to think this poster is a heap of sexist woman-blaming SHIT?

[QueenOfFlamingEverything]

Here - a nice bit of misogynism from the police in Wales.

How about a big poster suggesting helpfully "Rape. Don't be a rapist. Use your dick sensibly. Rapists feature in 100% of rapes??"

I would love to see more posters like those AyeScream

I agree that the poster in the OP is more victim-blaming than anything else. I was stone cold sober when I got raped. A friend text me saying he needed to talk, I had promised to support him with cutting down his drinking and giving up drugs, so I went round. I got in the door and realised he had been drinking and tried saying I would come back in the morning when he was sober. He got his dog to guard me, a staffie, while he locked the door and hid the key. He came back removed the 3 layers of clothing I had on. I tried fighting back, with the self defense moves I knew, and nearly ended up with broken bones for doing so and he set his dog to guard again so if I tried fighting any more I would have been bitten badly as well. I then was raped for 3 hours in a variety of positions and if I had of resisted the dog would have had my neck before I could lay a finger on him.

I went to the police 3 days later when I could get out of the house without his gang alerting him that I was out as my regular routine was to not go out over those 3 days. by the time the police got to him I had had death threats off his girlfriend and was scared to even open the door. All the evidence after 3 days was circumstantial. I lost my home and life and best friend through this.

My best friend said I was making it up but then this guy was selling her cheap weed. The police gave me 2 hours notice that they were moving me for my own protection and I had to find somewhere to go. So I lost the house I was renting and ended up sleeping on a relatives couch for 6 month, not even being allowed back to see my parents or my son who was under their guardianship due to my mental health problems.

So come on you lot who say rape can be avoided. How could I have avoided this? Break my promise to someone I considered a friend when I never break a promise unless it is totally unavoidable?

So sorry he did that to you, LittleDragon.

I believe you. And care very much that rape is taken seriously because of stories like yours and all of the others who have shared so bravely.

Thank you all. You keep me fighting.,

I am still suffering from ptsd from this and still get the flashbacks. I, now, do have a very supportive DP, soon to be DH, who puts up with so much and have a very supportive, if not clued up, manager at the Charity shop where I work. Something in a donation brought on a flashbacks on Tuesday which ended up in me walking out the shop. She just phoned DP to let him know I'd walked out upset. I went in next day and nothing was said.

I am finally getting my life back on track now but it has taken 3 long hard years to do so.

What does make it a lot harder to deal with us the sexual abuse I suffered as a teen at the hands of an uncle and the fact I struggled to come to terms with both the abuse and the fact that most of the family, including my own mother, thought and said that I was trying to split the family up and was making it up just for the attention. This carried on even when he admitted it in court. He got 6 month for sexual abuse of 3 minors and was let out after 3 which just happened to land on my 16th birthday.

And then people say I'm just an attention seeker when I started self-harming and even more when I made a suicide attempt. Luckily since meeting DP my mood has levelled off and unless I stop taking my A. D. 's I have stopped the self-harm as I now have both DP and DS to live for.

Victims can never be held responsible for being attacked.
That's the attackers reason for concern.

But it's just a public information poster.

Honestly thought it was a poster from the 50's. Crap.

I always think it's interesting on these threads how often the focus is on what to tell your daughter, never what to tell your son, and yet the people doing the raping have to be someone's sons. So there should be just as much focus, no more on teaching our sons to be respectful always of other people, not to pressure or bully them and never to make assumptions. And whilst I will tell my children (they are 12 and 11 so not yet going out on their own too much) to learn how to manage alcohol so it doesn't manage them I think it just as important to tell my son that getting drunk might make him behave very badly because it reduces inhibitions as to tell my daughter that she might be more vulnerable.

Of course I don't think my son could ever rape anyone (I would of course be absolutely furious/devastated if he did anything even vaguely in that realm), but many people are raped by people that they thought were good and kind, so it must be possible that their mothers thought it impossible too.

Otherwise rape messages seem always to be aimed at women. Making them frightened and reducing their autonomy at the same time as reinforcing the false message that there is anything very much that you can to reduce the chance of being raped. Plus increasing the idea in society that women are to blame for most rapes, apparently simply by the very factor of being female.

That Herefordshire poster was good. I wonder if their conviction rate is higher than South Wales?

little dragon flowers and all the good stuff for you. Wish there was more we could do for you.

It's good to share and if my story eventually helps someone then I know all this suffering won't be in vain. That's my reward for getting through it.

AyeScream - if only you could have posted those examples way back on page 1, we could have avoided 15 pages of people trying to defend this shit.

lassylass, Whatmeworry and even SqueakyToy - can you not see that these poster are a zillion times better?

SqueakyToy (I've been lurking on this thread and the other one from the beginning) - you've been at such pains to differentiate stranger rape (~10% of rapes) from acquaintance rape (~90% of rapes) and say that the poster in OP is good, even though it focuses on that small minority of ~10% - surely even you can see that AyeScream's examples of better campaingns are good purely because they don't make this ridiculous distinction and instead focus on -

1. The rapist
2. ALL rape scenarios - stranger and acquaintance?

Let this thread die now with the hope that some people have had the hubcap-sized blinkers removed from their eyes.