What can we as a society do about rape (Gisèle thank you)?

[crosscross]

Even as Gisèle Pelicot is shining a light...

Cameras in girls toilets...

rapes every single day in the news...

light sentencing (my rapist brother pleaded guilty, lied in court, so spent zero time in jail)...

Metoo forgotten

70000 men on a site sharing info about how to drug their wives and daughters

Men demanding access to girls' spaces

Evert single day more horrors emerge.

We cannot trust men. And yet we all think not my husband not my son (I even think that when it WAS my brother)

Society's no. 1 problem is male violence (sexual, physical, wars)

What can we do?

Get men talking about this. Why are they not already?
Get all rapists chemically castrated. Why are they not?
What else?
Please please please don't let the Gisèle momentum fade because... (Christmas, politics)

We need a seismic shift in society. Jurors are indoctrinated in rape myths and men can rape with impunity because it's rarely reported and there's no justice.

We live in a culture infused with porn and harmful messages about women. The manosphere is full of hatred towards women and I read about a rape messaging board on Telegram yesterday where 70,000 men talk about raping their relatives, friends and colleagues.

Women are viewed as men's playthings without a right to their own bodies and sexuality. Seismic shift.

We need a massive shift. But how? The men I know who are horrified by toxic masculinity and who make sure they are not like that have, with very few exceptions, grown up in fear of the majority of men — bullied at school, sometimes at home too, threatened with violence and believing women will reject them for not being stereotypically male.

I do think the one major act that could make some change is to insist teaching in primary schools the difference between sex and gender. Dispelling the toxic myth that boys and girls have different abilities etc..

Also, parenting classes early on to tackle gender biases and the way people bring up their children to believe in gender differences.

I fear it’s impossible because men have the power and men do t want to change.

In some ways, I think we have been fortunate to live in a time and country when rape is supposed to be a crime and at least have some rights. I often think how it must have been for women over the last few thousand years where men could rape with absolute impunity, so long as it was t a woman who was someone else’s property.

Huge swathes of men and boys believe that women and girls are a subset of humanity. We are "less than". We have been dehumanised and reduced to an underclass that must serve men however they see fit.

Every day, there are more threads... Just today for example -

Camera found in unisex school in Scotland
Partner refuses to help with the house/children
Is this abusive?
etc etc etc

What can we do? Burn the fucking patriarchy to the ground.

Honestly, I don't believe the gentle approach works. Look at football/rugby banners and minutes silences and charter of behaviours. It's all blah blah on paper, in theory.

Yes to education but we need to say more than it's bad to rape.

I just want to DO something instead of sobbing into my phone.

Why don't we castrate offenders? Serious question.

Shouldn't every offender be in a weekly offenders meeting like AA?

It starts as young boys, they are given t shirts hinting at powers and strength, girls are given princess and beauty slogans ... the internet is the Wild West for the 21st century, anything goes on there so those little boys now teens are remembering they are powerful as they access what every teen boy does, and girls remember they are submissive.

Ok I'm generalising and it's not all men nor all women, not everyone accesses porn online but as parents we need to be waking up to the fact it may be our sweet 13 year old. We need to be teaching against misogyny but also girls to be watching out for worrying behaviour and not putting themselves at risk even if that means wearing trousers rather than mini skirts etc to school (a recent thread) .

I don't have answers but I do see men teaching their boys to be "real men" and unfortunately it is partly a class issue, football culture does not help. As I say it isn't a solution but getting boys to embrace equality is a good starting point

Society's no. 1 problem is male violence (sexual, physical, wars)

This. I dont know how we can change something so massive. It's utterly depressing.

Was the problem with MeToo that it was all online? How can we take this into the real world? I want to write to my local representative and expect politicians to do something but I know they won't. Another crisis will take over

A lot are chemically castrated with regular medicine. Choosing not to continue would break the rules of their license and they'd be back inside....

.... but by then, the crime has been committed. It relies on the rapists being caught. They could have offended hundreds of times ( as we've seen this week) without anyone having any idea.

Its Inhumane to forcibly chemically castrate somebody

As a man, I must say that the entire issue is incredibly depressing and disheartening. Of course, I can only image how you as women must feel...

One thing that still shocks me is that even today, we raise young children—especially boys—with the same stereotypical approaches as in times long past. Women are presented to them as an alien gender, femininity as something that challenges their masculinity, and supposedly feminine traits as something they must overcome in order to eventually become a man.

For this, they have to trade attributes like empathy, cooperative behavior, and access to their own feelings for dominance, assertiveness, and emotional coldness.

As long as we fail to raise boys to become emotionally mature men, we unfortunately lack any foundation for change IMHO.

Stricter penalties and prosecution in dealing with sexual violence are, of course, beyond question...

'It starts as young boys, they are given t shirts hinting at powers and strength, girls are given princess and beauty slogans ... the internet is the Wild West for the 21st century, anything goes on there so those little boys now teens are remembering they are powerful as they access what every teen boy does, and girls remember they are submissive.'

It's SO TRUE - this innocent sounding stuff with tiny children is massively problematic. Expectations of boys and girls regarding play, social interaction, behaviour are still massively different even from the earliest age. There are so many adult women who have been taught to believe that all sorts of appalling behaviour from men is 'a man thing' i.e. you can't possibly expect better from him. It's beyond depressing

Sure, you're right and I'm expressing my anger and frustration. But what can we do?

I agree with all the people saying education is key. But the vicious circle is that by the time we teach girls that they can be brave and strong and successful - haven't we been trying for years and years? - and by the time we manage to teach young boys that they don't have to be the toxic masculine man and they should respect girls, most of those girls and many boys too will have been raped by their fathers/older brothers/men advertised to on the internet. And the cycle continues - well, the cycle where the boys grow up to be men who rape, yet the girls don't.

I think men need to be scared for their balls - literally. Thinking they are scared for their daughters is not enough because many of them are the ones drugging and raping their daughters.

How come we don't know how many men? We think it's 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 girls sexually abused/raped in their lifetimes. That translates into how many men? We all hope it's a minority. Why is there so little research. Gisèle's case tells us it's a lot of men in a tiny area when given the opportunity. I seem to remember other research that said a huge % would rape if they were sure they'd get away with it. Why are none of the big thinkers in our society talking about this?

I actually think it's getting worse all the time. But what do we do? How can we stop it?

Men can say all the "right" things but still have that darkness inside them. We have no way of knowing and I'm not sure they can be "educated" out of it. All men know that you don't rape or beat a woman or any of the other awful things that happen every day. Yet they still do it.

I have an adult son. I'd confidently say he wouldn't do anything awful to a woman but can I know that 100%? No. Because the vast majority of men who do awful things are someone's son/dad/brother etc and their relatives would probably have said the same.

I think the most pressing issue is online porn. It's just so accessible, there's so much, and it's so extreme and at odds with a healthy respectful sex life. Young children access it and their whole blueprint for sex and men and women as sexual beings is negatively shaped by it.

Normalisation of things like choking, hair pulling etc as mainstream acts. Not to mention the issues it promotes with hairless, fake-breasted, dead-eyed women-as-objects seen as desirable and the norm for what is 'sexy'.

20 years is a joke.
That disgusting monster should have been charged 20 years for each man who raped Gisele.
And each one of these fucking freaks should have been given 20 years each time they raped her. I'd happily see every single fuck up who was involved in the rape or who was aware of what was happening locked up and never released truthfully. Fuck them, they're not ever going to be rehabilitated are they? They're no use to society. Keep them locked up.

I hope Gisele feels the gratitude from every single human being that stands against sexual abuse and wishes her love and strength in her unenviable position of being the appointed spokeswoman against sexual violation.

'I'd happily see every single fuck up who was involved in the rape or who was aware of what was happening locked up and never released truthfully. Fuck them, they're not ever going to be rehabilitated are they? They're no use to society. Keep them locked up.'

I hear you. Hopefully Dominique Pelicot's age means that he will die in prison. A lot of the others though are much younger and got much shorter sentences. They could be living a free life in no time at all. It's sickening

Quite honestly... chop it off if guilty. Anyone caught will never do it again and hopefully it puts a few off. I'll probably be set upon for saying that but desperate times...

That aside, education and stamping out misogyny would be a start.

It's inhumane to rape someone.

We need to educate boys better and make it culturally unacceptable. My son, who is in his early teens, told me boys at school casually refer to rape, from across all year groups and jokes about it seem acceptable. He thinks social media influencers like Andrew Tate and porn culture is responsible. This depressed me no end, but I'm glad he was able to talk to me about it. Unfortunately although he finds it offensive, he is reluctant to call people out for fear of being bullied.

It is absolutely sickening. My feeling is that men are most influenced by what other men think of them and what men who they perceive as alpha males do and say. I would like to see an ad campaign featuring high profile men in all fields eg music, sport, politics, film, tv, etc espousing messages like: real men respect women, real men are gentle, real men seek consent, real men do housework, real men look after their children, real men listen etc

It's inhumane to rape someone. If you ever use your penis as a weapon, you shouldn't get to have a working one any more. IMHO.

By that logic when a woman sexually assaults someone else should she have parts altered? If you look at which countries have the lowest reoffending rates, they are the ones that many would describe as liberal. It's been demonstrated time and again that tough justice doesn't work. It's a nice political soundbite to convince Joe Public you mean business, though.

Much of the problem lies within each of us. We are too quick to talk loudly about our human rights, but whisper about our human responsibilities. That's a paradigm shift that is much needed, but for some reason it's incredibly unpopular. If Dominique Pelicot had fulfilled his responsibility towards Gisèle, would we be having this conversation? It has to start within us, and at home.

Start talking and talk louder than the rapists, men who are silent and the women who are rape apologists.

After my case is sorted, I plan on being an activist (not that I have a clue how to be). Other people's prudishness, embarrassment and shame is not my problem.

It's not just tshirts, the thinking of women as less than and the dehumanising is in our culture.

I watched the panto, a much lived British tradition running in most cities with primary school kids being taken to watch it.

In the first 5 min, a ventriloquist with an 'old man dummy' made a lot of sexist jokes - asking the dummy what's your pick up line, what do you say to women etc. Then came into the audience so the dummy could 'kiss' a woman. And walked back onstage with a bra in his mouth.

This is where it starts, dressed up as humour, as banter. Oh so funny the dummy managed to get the women bra. It basically normalising sexul assault to hundreds of school children. How is this funny?

And yet this very popular panto is running twice a day for weeks.

And we are surprised that we have a misogyny and male culture problem?