To think some online dating SA victims need to take more responsibility for their choices?

[Iatethelastbiscuit]

Last night I watched a bbc documentary about the high number of sexual assaults that occur on dates from app dating sites like Tinder. It’s horrific obviously and I’m not victim blaming here but some of these young women will chat to a guy for a few days then invite him over to their house or go to his house for a date. In the doc there was a lot of talk about how apps can keep women safe (annoyingly they kept saying “keep people safe” when we all know it’s women who are at risk), suggesting the apps do stuff like age verification and run background checks on every member. Never once was it mentioned that it might be a good idea if women took a bit of responsibility for their own safety. Eg. Some basic safety tips like meet in a public place, don’t invite a total stranger over to your house etc. The fact that all the women who were sexually assaulted in this doc had done this was quietly ignored. Are people so paranoid of looking like they’re victim-blaming these days that they’re ignoring the most basic safety rules?! No it’s not a woman’s fault if she’s assaulted but young women need to be learning how to stay safe. There will always be predators out there, that’s not going to magically change if an app brings in background checks (which won’t make a difference for most anyway). Women need to learn how to stay safe and the bbc needs to not be so woke that they’re too afraid to give women safety tips for fear of looking like they’re victim blaming!!

Sorry meant to say thanks to the kind people on the thread - it means a lot 🙏

She keeps bringing her own experience into it! Not me! She brings it up repeatedly, and I'm responding. And I genuinely was just trying get across that I think her opinion may be skewed on this issue, because of understandable complicated feelings.

She seems angry at people who think risk reduction is a good idea, and insists that means they cant know what its like to be raped (untrue) and they must be blaming rape victims (also untrue), as though everyone who thinks risk minimisation is important is some ignorant monster. While simultaneously admitting she blames herself, which is both horribly sad (and makes me feel terrible for her, as I said) but also makes me think her argument is fundamentally hypocritical.

And yeah, I do find it upsetting to be told that I can't possibly imagine what it's like to be afraid to disclose sexual harm because of being blamed, after I've specifically told the person I know exactly that. I find it a little shitty that you’re jumping down my throat for simply engaging in a thread.

Regardless, on the topic, I do think it's entirely possible, and sensible, to engage in teaching risk reduction, while not blaming rape victims even an ounce.

@OtterlyAstounding that is absolutely 100% not what I said or intended at all and you know it. I too am leaving this thread because it’s all just too fraught for me, and maybe you too.

@5128gap Society doesn’t bring up the child though. Parents do that. Some parents are bloody awful themselves and don’t see what dc are like and certainly don’t parent adequately .

However it seems schools, work colleagues and others don’t notice “an wrong un” either. So what, exactly, should society do? I’m not parenting all these dc who might rape but should social workers remove dc from parents? At what point should Society act? On whose judgement? Who is spotting the issues? Schools? They just exclude for poor behaviour. So who in society can do anything? We already have life imprisonment as a deterrent and it clearly isn’t. So what should Society do?

OP, I do agree that common sense must be employed.
If a woman posted on here, saying that she’d invited a strange man over to her house for a first date, everyone would be asking her what the fuck she was thinking!

They're all valid questions. I work with women including survivors, not perpetrators, so I don't have the answers.
My point is, we should be looking for them. Something happens to those baby boys at some point on their journey to manhood and we need to understand what.
Various factors have been identified, how women are portrayed in our society and attitudes towards us. Influences from media. Toxic masculinity. Poor conviction rates that mean rape is not such a high risk activity as we might like to think.
Thsts just a handful of things society should be addressing. There's experts in the field who could offer more.

@5128gap Poor conviction rates are poor evidence. Many cases don’t get to court at all. They are too weak in evidence and will fail. Presenting watertight evidence and “beyond reasonable doubt” are key elements in a criminal trial - and they should remain so.

I listed who is in contact with most dc as they grow up. Most of the external factors you list can be controlled to some extent by parents, but dc respond differently. How do we know who the vulnerable dc are in terms of going on to be rapists? Most parents don’t seem to know. Plus parents are into the things you mention themselves.

Yet some men are wonderful human beings with poor parenting, but others are not. Do genes make a difference? It’s always been the case, long before the Tates and social media, that men raped and treated women badly - look at the Ruth Ellis case.

There’s always been men who started off as reasonable dc, but change. Some dc are pretty awful from a fairly early age and some have appalling role models for parents and sometimes no parenting at all that’s worth having. The Jury on tv is displaying poor parenting right now. We don’t know how it pans out, but it’s a true case. Dc are failed. So unless we intervene far more than we do when it’s obvious a child is being failed, what can be done?

Unfortunately just because someone knows something is wrong and illegal, they don’t refrain from doing it. Even murder! I’ve always felt we do have people who don’t respond to good parenting either but an awful lot of men have not been brought up well and are indulged.

I don't disagree with you that there are problems with the way our society parents boys.
Parents too have been raised in a society that sees women as secondary to men and this is internalised and creeps down the generations.
The push back against this, which has given us more rights and protections, has also strengthened the men as victims of women narrative, that's as old as Adam and Eve.
So we do have parents teaching their boys through subtle messaging that women are bad. So they must be on their guard, take no nonsense, beware of our traps. There's a thread on here at the moment about a young man who's girlfriend is pregnant that illistrates this well. Many posts accusing her of trapping him, asserting that her decision over her body should be his decision.
The 'date' rapist epitomises this. They are not typically skulking on the edge of society, waiting in the bushes. They are 'ordinary' men who've grown up believing their wishes are more important than those of women and girls. That women will tempt and tease them and then trick them. That if women don't want them to have sex with them, they shouldn't invite them into their homes.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not reducing every rapist to a sociological blue print. There are psychological drivers too. But while we are stuck as a society with the mindset of women as the subordinate sex, the real villains, that even some women internalise, then we are raising men in fertile ground for those psychological drivers to grow.

Please tell us the various legal categories of rape?

There are two types of victim, according to some. Those who did everything they could to avoid it and those who were just asking for trouble.

The judgement of other women is horrible

I agree with both those comments. This thread is so incredibly depressing. Some open disdain and judgement, many I’m not judging but…

I actually don't know how this foul thread, with all its creepy victim blamers, is still up.

The law does indeed categorise rape on a scale if 1 to 3 taking into account how blameworthy the rapist is (yup, really!) and how much harm is percieved to been done to the victim.
So a rapist who plans the rape, is in a position of trust and leaves a woman with serious injuries would be a higher category than a 'date rape' opportunist who does not leave the woman with serious injuries.

These are not categories of rape, they are categories of culpability, which influence the sentencing range. It’s not communicating that some rapes are lesser but that some include additional harm and/or indicators of dangerousness.

I doubt the semantics matter if you're a survivor of a rape classified as being low culpability, low harm, do you?

This is infuriating. Surely all rape should carry pretty much the same weight, and additional harm (like physical injuries, false imprisonment, etc) should be charged separately? Or is there a good reason for this scale?

It's really awful, because often the long-term impact on the victim doesn't always align even remotely with how 'bad' the rape might seem to an observer.

I agree. The idea is there is rape, which is an offence, and certain aggravating factors that make rape worse. Such as being premeditated, repeated, abuse of position of trust, additional violence. Also characteristics of the survivor that are believed to make it worse such as her level of vulnerability and the physical harm she suffered above and beyond the rape.
Its deeply flawed, particularly the harm to the survivor element.
There does need to be a way of increasing sentencing for rape plus additional violence. However, it would be better if this was done as an additional offence, rape plus GBH for example rather than the current framing that makes it seem some rapes are worse than others.

They mattered to me, yes.

The survivor is not classified as low or high culpability, because they haven’t perpetrated the crime, I’d have thought that was obvious.

If there are additional crimes they can be charged separately and often are. Injuries as a result of the rape itself may not be but would be an aggravating factor.

No of course they're not. The category is based on the culpability of the perpetrator AND the harm perceived to the survivor. So the harm to the survivor will also be classified as lower or higher and combined with the culpability of the perpetrator to arrive at the classification. Which is deeply problematic to survivors who feel their harm is considered less, by someone who isn't them.
I'm sorry, I thought that was obvious when I mentioned culpability AND harm in my post.

If that’s how it was portrayed to an individual person then yes, they could feel that way. But that’s not what the sentencing guidance does. It doesn’t say ‘less harm came to you’. It says the starting point of the sentence for the harm caused by rape is X, the additional harm of these aggravating factors increases the sentence by Y. Overall I think all sentences for rape should be longer. As a survivor I’m perfectly capable of seeing that another survivor may have suffered even more than myself, and I don’t begrudge that sentencing varies by case. And I don’t actually know anyone else who does, though of course it’s possible.

ETA: the sentencing guidelines are here, for anyone who wants to read. Harm is inherent in all categories.

https://sentencingcouncil.org.uk/guidelines/rape

If you have a daughter do you tell her to get legless when she's out and walk down a dark alley, get into a car with strange men or meet a man off a dating app in his home or remote location? It's not victim blaming, it's taking precautions and basic safety. Being on your guard is better than blind trust.