'To say that some men rape and sexually assault women and girls is an uncontroversial fact'

[HecatesCats]

Kathleen Stock has written an excellent blog reflecting on the alleged rape in Mitcham and how best to protect women and girls from dangerous men:

'Other than teaching women self-protection, a second thing a society can do to reduce rape and sexual assault is to encourage safeguarding social norms to get embedded, so that it becomes unusual and indeed remarkable for men to be in public areas where women and girls undress or sleep.'

kathleenstock.com/noticing-reality/

The original story:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8910225/Pictured-Man-hunted-police-rape-attack-teenage-girl-South-London.html

Useful analogy Cheese

Excellent article especially the last two paragraphs.

Fantastic blog post. Thank you for sharing it.

@PlanDeRaccordement

There is no way of knowing which type of attacker you've got and whether freezing, or (trying to) fight or flight was the best, or least bad, option until after the attack.

To piggyback on this good comment, I just want to add that at least in my limited experience in the heat of the moment, you have no choice in whether you fight, flee or freeze. I found that I had an out of body experience and I was reacting with one or more of the above but it wasn’t a conscious decision. It happened so fast and was so overwhelming I can only compare it to when swimming in the ocean and a big wave just crashes down on you and you tumble through the water, bouncing off the seabed, maybe fighting to get back to surface or maybe just rolling until the wave lets go and you wash up. It seemed purely instinctual how I reacted. This to me, just further underscores that it is victim blaming of the worst sort when people sit and say “you should have fought/fled/froze...” when truly, in some attacks it is all reflex reactions. There’s not always time to weigh options and choose.

Absolutely. I was at 20 a quiet, good-natured, conflict-avoiding kind of girl. I never fight. And from my character alone, you'd think I'd freeze. But when I was woken up in the middle of the night but a man touching me in my sleep, while staying in a cheap hotel with bad locks, I shot upright and punched him in the balls, and he ran away.

I honestly don't know what came over me. It was just a reflex. I'm still astounded. I was lucky, too, that he ran away; he could just as easily have fought and overpowered me with utter brutality.

Fight, flight, freeze or fawn. It’s not a choice, it’s survival instinct. No one should blame or shame victims for how they reacted to an attack. I’m appalled at how you are being treated DrizzleandDamp. An assault does not magically become something else due to the reaction of the victim. Rape culture in action.

Rape culture needs to go, but it’s a long arduous fight. Right now women are girls are viewed as a commodity for male sexual urges and the last thing anyone should be doing is reducing the small protections that help reduce attacks.

@SapphosRock

I really like Kathleen Stock. I don't think the trans element will persuade anyone who isn't already very GC though. The suggestion that trans women may be sexual predators has been debated to death and I can't see this this blog post changing anyone's mind who believes TWAW.

Every woman does indeed have a list of incidents that have happened at the hands of men. (Sorry to hear of your Mum's experience Rufus that's truly awful). But 99.9% of the time the perpetrators are men not trans women.

Where do you get the 99.9% figure from SapphosRock ?

@DrizzleandDamp

It’s an excellent post but I’ve read it and feel cold, because my horrific attack was a date rape and so it feels like my fault I went.

I know it isn’t, but the idea that it’s only mixed spaces or grabbed off the streets makes rapes from known men somehow excluded, and they are the majority and the hardest to prosecute.

Firstly It absolutely wasn’t your fault

Mine was after accepting a drink from someone I knew that turned out to be drugged. That wasn’t my fault either and I know that but I also know some people would blame me. And that’s their failing not mine.

That blog post is good in part because it is focussing on some simple ways of reducing the risk in some cases and doesn’t get bogged down in trying to solve the problem in all cases. There isn’t a universal solution but that doesnt mean we shouldn’t try and reduce risk where we can.

@Malahaha. Glad you scared him off! Still very traumatising like waking up with a rattle snake in your bed.

Sorry to hear of your Mum's experience Rufus that's truly awful

Sorry sapphos i missed this completely,

Thank you

"But 99.9% of the time the perpetrators are men not trans women."
Where do you get the 99.9% figure from SapphosRock ?

Maybe it's simply that 99.8% of people with male genitals are men not transwomen?

Disclaimer: I have no idea what the actual figure is, but that seems quite a possible one if actually being a transwoman requires more effort on the part of the individual than getting up in the morning and deciding to wear women-jeans rather than men-jeans that day.

I have been really lucky so far: on the three occasions (after the first one when I was pre-pubertal and he simply out-weighed me and there was nothing I could have done to stop him) on which I seemed to be at genuine risk of rape, I was so blazingly angry that in each case, I left the attempted perp badly hurt as I ran away. This was not planned, it was just how I happened to react. I got a nasty attack of "how dare he!" and had the right reflexes to make it stick, thank goodness.

AskingQuestionsAllTheTime as SapphosRock has confidentially stated a precise figure I assume she has a source and I was very interested in knowing what that source is and I don’t believe I’m the only person on this thread interested in knowing the source of that figure.

My first thought was definitely "thin air", but when I thought about it, I realised what a small percentage of the population at large trans women actually are.

Sorry I know it's a bit of a tangent but the fight/flight instinct discussion is interesting. Does anyone know if you can 'train' yourself into a fight instinct when you might naturally be a 'freeze'-er?

@SapphosRock as you can see a couple of us have asked you the source of your statistic

@DeaconBoo

Sorry I know it's a bit of a tangent but the fight/flight instinct discussion is interesting. Does anyone know if you can 'train' yourself into a fight instinct when you might naturally be a 'freeze'-er?

You probably could in some cases. The training may give confidence and train you to have different reflexive reactions. But it would probably still need the attacker to grab you in a somewhat familiar way that you had practiced, which 1) they might not do, 2) you might freeze anyway with the shock, 3) you'd maybe not want to start 'fighting' at first-grab in case it was a misunderstanding and then by the time you're sure it's too late, and 4) fighting really might turn out to be the worst thing to do.

Re. training to fight - very difficult to do, I would think.

This is a bit off-topic because we're talking about women (who just are less violent than men - largely socialisation, but possibly innately so), but it's interesting to consider the fact that it's actually quite difficult to get ordinary men to be violent, as can be seen by looking at what goes on within the military. A lot of military training is down to not just teaching people (predominantly men) the techniques of fighting, but breaking down their reluctance to do so - this is actually what a lot of the brutal "hazing" in basic training, tacitly tolerated by officers and NCOs, is about.

I remember listening to a fascinating radio documentary a few years ago. Most soldiers are extremely reluctant to cause injury to another human being. Typically they'll do things like "provide covering fire" (aka deliberately fire over the heads of oncoming soldiers) or pass the amunition to the one guy in the unit they know will actually shoot people. That way they can feel useful without actually having to be violent themselves. The programme had a number of interviews with ex soldiers, trainers, military historians - and the take home seemed to be that yes, you could train people (men mainly) to suppress their natural instinct not to hurt others, but only at huge cost in terms of (a) PTSD when they left the military and (b) the risk that you'd created a highly dangerous, undirected weapon who was as likely to go on an unpredictable violent spree against his comrades/family while home on leave/random member of the public who looked at him the wrong way in the pub closest to the bases as he was to kill the people you actually wanted killing.

My own personal experience is I tend to be a talker - defuse the situation verbally, talk him down, distract him, make him mentally shift you from "potential victim" category to "my mate's sister" category. I have on occasion flipped into fight mode - as others have said upthread, it's not a choice, it's pure instinctive reaction in that situation at that moment. And I think (Gavin de Becker style) that subconsiously what we think of as instinctive reaction is actually a fairly accurate self-preservation mechanism, and our instincts read quite accurately what is likeliest to work in this situation, faster than our conscious brain could. I'm sure the freeze response is an instinctive reading of the situation as "this is one of the really nasty ones who could kill me if I don't go completely unresponsive."

Totally agree with Cara about the military and training and the psychological outcomes.

Someone mentioned self-defence above. I am pretty sure I've read that knowing self-defence isn't really that helpful in most cases in terms of staving off a future attack. If you're a black (or other top level) belt in certain marshal arts and in regular training still it can be an advantage..but again, not always either (think of women in the military - maybe they'd have more chance against an unfit guy roughly their size, but against their male physical equivalents, they're not at any advantage).

Self-defence classes though can have a benefit for women who've been previously attacked, especially if they're set up as that. Basically it can be a physical way of moving through the trauma in the body, especially for someone who freezes/froze. I'm one of those people and I'd love to be able to do a self-defence class but the very idea of being "attacked" is triggering and I'd feel incredibly vulnerable..and feel that I'd freeze again. With a sensitive group and trainer, you can apparently work through that and get that feeling out of your body. The result is that you feel more confident in your own abilities and body, even though statistically you may not be at any increased advantage.

I suspect that simply knowing you could possibly makes a bit of a difference. It lends you an aura of confidence, or something, even if inside you are quailing: bullies on the whole tend not to choose to bully someone who will be just as nasty back, so if they see someone walking down the road in a way which says to them "lay a finger on me and I'll take it off at the elbow" they might be likely to move along and look for a different victim. Whether the confidence is a lie or not, if it looks convincing it might work.

This is of course no help in actually getting rid of male bullies, but it may be a help to an individual woman.

I dunno, I think the mere existence of a confident woman is exactly what makes some perps interested in taking that confidence away.

“Talker” I think falls under fawn. It’s the one that isn’t mentioned enough and the one that can end up with a criminal case going wrong due to a lack of understanding. It’s about placating and trying to get out of it in a non-confrontational way. Women are conditioned into a fawn response from birth, understandably so, we are smaller and weaker than men.

Random Google turns this up
www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/the-fight-flight-freeze-fawn-trauma-responses

You can see fawning in women’s responses to pretty much anything. Always considering everyone’s perspectives, looking for reasons which would excuse someone being a total prick. Relationships and AIBU is full of it.

Cara thanks for that detail about military training, I didn't know that. Interesting especially my dear old dad in ex forces and whilst with the exception of a tour of NI he was lucky to never have seen combat. To this day (and he's been retired years) I've never seen and cannot imagine him raising his hand to another human being. Humans are amazingly complex.

The stats about TW in UK prisons indicate that they are more likely to be sex offenders than other males. This ties in with the FBI, who say fetishistic cross dressing is the paraphilia most often found in sex offenders.

As it happens I have a morbid fascination with serial killers and I can think of a high number who cross dressed. The most bizarre was Ed Gein, a profoundly psychotic man who inspired a number of films, including Psycho. He did a lot of incredibly disturbing things.

@MaudTheInvincible

But 99.9% of the time the perpetrators are men not trans women.

98% of sexual offences are committed by men.

Where is the evidence that transition (whether medicalized or not) has any effect on the offending rate of men who have become trans women?

This is really important.

Transition doesn't alter sex, and it doesn't alter offending pattern behaviour, either. And between 80-90% of trans people have no hormone or surgical treatment at all (as is entirely their right, and given the health risks, very sensible) so why and how are we arguing that male bodies belong in female spaces? The stats are so clear.

[quote HecatesCats]'Study suggests that transwomen exhibit a male pattern of criminality'

This Swedish study found:

Transwomen are 6 times more likely to commit a crime and 18 times more likely to commit a violent crime compared to female controls. But transwomen commit crime, including violent crime, at a similar rate as any other males in the general population.

journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885

Ultimately the point isn't are Transwomen committing high rates of sexual assault? The point is if we undertake a huge societal shift that allows male born people to access previously female only spaces, will male born people take advantage of this? The prison system offers some answers:

'We submitted Freedom of Information requests to the Ministry of Justice.
It said that 60 of the 125 transgender inmates it counted in England and Wales were serving time for a sexual offence.'

www.bbc.com/news/uk-42221629

One in 50 prisoners identifies as transgender amid concerns inmates are attempting to secure prison perks

One in 50 male offenders in prisons are self-identifying as transgenderr^, according to a survey by the official jail watchdog, amid concerns inmates may be attempting to secure extra perks.
The figure, the first by the watchdog, suggests there are up to 1,500 transgender inmates among the 90,000 prisoners in England and Wales, more than ten times previous estimates, and at least four times the number in the general population.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/07/09/one-50-prisoners-identify-transsexual-first-figures-show-amid/[/quote]
Thanks for collating, Hecate.

@IAmNotAGirl let's use 2019 as an example.

According to Rape Crisis 510,000 women experienced sexual assault. See screen shot.

According to trans crime UK 15 trans women were convicted and an additional 2 charged with sexual offenses.

http://transcrimeuk.com/2019-convictions/

So 0.003% of convicted sexual offenders were trans.

Of course not all sexual crimes are reported and not all those reported lead to a conviction so let's imagine a worst possible case scenario and times those 17 convicted trans perpetrators by 100 to make 1,700.

That still only makes 0.3% of sexual offenders transgender.

As I said, I do like and admire Kathleen Stock but the continual suggestion that trans women are sexual predators does come across as scaremongering to me when it is men that are the problem.

the continual suggestion that trans women are sexual predators does come across as scaremongering to me when it is men that are the problem.

How does one tell the difference?