Curfew for Men!

My point is, and it hasn't changed, those statistics will largely be made up of violence from men that those victims know. I don't think the debate that baroness Jones has begun will take anyone anywhere. There's a huge problem in our society with violence against women, but it's at home where it happens not walking back there. I know it's not either or, as you stated earlier, but all the debate in the world will not stop the odd psycho, it may do something for the thousands who suffer domestic abuse on a daily basis if it was channelled correctly.

 

It's a complete mystery to me that any of us males on here can try to pretend that a culture of casual harassment of women in certain situations doesn't. exist.
I've worked in an environment within the last five years where it did. Physical harassment..no. But a constant stream of smutty comments and insinuations towards female staff members..definitely. I did my best to shield them from it by diverting conversations etc but I should have done a lot more and I'm a bit ashamed at that.
Some folk quoting stats and hiding behind the excuses that women commit abuse too is frankly pathetic and we all know it is.

 

There are two issues though aren't there.
1. Men who make inappropriate comments to women in the street
2. Men who will physically assault, kidnap and murder women in the streets.

The number of men, who do the first is sadly quite a sizable minority. The number of men who do the second is a tiny tiny number, it's so tiny that honestly the amount of women who do it which is also tiny is not irrelevant because when you are talking about a tiny amount of men and a tiny amount of women you have to accept that they are both the same really. Same crimes same situation same ridiculously small chance of it happening.

What can we do about the first issue? Well we can tell men to shut the **** up if and when we hear them do it. Women can report it to the police when it happens. Schools can actually do something about it when it happens as it tends to start there. We can all be a bit more understanding about how horrible it must feel. Banning ken from the streets won't make an ounce of difference though, they'll simply make the comments in clubs, in the workplace etc. I'd hazard a guess that men probably make random comments at women more during the day than at night too with the exception of being in clubs pissed.

On the second issue of rapists, assaulters and murderers. The chances are so small. I read that the chance of a woman being the victim of an unprovoked violent attack on the street is significantly lower than the chance of a man being the victim (I accept that the perpetrator is more likely to be male too) so really is the narrative that women should fear for their lives every time they leave the home accurate or is it scaremongering? Women are genuinely fearful but should they be or is it because it's been conditioned into them to be and in reality the evidence doesn't back that stance up?

I've just googled "random attack street" and filtered by results from the last month. I've got an 81 year old man attacked, a man's lip left hanging off, a man randomly murdered as he walked, a teenage male randomly attacked, a male van driver randomly attacked, and three women all attacked in other countries. The limited evidence there says to me that men should be afraid to walk the streets right? So why aren't there any campaigns for that? Why doesn't anyone care when men are attacked?

Women being attacked is horrible, absolutely horrible, but the scaremongering and conditioning women to see every man as an attacker is just wrong

 

So many on this thread clearly in denial. Shows the depth of the problem.

 

Id suggest there's a 'lot' wider set of issues than that. I do wonder whether many of the men in this thread have ever 'listened' to women they're close to.

When you look and see the first poster to 'like' your post, you might realise how far off the mark you are

 

Pardon.

 

Oh no, don’t misunderstand, I don’t live in the literal world either.

 

Of 6 women I know really well as an 'adult' bloke (2 sisters, 2 serious girlfriends, married twice) (thankfully I don't have to think about my mum or daughters here).
2 were rape victims
2 sexually assaulted

Only 1 of those offences reported,
if those reports were part of your statistics; 1 of the rapists was 'known' to the victim in so far as he was a 'mate' of her father, who started a 'friendly' chat on the way home from a pub, the other 'known' as he was a bloke she'd spoken to in a bar earlier in the evening, and had spoken to before.

The 2 sexual assaults - strangers.

You can't keep dismissing this by pretending 'known to' means 'in a relationship with' nor does that even change anything. If someone (as the daughter of a colleague was recently) is murdered by a jealous ex partner when she's trying to put her life together after a failed relationship. That doesn't mean you can dismiss her death in some was as being less important.

It's frankly depressing watching intelligent men trying to pretend this issue doesn't exist

 

I’d like to see the figures that back up that the same amount of women physically assault, kidnap and murder men as the number of men who physically assault, kidnap and murder women on the street because I absolutely do not believe the numbers are the same until I see that.

I think your Googling needs some work. I read that and immediately realised that there’s no way only 5 men attacked in the last month and only 3 women who were all in different countries. It was so obviously wrong I don’t know why you bothered posting it. I just googled ‘woman attacked Leeds’ as I remembered very clearly some attacks as they happened near where I live now and where I used to live and here are the top three results.



Women are 'conditioned' to be scared of men because men keep creeping on them all the time whether it leads to an actual attack or not. When you are walking along and a car full of men slow down and drive alongside you shouting 'Hiya sexy, where are you going? Do you want a lift? Get in. Hey, why are you ignoring me you bitch? I'm trying to be nice. F*cking slut.' Do you think I shouldn't be scared because it didn't result in an actual attack and that I am just fearmongering? When on public transport and a man gets on an almost empty bus/train and sits right next to you trapping you in between the window and the aisle and starts asking where you've been, where you're going, if you've got a boyfriend/husband and you sit there desperately hoping they get to their stop before you because you can't decide whether to get off at your real stop and they follow you home or get off somewhere random but then you've nowhere safe to go. Should I not be worried at the time as they always did get off the stop before me and no attack occurred, although I have no idea if that was because of the answers I gave or because I was lucky I lived so far out of town or any other random factor? (Btw, when you see women sitting on the end seat with their bag between them and the window, this is why. It's not because they don't want to put their bag on the floor or on their knee). When walking along and men start getting their d*cks out and waving them around shouting 'do you want some of this?' That one is actually a crime but I'd never thought to report it because it happened all the time about 10-15 years ago. They didn't physically attack me though so maybe I shouldn't have been worried.

 

87% of all crimes against the person are committed by men that’s the blunt truth that no one can spin away.

 

Dismiss people's deaths?

Good grief.

 

The conversation on this thread is diverging from the real issue a lot of the time just like the BLM discussion did. The issue is really what we can do to make our women safer. That's all. Posting statistics to show that men are also attacked is not relevant. Posting anecdotal evidence about one's own experiences is interesting but not relevant. All violence is wrong for sure but at the moment the issue is not about ALL violence its about violence towards women and the fact that many many women are scared or uncomfortable. Twisting the narrative onto other issues misses (deliberately in some cases) the real one.
I could relate a story about myself from a while ago where I was sexually assaulted by a woman. People may find it interesting or not as a slant on the thread. However, as I've just intimated it's not relevant here.
Women want their voices heard. It's about time they were listened to and its time for blokes to do the listening.

 

Spot on.

 

your post...

I appreciate you're somewhat an 'expert' on domestic violence, but the facts here aren't simply that 'men are at risk outside the home or from strangers, and women are only at risk from people they know (so it's their own fault for getting into these relationships), and I'm fairly certain that's not what you mean - but it's pretty much what you've posted here.

 

Wish I could like that more than once.

 

It amazes me that of all groups, it’s the white male who profess to be most wronged, most maligned, most misunderstood.

I belong in that group, white male, and I regularly feel guilty for simply having random privilege I never asked for at the expense of others who deserve it more than I do, if only to escape the crap, perceived as normal by many, they face on a daily basis.

 

I think as a society we don't encourage and value self reflection and an openness to understand others experiences enough. It's an inbuilt insecurity and self-preservation mechanism that when a difficult issue is brought up people don't always have the bravery to ask difficult questions of themselves, and consequently try to deflect or say "not all men" or equivalent.

I am absolutely certain that every single man on here will have at some point behaved in a way towards women that they're not proud of. No one is saying there's not a vast scale of severity. But it's the low level stuff that enables the bigger stuff. You tackle the most serious behaviour by each of us questioning and addressing our low level behaviour and attitudes.

If we were all more open to learning about a subject when it comes up the world would be a better place. Don't fear issues we don't understand, listen and educate ourselves, reflect on what we might have done in the past, own our past uninformed behaviours, and then move on to be better people.

I think that goes for any issue. But in this case it starts simply with listening to women.