I have a 13 y o DD and I would no more let a strange 18 year old man to “take her out” than I would fly to the moon! That was completely inappropriate, and no wonder it ended badly!@AnchorWHAT
There’s a big difference between being “strict” and actually taking care of your children. OP’s parents, too, might have liked to think they were “strict”, but they weren’t actually assessing risk accurately or taking care of her welfare.
In answer to a pp, no, not having had those experiences doesn’t mean that one is “oblivious” to predatory male behaviour. It means that those of us who didn’t experience it were a combination of very lucky, and/or better protected in some way. In this case, OP’s parents were oblivious to what was happening to her — and they weren’t taking care of her in key areas, like allowing some odd behaviour around boundaries (porn DVDs), not actually knowing the friends’ dads she was staying with well enough, not having a good enough relationship with her so that she could feel able to tell them when she had scary experiences.
And, despite the fact that it ought to be the case that young teens can walk alone or in small groups, there are good reasons why parents drive kids that age to friends’ houses, etc. As a parent you can’t prevent this kind of stuff happening, but you can reduce the likelihood of it happening to your kid by having a good relationship with them, being aware of and taking real care about what they are doing and who with. As I said upthread, my mum was a child protection social worker, and she was very vigilant about looking after us — we definitely did not have the free range childhood some posters talk about in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, we were never left with male relatives/babysitters/any male friends of my parents; and she was pretty good at making sure we were safe (without being overprotective). She had had several experiences of assault or harassment when she was young in the sixties and seventies, and she was good at making sure we were safe and also that we know what to do if we encountered any predatory behaviour.
I certainly encountered plenty of this stuff when I was an older teen or student age, so it was out there; but I was really lucky not to have encountered too many unsafe situations and yet still have had a degree of freedom (eg going youth hostelling in a small group alone at sixteen, travelling on my own around the country aged 15+, and so on). It probably didn’t hurt that I was a spiky, awkward “alternative” teenager with glasses and a serious case of resting bitch face, to be honest.
Honestly, it ought not to be the case that the experiences that the OP had are thought of as normal. They ought not to be. We shouldn’t be talking about being exposed predatory and inappropriate behaviour as some kind of life education for the streetwise. It’s unacceptable for any girl to experience these things, full stop. And it’s partly parental failure and partly a wider culture of societal failure here.