Yes. the point of the joke is that even suggesting that men be faced with the sort of restrictions routinely pushed on women is met with abhorrence.
Let me try it another way. We assume that the large majority of men are innocent of assaulting people in the streets. Otherwise no one would be horrified. After all, we routinely accept much more onerous restrictions on people who have actually been convicted of violent crimes. (Like prison. Or like forbidding sexual predators from living near a school.)
Yet, it is horrifying to think that all men might be restricted from going about their business without begging help from a woman. Because… Most of them AREN’T violent, of course. It’s not fair.
In contrast, lots of men think nothing of telling women (who are even less likely to perpetrate violent crimes in the streets) that they shouldn’t go out without a male escort.
You know what, that’s not fair, either. And the fact that it’s a social norm, rather than a law, doesn’t improve the situation a whole lot.
I understand the rhetorical point about the curfew, and I am as appalled by this murder as anyone else.
But
I will say the question of “Why do we tell women to do X and not tell men to not assault women?” is a bit silly. It’s not the same question as the curfew, but it has been asked in several articles related to this incident.
The answer is because rapists and murderers are the criminals. It’s like we would tell someone to lock their door when they go out and not tell people not to burgle houses, because we assume everyone already knows that taking someone’s stuff is not a virtuous activity.
How would that have been a “practical suggestion” in the case of Sarah Everard, the murdered UK woman whose death sparked this thread? The suspect who’s been arrested for her murder is 48-year-old married white British police officer Wayne Couzens.
I’m not saying there can’t be a separate discussion on the question of links between immigration and crime. But it seems kind of gratuitously racist to drag that question into the discussion of a case which so poignantly illustrates the problem that women are NOT only or even primarily in danger from “scary foreigner” types, women are largely in danger from native-born local majority-group men, even the middle-aged ones, even the ones whose JOB is to help PROTECT them.
I didn’t think we were talking about a specific case, but the general case of violence against women. Of course any particular rape can be caused by anyone.
You throw around accusations of racism so easily. When you do that, you water down the idea and let real racists off the hook by making them no different than anyone else who disagrees with you.
It depends where you live, doesn’t it? In some locations you are absolutely right. And of course I already said that the problem occurs with men in general, not just ‘scary foreigner types’, which are your words, not mine.
But I was talking about the specific case of the UK and Wales. If the rapes there are primarily committed by local men, how do you explain how rape levels have gone up exponentially? Did all those men suddenly become rapists? From Statistica:
Those are HORRIFIC numbers. Is it your contention that the same pool of men who committed 18.4 thousand rapes in 2014/15 are the same group now committing 62,000 rapes in 2019/2020? Did they get three times as violent in five years? Or maybe something else changed during that time. If you’ve got a candidate for what might have changed other than immigration, please enlighten us. Here’s a nice control for your study: During the same period, rape went up in the U.S. by anout 20%. Also terrible, but nowhere near the massive increase in the UK.
As another data point we could look at Sweden. In the early 2000’s Sweden started taking in many thousands of immigrants, many young men with low educations from distressed countries. From 2005 to 2011 the rape rate was constant at about 2.3% of the population reporting a sex crime. Starting in 2012, that number started to rise dramatically, and is now at 11%. Peaceful, welcoming Sweden now has the highest number of rapes per capita in Europe, by a big margjn. Did the local men there suddenly discover their love of rape? Maybe it was something in the water? Whatever else could it be?
Some light reading:
There is a reason I said ‘culture’ and not race. There are many eastern countries with similar ethnic breakdowns, but violence against women varies dramatically between them.
Here’s an example of the culture in Afghanistan:
Is it really so hard to believe that bringing thousands of young men from a culture like that into a western country where women are free to do as they please just might cause a lot of rapes?
Moderating
This thread is in danger of being hijacked into a discussion of immigration policy, racial prejudice and cultural attitudes toward sexual assault in other countries. Let’s drop that.
You are having difficulty hearing the hordes of women tell you that we are not allowed to do as we please. We are having to restrict our lives and activities to avoid harassment and assault. Going on seven decades for me here in the US.
Back in about 1997 I was living in Wausau, population about 40,000. A woman at a laundromat got brutally attacked but survived. They caught the guy maybe 3 months later, but in the meantime hello, I had to go do laundry (different laundromat). So I went in the day. I sat next to the door. I looked at everyone who entered, which was basically no one. Except this one guy. He came in, saw me, and immediately walked away from me and circled around to get to his laundry. He made kind of a show of getting his laundry out and putting it in the dryer, aware I had an eye on him. Then he left the same way. He did the same thing when getting and folding his dried laundry.
How hard is it to realize just by having a penis you can spook a solitary woman? This guy knew it.
I won’t respond on the race thing, because as the Mod correctly says, that’s a hijack that’s nothing to do with this OP.
But in terms of your question, yeah for a crime like rape there are many factors that can affect the numbers a great deal without the actual number of incidents changing, regarding: how much as a culture we think such crimes will be seriously investigated, whether people feel safe to make such a report (bear in mind most rapes are committed by someone the victim knows, so in the past they may have been afraid of losing their job, or their home, or their family ties) and so on.
Articles such as this one by the BBC largely put down the increase in these statistics to more people feeling empowered to come forward.
I think you mean “32 thousand in 2014/15”, according to your quote?
Theoretically they could be, of course: if, for example, every UK man who committed one rape in 2014 became emboldened by the country’s recent record low rape prosecution and conviction rates to commit two rapes in 2019, that would account for the entire increase all by itself.
But of course, that’s very unlikely to be the whole explanation. As Mijin notes, the whole explanation is likely to be made up of a quite complicated combination of factors.
Yup. Disregarding the approximately 1100 more rape offences we’d expect to see in 2019 compared to 2014 just due to the overall growth in UK population alone, there’s also the issue of rape underreporting. Rape is, of course, an extremely underreported crime in the UK, as in most other places, which means that even a moderate increase in willingness to report rape can lead to a drastic jump in absolute numbers of reported rapes. As this article notes,
A follow-up on another statistic:
Note that Sweden’s number of registered rape offences has been the highest in Europe for decades:
But as the cite notes, that doesn’t necessarily imply that significantly more rapes happen in Sweden than in other European countries. Maybe rape is less underreported, and/or more broadly defined, in Sweden than in the other countries in question:
My rapist was a white U.S. citizen, an Ivy League grad, and an executive VP of a Fortune 100 company. As a result, I am far more afraid (and yes, still am) of being alone with a man of power - because they don’t face consequences.
Despite the insinuation that somehow the problem is immigrants, you’ve just describes right-wing culture (and particularly right-wing incel culture).
Part of that, as described in previous discussions, is simply that 1) the UK has a broader definition of “assault” and 2) the lack of guns means that violent assaults are considerably less likely to escalate to murder in the UK.
The big reason is that successive Conservative governments slashed police officer numbers by 20,000 across the country as well as over 20,000 supporting staff (custody officers, scene of crime staff, PCSOs etc) starting in 2010. It’s the same reason knife crimes, which had been steadily falling for years, began an upturn in 2013-14. London was hit hardest by these losses.
One might also point to the upsurge in hate crimes following the Brexit referendum in 2016, including big jumps in assaults on Muslims and other religious minorities, homosexuals, and immigrants. However, I have found nothing to indicate whether there is a direct correlation with the increase in attacks on women in general at that time.
@Sam_Stone your position as a pro gun rights conservative is very well known here, and your points are pretty much only presented in support of that view, except for those relating to ‘dangerous foreigners’ which leans so far over toward the anti-immigration crowd that they hardly deserve mention, and certainly qualify for no merit whatsoever.
Your comments about crime rates are exactly the disingenouus and ill-informed extremely selective data I have seen spouted in many gun control threads.
I’n not sure of your motive for making such assertions, because they seem to be more intended to derail this thread - and this is a common debating tactic, instead of meeting the arguments on point.
In my opinion the vast majority of issues that women face are the social/institutional structural ones - the role expectations that we collectively hold, criminal behaviour simply feed of these to a large extent, but at least in crim inal behaviour we have recognisable sanctions - whereas in societal expectations we do not.
My concern about this ‘thought game’ is that as soon as objections are made, we then get comments of ‘we didn’t really mean it that way’ or 'you don’t really get the “joke” - well guess what? this is precisely the sort of argument that abusers make when they come up with objectionable comments/behaviours - as a person of Asian descent I am extremely familiar with this sort of ‘game’
So the idea that ‘hey we don’t really mean all men are rapists and we don’t really mean its really about curfew’ is a rather tired tactic - debate things on the points that they support, you might try preface it with a scenario that does involve curfew, or even what sort of behaviour should drive curfew.
Stereotyping is just a very dumb way of switching off the very individuals who you are trying to reach - its counterproductive and is certain to be twisted out of context by the very folk whose mindset needs to change.
One poster claims to have had second thoughts, I wonder how many would admit to subconsciously digging in even deeper - not many would admit it I suspect, but it is a risk of such an approach.
@casdave Whoa, wasn’t expecting that, thank you for speaking up.
I won’t touch the derailment except to say I vehemently disagree with Sam_stones argument in its entirety, but this:
…is quite apt.
I’ve certainly had my concerns about unflenching hypocrisy and rampant unchallenged sexism reaffirmed quite strongly. Can’t call it subconscious when you’re hit with it that blatantly, though, so I wonder if that counts?
I call out things like stereotyping or casual -ism (usually racism or sexism but occassionally others) because it’s one major reason Thought Bubbles like /r/The_Donald get formed. People try to have a conversation, get completely alienated by their opposition and find refuge with like minded individuals who echo and amplify their views until they get radicalized.
So what you guys are saying is that there are a whole bunch of men, on the verge of raping women, who will be pushed over the edge if women are too uppity? Maybe we should make this a serious proposal, I didn’t realize that the the sexual assault tendency was so common men just needed a small change in women’s behavior to push them over. Oh, wait, that’s what you’ve been telling us all along “she shouldn’t have dressed like that” “she was a tease.”
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can say I’m saying there are a lot of men who would listen to and try to understand with and maybe even comply with your requests who hear the way you treat them with explicit hatred and join MRA and incel groups instead.
Some of those people do go nuts and do horrible shit, but that’s more a consequence of radical echo chambers providing a place for them to get comfortable with their own violent tendencies (these groups don’t create violence but they do incubate it).
If your goal is to be heard and understood, starting from a position of “you are a subhuman monster equivalent to Satan’s spawn and I find your misery hilarious” is not a smart approach.
Oh, good grief.
If your goal is for us to hear you, accusing us of holding abhorrent positions that none of us are holding is not a smart approach.
It’s perhaps worth asking why some men hear a proposal that only makes sense as the satire it obviously is if you all agree that most men are decent human beings and NOT violent monsters, and yet read it as saying that all men, including them, are violent monsters.
I’m pretty surprised, honestly.
My pount was simply that there are countries out there with horrific attitudes towards women, and if you are truly interested in helping women it might be a good idea to not import hundreds of thousands of unmarried young men from such a culture en masse and unassimilated such that they bring their culture with them.
I would have thought this was rather obvious. After all, if you imported hundreds of thousands of American Republicans, and they moved into ‘American’ neighborhoods and didn’t assimilate into the culture, would you not expect them to do the kinds of things American conservatives do? If you suddenly saw political pressure increasing to make guns more legal, would you be as quick to dismiss your large American conservative community as being somewhat responsible, especially if such support seemed to go up as more American conservatives showed up?
So the answer is “behave or we might get worse?” Really, this is your argument? Someone on the fence about joining a MRA group isn’t going to be a good ally anyway, and isn’t someone I would trust to have a date with.