My daughter says being harassed is part of life!

[Glax]

A young girl we know was harassed on the way to training by a man who followed her and wanted to “talk”, she is only 11 years old and was understandably upset.
My daughter and her friend (who are both 20) gave her some sympathy but when I spoke to them both their attitudes to it really got me.
My daughter simply said “she needs to get used to it. It will happen to her all through her life. This is something we just have to put up with it” her friend said “yeah! Wait until they start grabbing her bum! We get that all the time. You just get used to it”
How is it OK that they think you just have to put up with that?
Is this now the attitude of young women?
I was taken aback by that!

Maybe its an area/ or class thing.

My mum told me about getting groped as a little girl walking home from school in London with her little brother in the early 50s, some dirty old man chased them as as they tried to take a short cut through a hedge to escape, he shoved his fingers in her knickers. In broad daylight. When she was a young mother in the mid 70s we lived way up north in the countryside. She’d taken us 3 tiny children for a walk and some creep pulled up in his car and started wanking at her. She called the police that time and as he had his name and that of his girlfriend in the sunshield across his windscreen he was easy to track down but the fucker was due to get married in a week so she felt sorry for him and didn’t press charges!

I’ve been sexually assaulted, groped, catcalled, all the shot girls go through growing up, found porn mags in the hedge by school or under the bridge down the village and I always feel I was exposed to sex far too early which gave me a lack of bodily autonomy to even think about fighting back. My best friend and I have discussed this at length as she has the same experiences as I do.
We both felt that we just shit up and put I to be polite or something, I can’t even get my head around it really but we just didn’t feel as though we had the ability or right or we didn’t want to offend those disgusting perves who were preying on us. It’s hard to imagine that feeling now as a middle aged women because now i would absolutely fight back or try to shame someone treating me like that and I aim to bring my daughter up to know full well that her body is hers and hers alone and nobody can touch her against her will.
It’s gut wrenching to realise that women and girls are still up against the same old shit that we’ve always been up against and if anything, it’s even worse now. So many children see violent abusive porn before they’re even teenagers now, choking is seen as a normal part of sex, teen vogue teach kids about anal sex, school sex education includes anal, porn, kink. Kink is pushed at family friendly pride events and single sex spaces have all but disappeared in the name of inclusion. No wonder so many girls are trying to escape being girls and declaring themselves trans or non binary. It’s utterly heartbreaking

No one is saying it didn’t exist. Just that it wasn’t accepted as normal in the way it is today. And yes there was less of it.
It isn’t some sort of competition as to which generation suffered more.
Competing to see which generation has it worse doesn’t even start to begin to solve the problem.

I think you’re right @Bargebill19 I think we need to encourage girls to call it out more but also encourage man and boys to call it out. It’s not acceptable to treat women this way so they shouldn’t feel obligated to accept it the way my friends and I did when we were girls. Men and boys should be bloody ashamed to behave like this. Although when I’ve discussed it with my dh he was shocked that this kind of thing even happened then and now, fucking clueless. He said he didn’t know anyone who behaved that way when he was a teenager/young man and when I pointed out the many of his friends and acquaintances who did behave this way he had no idea they were even like that. Men are responsible for their own shitty behaviour and they should be aware of how shitty other men are too and calling them out on it. Fucks sake I despair though. It sounds every bit as bad as it ever was and we’re going ever backwards in women’s rights.

Unfortunately it’s true that it’s a fact of life. It doesn’t make it acceptable.

When I was 14 a teacher (who often picked on me in class) put his hand on my breast and said "Your a big girl!"

I knocked his hand away and snapped at him. "You shouldnt have done that! If you ever pick on me again in class Ill tell on you!"

Not only did her never pick on me again he never again directly addressed me - only as part of a class or group. If you lash back hard and unexpectedly you can often alter the power dynamic. The fear in their eyes can be very satisfying,

My daughter, and increasingly her friends, have started kicking up a big fuss about being grabbed and harassed. It is paying off. But it's a long struggle