"What about the men that get raped?"

[thefinerthingsinlife]

Whilst talking about Reclaim the Night to a friend, a male asked what it was about I explained, he then questioned "what about all the men that get raped and are victims of domestic violence??" I explained to him that I think that only 3% of men are victims and the stats are roughly the same for Dv (i'm not a 100% that these stats).

He then said "I thought you believed men and women are equal therefore Reclaim should be about men victims too"

I didn't really know what to say to this so can someone give me some guidence

Thanks

Little red that was in response to: My goodness I would never go on a reclaim the night march with men in it. It's men who have flashed at me, followed me, shouted at me, groped me and generally intimidated me on the streets. How would I know the men marching beside me hadn't done those things to women?

It irks me whenever someone defines a race/gender etc based on bad experiences with some in those groups.

Yes, I agree with that Sal. He shouldn't get slated for not understanding. It sounds as if he thought it was primarily about preventing crime ... which I guess is one of the things it's about but it's also about changing attitudes.

Men don't get told that they're stupid to get caught in the dark outside - that's an attitude that doesn't need changing. Women do.

Sal, I don't want to come across as if I'm speaking for dittany, but what that post made me think was, if I were someone who'd been raped or mugged, and went on a march, it could be traumatic to find that instead of it being the all-women event I'd expected, there were also men there, probably making shouting and waving things, as people do on marches.

It wouldn't be about rational response to danger - I wouldn't rationally think I was about to be hurt by these men. But it's only respectful to realize that trauma has effects that aren't rational, so the march should be a safe space for women who've been through it.

Does that make sense?

Oh FFS the OP's friend is a bellend! 'Bwaaah, wat about the MENZ?' is one of those arguments that every feminist (and every woman who ever wonders aloud about any kind of evidence that women are not yet treated as fully equal human beings) gets very tired of hearing.

Even though it appears that, statistically, men walking the streets at night are more at risk of attack (not sexual assault but being mugged, or set on for having the wrong colour football shirt on or whatever) than women, men are rarely advised to stay at home after dark, or blamed for becoming victims of muggers. It's not that I have no sympathy for men who do get raped or suffer domestic violence, I wouldn't wish domestic or sexual violence on anyone and I appreciate that a male rape victim may feel that he won't be believed and that there will be no support for him etc. That's bad, and your friend is at liberty to, for instance, get involved with this organisation. However, trying to muscle in on an event for women who have been victims of male violence is not helpful to anyone. Especially not the women. And they matter.

It's not just about rape though it's about a whole range of abuse and assault that (mainly) women are subjected to.

And about the significant minority of men who behave like this. Stranger rape is rare, yes, but being followed, having some random grope you, having a group of men shout stuff, all of that stuff is pretty common. So there must be quite a few men out there doing it - and it's all of that stuff that makes your average women feel cautious/nervous/scared.

I also think that OP's friend misunderstands what it is about.

ANd also, at the risk of sounding like a man-hating paranoid, let's not forget that some bad men really would love to get in on a march like this, because the excitement of terrorizing a woman who has previously been traumatized but now thinks herself safe - well that would be serious jollies for a certain type of extremely bad person. As Dittany suggested, it would have been quite feasible for the man who killed those women in Ipswich to have gone along on the protest march and had the time of his life feeding his disgusting twisted little ego.

This is from the website:

'Men can support the Reclaim The Night march by joining the London Pro-Feminist Men?s Group solidarity demonstration. Meet by the Edith Cavell statue, opposite the National Portrait Gallery at 6pm on Saturday 27th November to make your protest against violence against women.'

'Stranger rape is rare, yes,'

It's not, stranger rape account for 25% of reported rapes. Every time I read a comment like this I feel insulted. I was raped by two strangers. Thousands of women are. It's not rare for all of us.

so sorry to hear that Earwicga.

No worries seth - I shouldn't get insulted and it's not like ISNT meant to be insulting. Some days I am more sensitive than others.

Earwicga, sorry to hear about your experience, but stranger rape accounts for 25% of reported rape. Given that the vast majority of rape goes unreported, it is rare - stranger rape is one of the rapes where a victim is more likely to be believed and treated sympathetically by the police and courts and more likely to get a conviction, and so of course women are more likely to report it. (Although a friend of mine who was fourteen years old at the time was told to go away and stop wasting police time with attention-seeking when she was raped by a stranger, however that was 30 years ago now.)

But between 60% and 85% of rape goes unreported and most of that will not be stranger rape.

It is still unacceptable, surely that's the important thing!

I dont' know that it is HB. I think it is impossible to quantify. I didn't report. Your friend was so brave to report, she was the same age as me. What bastards.

Yes LittleRedDragon.

Well of course it is, no one on a feminist thread would argue rape is acceptable.

Although it's quite incredible how many people outside this space find it acceptable. They pretend they don't, or they genuinely think they don't, but they refuse to recognise rape when it happens. Or if they do recognise it, they say victims are partly to blame.

It's true that young men are more likely than any other demographic group to be attacked on the street, but I read somewhere that that is purely because they are more likely to actually be on the street - if you analyse how many women are on the street at the same time as young men, you might find that in fact, young men are being attacked according to their proportion on the street, IYSWIM. I'm not sure if anyone could ever do that analysis, because how could you take a demographic snap-shot of who is on the street at any given time? Anyway, that's what RtN is about isn't it - the fact that the streets are inhabited by young men at ngiht, because no-one is telling them that it's their fault they get attacked, because they should have had the sense to get a taxi, while women are restricting their lives, their opportunities for exercise and spending their hard-earned money on taxis when they would walk if they didn't have the fear of rape.

Earwicga, my friend had an incredibly loving, supportive mother who was convinced that if she reported it, she would feel better because she would have "done something" about it, even if they never found the attacker and it never got to court.

I'm not sure that was the case tbh, I think for many years the way she was treated by the police traumatised her so much that maybe she would have been better off not bothering. (She took drugs, got into abusive relationships, etc.) But who knows, pthere's no way of knowing what effect taking one road instead of another has, is there?

I hope you got all the support and love you needed. So many women don't.

HerBeatitude wrote - "how could you take a demographic snap-shot of who is on the street at any given time?"

CCTV cameras are watching our every move in town centres.

The truth is, many women calling themselves feminists don't believe men and women are equal.

Men are way down there with pond life.

This thread makes that clear.

LOL at SF. Oh so true.

Yes I did think of that Vesuvia, but I'm not sure if the attacks happen in town centres do they? Don't they happen away from areas with lots of people around? So young women are perfectly happy to wander round the street in a town centre where the streets are busy and everyone is out and about, but they make up the majority of the taxi-queue at the end of the night - they don't walk home by themselves.

I think drunken attacks are often caught on CCTV, but deliberate targeting, in order to rob or rape someone, usually happens where there are no witnesses or cameras.