Safe place for budding feminists

[Mamaka]

As some of us have had our opinions, feelings and questions so completely bulldozed in other threads, I thought I'd try and start a safe place for newly questioning and of course veteran feminists to explore without fear of being misunderstood or ridiculed.

A couple of things I'd like to know:

I've just found out that there is no feminism group where I live and am seriously considering starting one but feeling a little unqualified for it. Any recommendations for where to start if I wanted to do this?

I've just read the equality illusion by Kat banyard in its entirety and now I'm feeling riled up. How can I start to move from anger and frustration towards positive action? (This is really what my previous thread should have been called!)

Probably not, because women committing sexual assaults is extremely rare compared to men where it's quite common.
If she was accused alongside a man that would change things again because when women do commit sex offences there is often a man involved.

Fela women do commit sexual assaults on their own initiative. I agree it's rare but it happens. If you believe in "we believe you" it can't be qualified by " if your attacker was a man"

I am thinking about it because I can't actually conceptualise my daughter doing that, which says something in itself. And you are right lass.
As far as I'm aware though, women aren't using "I thought he wanted it" as a defence. I would not be impressed with that from my daughter either.

Fela "I thought he(or indeed she) wanted it" will almost certainly be the defence in cases involving underage teenagers although probably dressed up as it being part of a loving relationship

Bit outrageous that you would judge whether someone was guilty based on statistics rather than evidence.

Sorry felas i didn't mean to open a can of worms

An interesting can of worms though. And interesting honest answers.

Placemarking too. Not sure if I'll post much given most are probably more clued up than me but I will be reading.

Buffy's analysis is spot on too.

There's also a point to be made that we are in a totally different mindset when it comes to deciding as an individual whether we would wish to be alone at night with a man who had been accused of rape versus being on a jury confronted with a man who had been accused of rape. As a juror we are required to set aside prejudices about groups of people and listen to the evidence pertaining to this individual case - i.e. not do class analysis. And that is right and proper in those circumstances. However, there is no obligation on women to give a man the benefit of the doubt/presume innocent until proven guilty in social situations. If she doesn't feel comfortable with him, she is totally at liberty not to want to be alone with him. We can do "class analysis" in our private lives - it may cut us off from a few nice guys who were totally blameless, it may save us from a few dangerous predators, but it is not for anyone else to make that decision for us.

I think there's another point about statistics, and that's to do with Bayesian statistics. There is a model of how human beings make decisions which is called Bayesianism. It involves how we update (not form in the first place) judgements about the likelihood of our beliefs being true. We might start from a 50-50 position (this person is as likely to be lying as telling the truth), then when confronted with evidence that they are generally trustworthy, decide they are 99% likely to be telling the truth... The point to note here is that we all start with a set of "priors" - our initial "in-the-absence-of-any-further-information" set of probabilities. A feminist may go into a rape case with a belief (based on the Home Office/Police's own surveys into false reporting in rape cases) that only 3% of women lie. But so will all the other jurors - whether it be 10%, "as likely as not", "they all lie because my ex wife was a bitch"... What matters is whether they can promise to be objective enough that they can be relied upon to update those priors in the light of evidence. People are very quick to say "a feminist saying that statistics show that only 3% of women lie about rape renders the feminist ineligible for jury service", but not so quick to say "a right wing conservative saying that a substantial proportion of women are embittered gold diggers who lie to cover their arses renders the conservative ineligible for jury service."

I also think Buffy's example of the hotel case is an interesting one - because it shows how our legal system constructs situations where the woman is telling the truth about a rape having taken place, yet because of the man's beliefs about the situation, he is not guilty of having committed the crime of rape. (I think it's informative to perhaps wonder if there is any other crime for which this could be the case - assault where a man stumbles into a bare-knuckle fight club thinking it's an improv acting group, gets beaten to a pulp, but the person doing the beating genuinely thought the other was there in the full knowledge that it was a fight club... Fraud where the person perpetrating the fraud thought the person defrauded was just remarkably philanthropic... These have to be really far-fetched, yet there is something about the was we frame heterosexual sex as involving a dynamic of dominance and submission that mean that men sometimes get off on rape charges where they've beaten the woman up badly by claiming "she liked it rough", even when the woman says she has no history whatsoever of enjoying consensual rough sex and BDSM).

Dilberry, it's not about judging in the legal sense.

We've all had our children come home and give their side of the story about some incident. If the story involves something improbable, say "and then the teacher threw a pencil case at my head", we take our societal knowledge about what teachers do into account when considering the story.

So with rape/sexual assault. If your grown up child (and I think that's sons and daughters, because I don't see that the false allegation level will be any higher for either even if the absolute number of assaults committed by females is lower) tells you that the accusation is made up, you need to put it into the societal context that the vast majority of allegations aren't false.

In the case Buffy refers to, the man should, at the very least, be convicted of something similar to "driving without due care and attention" or "reckless driving" - it is reasonable to expect that an error like misidentifying the person you are penetrating should be seen as a grievous fault, given that the result is that the woman has been penetrated with her consent ie raped.

Bit outrageous that you would judge whether someone was guilty based on statistics rather than evidence.

Its not as black and white as that. All I'm saying is I would be skeptical about any man claiming to be innocent of any sexual assault if his only explanation was "she wanted to then changed her mind".
At the end of the day my opinions don't matter, I'm not having any influence over the outcome of a criminal case and I'm entitled to my own views on this stuff.
If I was on a jury I would base my decision on the facts of the case of course.

X post Matilda.

This is well put:

"There's also a point to be made that we are in a totally different mindset when it comes to deciding as an individual whether we would wish to be alone at night with a man who had been accused of rape versus being on a jury confronted with a man who had been accused of rape. As a juror we are required to set aside prejudices about groups of people and listen to the evidence pertaining to this individual case - i.e. not do class analysis. And that is right and proper in those circumstances. However, there is no obligation on women to give a man the benefit of the doubt/presume innocent until proven guilty in social situations. If she doesn't feel comfortable with him, she is totally at liberty not to want to be alone with him. We can do "class analysis" in our private lives - it may cut us off from a few nice guys who were totally blameless, it may save us from a few dangerous predators, but it is not for anyone else to make that decision for us."

Actually, thinking about my fight club example, there is case law (the "Spanner" case, I think) which establishes that one cannot consent to actual bodily harm. (Warning - graphic details ahead). Yet this legal precedent seems not to be applied in rape cases. A woman with no prior history of interest in BDSM who makes a complaint of rape aggravated by physical assault can, apparently, be deemed to have "consented" to sex which leaves her anus ripped and bleeding, and yet a group of gay men with a whole history of BDSM, none of whom actually made a complaint to the police that any of the acts they engaged in were non consensual, can be prosecuted for nailing each other's scrotums to the floorboards. One marginalised group gets held to standards they haven't asked to have applied to them, to their detriment, while another marginalised group has those same standards ignored, also to their detriment. One might almost be left feeling that the way the justice system cherry picks the standards to apply or not to apply is indicative of the fact that it's designed to see the world from the perspective of a heterosexual male!

Can I ask why people here think it is shocking that I say i wouldn't necessarily believe my child if they said they were innocent of a sex crime?
Is it because parents should always believe their children?
Is it because sex crimes are so serious and it would be the same about murder for example?
Or is it specific to sex crimes?
I'm interested because my POV is clearly off compared with others

Can I ask why people here think it is shocking that I say i wouldn't necessarily believe my child if they said they were innocent of a sex crime?
Is it because parents should always believe their children?

I don't find that shocking at all. If you adhere to "we believe you " for victims it's pretty bloody illogical to qualify it with "unless your attacker was my child and/or female"

Mothers who come out with "I know my child is innocent because I know they wouldn't do that" line are ridiculed and lambasted for saying it.

I don't think it is off, Felas. I have often wondered about this myself. I had a relative (now dead sadly), let's call her Jane, that I was very close to. Her son Pete was a very troubled individual - dyspraxia, various behavioural difficulties, physically abusive father leading to suicide attempt in childhood, sexually assaulted round about the age of 11 by someone on the fringe of their social circle (think the sort of "scoutmaster" level of involvement in his life), substance abuse and alcohol problems as he grew older. Pete went on to groom and sexually abuse a young teenage girl when he was in his twenties. Sue stuck by him through all his various behaviours, but not in the sense of believing him innocent, rather in the sense of "he's had such a shitty life, and I am the only person in his corner."

After her death, I had a long think about what role I should play in his life. There is a Quaker set-up called (IIRC) circle of friends, where groups of (I think usually childless people) set up social circles for convicted child sex offenders after their release from prison - the idea is that by tying offenders into a community who offer them normal social interaction but without the chance for further offending, they are less likely to go underground, seek out the only company they can online in the form of other sex offenders, and reoffend. It seems to work to some degree.

In the end I wasn't able to keep in touch (due to having a child myself and on police advice).

That's a bit long-winded but I think my response is two-fold. I think if my DS were to be accused of rape in adulthood, my priors would be very different to what they would be for a random person. I'd be starting probably from a prior belief of at least 90% that he was telling the truth when he said he'd done it; I'd be much more sceptical (based on known statistics and studies of offending patterns) about some random stranger's protestations of innocence. But I would be prepared to change that initial opinion in the light of evidence. (I've actually watched a close friend go through this with regard to their partner - partner initially stuck to their story of "I've been a shit for being unfaithful, but it was just a rough sex game gone wrong..." - my friend initially gave their partner the benefit of the doubt, but then as the court case proceeded and it became abundantly clear that the partner was lying, distanced themself). So yes, I can imagine not believing my child's claims of innocence.

I hope that (like Sue) I'd still try to support him - in getting through his punishment, in keeping him embedded in society so he was less likely to reoffend. (I don't quite know how I'd handle a situation where my child was tried, found not guilty, but I felt on the basis of the evidence I'd seen in court that he'd got away with it. Before anyone jumps on me, remember the standards for a criminal conviction are incredibly high - beyond reasonable doubt - so it is quite possible to think the evidence makes it more likely than not that person X did crime Y, but not that it's proven beyond reasonable doubt that they did.)

Oops - I'd make a rubbish novelist, can't keep the names of my characters the same throughout!

But what about the men who don't see their actions as rape? Say your son says 'oh x y x happened' and you say - well that's rape, and he says, no it isn't, I know she wanted it...

Would you consider yourself failed in your parenting if he could fail to see/acknowledge what rape is? Or just that the overwhelming weight of society had crushed all your efforts out of him?

I have been raped and one of them for sure didn't think of himself as a rapist, and I don't think the other one did either.

I usually compare rape to murder because it's the only other crime in which this kind of double think goes in - oh I didn't mean to do it, she was asking for it, etc. Unfortunately rape is sex, and sex is often a pleasurable act, so whereas the doublethink in respect to murder gets you to manslaughter (still a crime) the doublethink in respect to rape gets you to mutual enjoyment. Particularly since women enjoy being submissive, never ask for sex anyway because they're not slags.... Etc etc insert excuse here.

It's a head fuck. Sorry I don't know what I'm getting at. I guess that so many men see sex as something women are taught not to want, but they secretly do, so it's ok to do it anyway, because then they're getting want they really want....how do you get away from that kind of thinking which feeds off itself

As a woman who has been sexually assaulted by another woman (quite seriously), I find it offensive that people would be so desperate to give her the benefit of the doubt in this way. I would expect it to be judged on its individual merit rather than whether the person I said attacked me was attached to such and such statistical data.