to worry about the accused?

[WitchWay]

DLT for example. How is anything going to be proven? Are people jumping on a bandwagon or am I very wrong to even think that? I don't condone abuse - far from it - but surely they can't all have been sailing along in JS's wake - can they?

Many victims of rape and sexual assault commit suicide as well, suzanne. Often because people don't believe them.

I am not sure where you are going with this?

I didn't see the comment that fcukkedup is referring to though. Maybe someone could point me in the direction of it.

SuzanneUK - your claims of being bullied might be more convincing if you stopped calling people rabid/man hating/fanatical/extremists who are against fair court proceedings simply because they disagree with you.

Report to MNHQ if you think you are being bullied - they take such reports very seriously. Just saying 'bully bully bully' on a thread does not make it so and is derailing. This thread isn't all about you. Neither is the subject of sexual violence.

Suzanne - when you have sat on the floor - make that laid - with a sobbing teenager throwing up bile - for night after night - because their real life world has been shattered - then please talk to me about internet bullying

you can try as hard as you like to make people disagreeing with you , on one thread, in an anonymous forum into victimisation of you - but it's not going to wash

as someone who has dealt with both the impact of abuse and the impact of internet bullying - I find your comparison at best pathetic and at worst insulting

I just copied and pasted it - there are 2.

I do think there's a difference between serious sexual assault & knowing that it was such & that it was wrong (assaulted & assaulter) & the sort of casual "sexist" minor level comments or touching that is ALWAYS wrong when aimed at a child but could be construed as part of life by someone older / more confident / more experienced. Where to draw the line, there's the problem. I hope all who are guilty of serious offences are found guilty & punished. I hope what was done in the spirit of "harmless fun" at the time & interpreted as such at the time is left out of it.

Women and girls are always being told to put up with sexual harassment and assault as 'harmless fun'. That is how it is got away with. It's the oldest trick in the book. And men know this and they know that younger women, in particular, are socialized to put up with it.

Unwanted sexual touching is never 'harmless fun' - it is sexual assault.

excellent posts at 9.50 and 9.53 Beach and Nice.

We were advised juries don't have the stomach for conviction even in the face of over overwhelming evidence even before our trail started

Suzanne- could you point out an example of the cyber bullying you have experinced? Just a simple cut and paste. Or is this another of the accusations you make and refuse to support with evidence?

Oh, and I am just about to report this thread and ask MNHQ to adjudicate on the bullying issue. As somebody else said, they take such things very seriously.

And part of socializing girls and women to put up with sexual assault as 'harmless fun' is people going on about what harmless fun it is and how anyone who complains about a (harmless, funny) 'pinch on the bum' (AKA sexual assault) is probably after money/lying/trying to damage a poor man's reputation/vindictive/loved it really.

Sexual assault generally escalates. Men have a grope here and a pinch there and see what they can get away with. Ha, ha, ha, it's all harmless fun and the girlies are flattered by it really, so I'll take it a bit further...

Thanks fcukkedup. Really sorry to hear of what your family has been through.

Thank you - personal experience tells me it is not being accused that destroys lives - the abuser in our personal case wasn't even found not guilty - hung charges

He is back in his job with his friends and family, we have moved, I've had to give up work as I'm too anxious about leaving DCs, we have lost a lot of friends who can't cope with the forever changed us.

I have now spoken to a lot of victims and their families and our story is familiar and sadly normal. In our society it is far easier to marginalise victims than to accept the possibility that someone we love and care about it an abuser because marginalising victims does not affect our own cosy world.

I'm very sorry to hear that fcukkedup. You are right, you family's experience of what happens to victims is very common, as you say.

There was another thread on here not that long ago about anonymity and a poster said the same. Their lives had been destroyed, not the perpetrator's.

Tabard I'm not keen to say it was all a harmless bit of fun because it clearly wasn't, but some of it probably was, and was taken and accepted as such at the time, even if with hindsight it was thought to have been unacceptable.

You don't know that, though do you? The women who are giving evidence in court, you don't know that they thought it was all harmless fun at the time, you can't know that. You weren't there, and you're not them

I also don't think it has ever been acceptable to put your hand up people's skirts? Most women will dismiss a pat on the arse but grabbing/fondling breasts and trying to get hands in pants is a different order of conduct surely?

NiceTabard - I remember Gia Milonovich's tweet about suffering sexual harrassment:

"It happens so often it's like the air I breathe"

That stuck with me - I feel like that - women just deal with it as part of life.

But WitchWay lots of the women (many who were girls at the time) say that they were afraid to report DLT at the time for fear of losing their jobs and or not being believed.

You do come across as trying to write it off as harmless fun when you say stuff like "but some of it probably was" and your use of the word 'hindsight' suggests that the women went along with it as harmless fun at the time (reports suggest the opposite), and only now that political correctness has gorn mad are they getting all indignant about a bit of slap and tickle (except it was indecent assault).

These women clearly say that they were upset and didn't see it as harmless fun. They were afraid of DLT.

Why are you proposing convoluted theories about harmless fun when we have the actual words of the women concerned who simply don't say that? Why don't we just Believe Them?

A grown man sticking his hand up a 15 year old girl's skirt is never 'a harmless bit of fun'. Even if she wasn't bothered by it (which is a sad indication of how indoctrinated we women are to low level sexual assault) he should still have known not to do it. She's 15, she can't, by virtue of being a child, consent to that behaviour. He's the adult, he should have known better. Look at the case recently where a teacher was having a sexual relationship with a pupil. People tried to argue that she knew what she was doing and it wasn't wrong. But even if she understood their relationship as well as a 15 year old possibly could, it is still inappropriate for a grown man (in a position of power and authority over a child) to have a sexual relationship with a child/young teen. He should still have known better.

We are still living in a society where an underage girl can be painted as the harlot, as acting in a deliberately sexually promiscuous way and rather than utter horror at what has happened in this girl's life for her to be expressing this kind of behaviour, we just think 'oh she's a slut, he couldn't help himself really'. Until we start challenging every 'harmless bit of fun', every bum pinch, crafty grope, inappropriate comment, then nothing will every change.

And I'll say it again, this is not a problem with an open justice system. It's a problem with the media; who cannot seem to get their head around responsible journalism v's sensationalist media and perpetuate rape myths and misogynistic attitudes to women because it sells papers. We're still campaigning to have the soft-porn taken out of the Sun FGS. Trial by media because it sells newspapers is the problem.

Yes I agree they ought to be believed (at least as a starting point) until the truths/untruths are unravelled. I'm not proposing anything convoluted, just offering an alternative opinion and perhaps playing Devil's advocate to stimuate discussion

With Stuart Hall as well there was a lot of talk initially about how it was just a bit of fun, went on in those days, ridiculous to judge what were perfectly reasonable everyday actions then by todays standards and so on.

I keeps being raised time and time again, with people seemingly not reading what these men have actually been accused of, or the ages of some of the victims.

There is also the trope of sexually knowing teenaged temptresses being trotted out over and again.

Basis for all of these comments are I think two ideas. 1. Women and girls lie about assault 2. Women and girls are randomly vindictive.

Various quotes from www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25745617

A radio announcer was in a "panic" as DJ Dave Lee Travis grabbed her breasts when she was broadcasting live on BBC Radio 4, his trial has heard.

The woman, who was a BBC trainee, said she had been frightened she would mess up an announcement but she could not tell her bosses as he was a "big star".

A second witness said Mr Travis touched her breast the first time they met.

Giving evidence behind a curtain, the first witness said Mr Travis had walked into the studio as she was about to go on air on Radio 4 in the early 1980s and sat down behind her as she read out the time.

"His hands came round under my arm pits and he put one hand on each breast," she said. "He started to move my breasts up and down."

The woman, who was 26 at the time, told the court Mr Travis held her breasts throughout her announcement which lasted about 10 seconds.

The woman said that in a second incident, Mr Travis "slid his hand" on her breast as he reached to take a pen away.

Asked by Ms Moore how she felt, the witness replied: "Terrified. Shocked. Sick."

Asked why she had not said anything, she said: "I had the job of my dreams. I had worked very hard to get where I was. I was initially terrified no-one would believe me."

The witness said women in the office "kept their heads bowed" when he walked in.

You know what it doesn't matter if they thought it was 'harmless fun' at the time. It was still illegal. It was still sexual assault. How a person feels about a crime does not diminish it as a crime.

However, as NiceTabard says you have no idea how they felt about it. I had a 'friend' of mine walk up to me in the middle of a room full of other men and touch my breasts for a dare. I am sure all the men in the room thought I accepted it and was OK with it at the time as I joked about it. I hadn't accepted it and I wasn't OK with it. I felt humiliated and worthless. These men thought it was OK to do that to me. That my boundaries meant nothing.

I am glad these women have had the courage to challenge a man with a sense of entitlement the size of Greenland.

The bit about the BBC cutting / changing a DLT intro so viewers wouldn't be able to see what he was up to is disturbing.

If that clip is still in existence presumably they can enlargen / clean it up and see in court what it looks like.

Dave Lee Travis described as 'opportunist' sex offender

You are playing 'Devils Advocate' with someone else's unhappy experiences WitchWay. That isn't a particularly nice thing to do when those people are victims of such a personal crime as sexual assault. No matter which you look at it you are invaolidating their experience.

Here is a good article on why playing Devil's Advocate is not necessarily a good thing.

WitchWay. Ah, I just saw your post about 'playing devil's advocate'.

We had a thread on FWR recently where we discussed how playing devil's advocate is really inappropriate when it comes to subjects like sexual violence.

It is really just doing the devil's work for him (described as playing the devil's idiot on the thread in question). Spouting rapey shit is spouting rapey shit whether it is what you really think or whether you are doing it as the 'harmless fun' of playing devil's advocate. It is misogynistic and it isn't harmless - it gives air space to nefarious views and encourages others to express them. It is also pretty disrespectful of people who actually care about sexual crime and who take the time to post sincere opinions on a thread.

Well done.