrived, we couldn't get her out of bed and she was in obvious distress. It turned out that she was in early labour. The father and brother each blamed the other. I don't know if either were arrested in the end.

@RoyalCorgi what an absolutely dreadful story. That poor girl had to go back to the house with him? Oh it’s all so depressing.

I was so glad she was able to set ED straight after he described when she endured as an "incestuous relationship ". She is an amazing woman.
Her rapist served 18 months of his sentence.

Mammillaria · Today 10:30
It's as if if you live in the same house as a man you're implicitly consenting to be harmed by them - even if you are a child

So true.

^This has been such a difficult thread to read. My school friend was repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted by an uncle. I encouraged her to tell the school and her Mum. This got her into loads of trouble, then it was all brushed under the carpet. The awful shock of realising the adults actually didn't care. She never spoke of it to me again, just drifted away and went slowly off the rails for a few years*.

Oh no, that is so awful, sad and utterly bleak. That poor little girl. I hope that knowing you believed her and cared may have been some comfort to her over the years.

Shelefttheweb · Today 10:32

I do understand why you are bringing TRA up, but this particular testament, involving as it does the incest and rape of a child and the birth of a victim of that rape, is so harrowing that I think most people here want it to have as much of its own space for discussion and sympathy as possible.

@Shelefttheweb you are quite wrong. I have a lot of sympathy for your political position. But this is not the subject of the thread. Why try to take it over?

The awful shock of realising the adults actually didn't care.

I think that's so devastating to someone's mental health. The attempts to rationalise or justify or just... not do anything. It must really do a number on your self-worth and ability to trust your judgements, to calibrate how you are valued as a person in society, in your family. It's just completely screwed up.

I appreciate you don’t want to acknowledge the impact of the very anti-woman/girl culture put forward by TRAs but pretending they are unrelated doesn’t make it so. If young girls are told they cannot have boundaries in front of men, that they are hateful if they fail to strip off in changing rooms in front of men and boys, how can they do so when it is their father telling them they must do so? If queer theorists are trying to destroy boundaries and lower ages of consent then how can young girls avoid coercion? If schools are discussing sex toys at primary and playing dice games over how to pleasure a man, how can a young girl realise what she is going through is abusive? If men attend or run rape counselling sessions because they claim to be women, how can a young women traumatised by men get support to recover?

It's as if if you live in the same house as a man you're implicitly consenting to be harmed by them - even if you are a child

So true.

This has been such a difficult thread to read. My school friend was repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted by an uncle. I encouraged her to tell the school and her Mum. This got her into loads of trouble, then it was all brushed under the carpet. The awful shock of realising the adults actually didn't care. She never spoke of it to me again, just drifted away and went slowly off the rails for a few years.

Sentences are substantially longer now and this would have a starting point of 16 years.

These cases are very rarely publicised because victims' anonymity makes it difficult to write reports about the offenders.

www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/offences/crown-court/item/rape-of-a-child-under-13/

@Shelefttheweb yes, very rude, and you are doing your cause no good at all by shoehorning it into any tangentially related debate.

I’ve come across people I’ve worked with who have similar stories, it’s beyond infuriating

My reflections on why these men get away with it…it’s not so much they see women as nothing, but they see women as no threat. A lot of these men operate with a competitive hierarchical mindset, constantly assessing where they are in the pecking order, always trying to be top dog, Obviously some men are no threat to them, some men they need to spar with to decide their position but all women are no threat. When I look at it like this, the only thing higher on the hierarchy than all men should be and is the law. The law and the punishments are the ultimate Top Dog.

That’s why I have such a visceral reaction to 3 fucking years. The law is the only thing that stops all these men, the only guaranteed thing that is higher than all of them on the hierarchy.

And the problem then is that some of these men are part of the system of law, using their positions to keep their ‘ultimate competitor’ constrained, sparring and gaming with the laws in their favour.

Anyway, the only thing we as women can do imo is lobby for better laws. I don’t think it would be nothing to do that and it would make a difference and I think we sometimes forget was is possible from lobbying for law changes. I feel a lot of feminists have been diverted by the trans issue, which is definitely important, but it’s come at the cost of issues like this.

I’m so sorry @Shodan 💐thanks for sharing. You’re right. There are far too many mothers making excuses and letting their sons hide behind them and from justice.

MoltenLasagne · Today 21:52
I don't understand how the justice system can be structured so that a man can get only 3 years for this crime. It just baffles me.

It is repeated over a decade, it breaks the most fundamental moral rules of protection of your children, it has resulted in the birth of a further victim, it involved trying to cover up using his "pillar of the community" reputation. How, just how, do those multiple factors added to the fact that it was rape not result in a minimum sentence of decades?

And I think she said he only served 18 months.

The stories people are sharing on this thread are very distressing, and sickening in the truest sense.

And still the narrative avoids talking about the sheer numbers of abusive predatory males involved in raping and abusing and killing women. We are right to be fearful and seek to make our own separate spaces. But none of the commentary actually names male abuse as being a male thing.

Shodan nails it with “I was nothing but an object, a means to his ends”

That is exactly how a lot of men view women. Not as people, as a thing that is required to provide the actual human person (man) with his desire.

The gay males who want to have genetic children show this in full daylight. It’s the only time in their lives they require a female body, and the dialogue and language used by some male gay couples around the use of egg donors and gestational carriers really shows how the women involved are not seen as people at all.

I think the only reason heterosexual men are not as outwardly dehumanising towards women is because they know they can’t always get away with force when they want to have sex.

I saw a horrendous interview with two lovely women on tv last night whose daughters had been brutally murdered by their partners. Again, the law gave them a much reduced sentence compared with if they'd done the same thing to a stranger. It's as if if you live in the same house as a man you're implicitly consenting to be harmed by them - even if you are a child.

The way you’ve summed this up is just so harrowing to read @AmuseBish , because it’s so true and fucking heinous.

Well said, Shodan, and I’m so sorry for what happened to you. It is harrowing.

I remember watching a television documentary years ago that was part of a project to record the memories of very elderly people, born in the 19th century. Several women, then in their 80s or 90s, described how their fathers had abused, or attempted to abuse them, and they had to suffer in silence. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. I'll never forget one woman who detailed how her father tried to climb into her bed, but her mother realised and went into the room and threw him out. Then from that moment onwards her mother slept in her daughter’s room and was eternally vigilant to make sure it never happened again.

It just made me well up with admiration for that mother, protectiveness for the young girl, and rage for the father. And it’s STILL HAPPENING. To girls who don’t have anyone to protect them.

On a far lesser scale but...

I was sexually abused by my eldest brother, several times, when I was 10. He was 20. The purpose of this abuse was an initiation into a gang, apparently. I didn't know, at age 10, that what he was doing was wrong.

But when I was an adult, I knew. And I told my mother. She...was not very supportive. She spent the rest of her life making excuses for him, and trying to tell me how penitent she thought he was.

Except he wasn't. And he would get violently angry if anyone tried to take him to task about it. In his mind, you see, I was nothing but an object, a means to his ends.

Some men are horrible, disgusting, perverted, violent people. They can hide behind their 'safe' persona- priest, tv celebrity, pillar of the community, police officer...'transwoman'.

And then there are those who excuse those men. Women, like my mother, who minimise, excuse, defend- I don't know why. Other men, who possibly are hiding their own secrets. And others, who will use violence to put down a woman who dares challenge their 'liberal' views.

And that is why this terrible matter connects with the transgender issues. Because very few perverted men commit their horrific acts in plain view. They hide behind costumes, personas, and no-one can ever tell. It's as much about power as about the sexual act itself.

Men want power over women. Some men will stop at NOTHING to gain and retain that power. Some women will want them to have that power, too.

So we must fight on.

Sorry. That was lengthy.