Rape, blame, responsibility, Amnesty, etcetera.

I mean, there are the obvious reasons, that I don't want deeply private and personal stuff like this ending up on "ha ha Britishes are so funny!" threads for adolescent boys.

But partly because I hate that way it seems to *change* people's attitudes towards you. (My most recent Ex actually found out about it and was "Errr, I don't know how to handle this." F*ck you, because I do.) Don't feel sorry for me, because I don't. It happened, and it sucked, but I've dealt with it in the best way I know how. Feel sorry for the f*cking animals who do this kind of thing. Feel sorry for the police who don't know how to treat this sort of thing with any degree of sympathy.

I don't *mean* to bring threads crashing to a halt like this, but OTOH it does piss me off when people start saying EVERY rape is like this or EVERY rape is like that. Because every rape is different and unique and there's no one size fits all blanket solution or attitude to take.

and yes, you're right, every such incident is different. and people's perceptions are different too. i'm just talking as an incredibly angry man who fucking hates - hates - aggressively sexual male behaviour in any form. JBR, i didn't mean to sound like my earlier rant was directed at you: it wasn't, and i appreciate totally what you mean about keeping your wits about you (exactly the phrase both mrs fiendish and i used, at the same time as each other, when discussing this last night).

it just shouldn't have to be like that: what gives any person the right to impose themself on someone else, no matter who that person is, what they are doing or why they are there?

but hey. the world is a shitty place full of shitters. we knew that.

But don't actually buy a copy, for god's sake. Try your local library.

OK... my girlfriend was raped about six months before I met her. Once when we were having sex, I looked down and released that the bed, her lap, and my self were completely covered in blood, from where I'd reopened a wound where she'd had a knife inserted into her vagina. Do you understand what it's like for us though? When every single touch we make runs the risk of triggering off memories of what happened? It's hard. Asking us to treat you as you would anyone who hadn't been raped is a ridiculous thing to do. We do that and we're heartless. We make allocations and then we're pandering. It's... it makes me seem like such an asshole for worrying about myself when I'm not the one that was raped, but to have someone you love, and to know they've been... ruined like that... I think what you're saying is umpossible.

But as I said above, there really is no "one size fits all" response to rape and its aftermath.

Sure it changes you, and it can change your responses, emotionally, sexually, and otherwise. But the important thing is to talk to the victim about how *they* want to handle it - which does also include how they'd prefer you react to it.

Personally, *I* would prefer that it didn't affect anything within my sexual relationship(s). Your GF may have a completely different response, and it really is her right to say what that is.

Part of recovering from rape and any other sexual abuse is regaining control over your own sexuality. So it really is her/my/any other victim's call about how to deal with it.

anyone who's been through anything like this has my absolute undying sympathy.

other than getting cross and railing at people who sexually assault others in any way, i don't have any more to say. so i'll shut up now.

jesus christ. i think "insensitive" has just been redefined.

I'm not sure what you mean here - if you've been in the same position then that's terrible.

I'm still only assuming I am reading it correctly, I could easily not be - I guess he means that his girlfriend has been irreversibly changed for the worse by the experience, scarred permanently both literally and figuratively, and nothing that anyone does can make it go away.

I might be wrong though.

The answer is no, not to distract the thread from the charming ruined versus not-ruined debate. This is the thing that bothers me about most of these discussions, is that basically "Anonymous" is right, every single instance is different, but however studies show, in the US at least, that most rapes are done not by strangers but by people the women knew, friends or boyfriends or neighbors.

There is this great big myth that all rapes are like Jodie Foster in The Accused, drunk off her ass girl in a bar getting banged by a bunch of strangers but it's just really not that common an instance.

So yeah, what I'm saying here is you can "minimize risks" all you want but the bottom line is that there's only so far that goes. grimley OTM, basically.

Also Nick, that study is disgusting. 8% of poll respondents think a woman is totally responsible for rape if she has had many sexual partners. I fail to see what point you were trying to illuminate by posting it. It says the exact same thing the article says.

Um, 8% think the woman should be completely blamed. You've still got the other 20+% who think it is A-OK to partially blame the victim. Or did you skip that part?

It makes me kind of wonder what kind of shit goes on in the heads of people you meet on a day-to-day basis, behind the mask of "normality"

is the absolute key. what the fuck is our so-called functional western society DOING to people? that's what needs discussed!

jesus. these people have the vote. they have children. they ... wow, pash's "doing my head in a bit" is a vast, vast understatement :(

People are all sick stupid sheeplike fucks, I assume everybody has as much right to be alive as I do though and that gets me by okay

Does any of this make sense?

Yes, it makes perfect sense.

-- Sick Mouthy (sickmouth...), November 21st, 2005.

I don't think these statistics are common to the UK, either. I can remember surveys of American college students where the questions were phrased quite ambiguously - and it was fightening how many would admit to doing things that were certain morally and quite possibily legally apalling. This was 10, 15 year ago. I actually have a hard time believing that it's changed that much.

Even despite the PC excesses of the early 90s - does anyone remember pamphlets on campus that advocated men asking women at every step of the seduction if they consented to having their knee touched, their breasts fondled, etc. Gah! Who would want to have consensual sex under those circumstances?

How *do* you go about changing these attitudes? How do you go about changing the attitudes of men who think that they *own* their partners, to the point of abuse and marital rape? How do you go about changing the attitudes who think no more of sexually assaulting a drunken woman than they would of picking a lost five pound note off the floor? Are we really going to change anything by flapping and grandstanding here? (Well, apart from upsetting a couple of people who are clearly in pain, because they used words that "offend" our sensibilities.)

I don't know. I'm not sure that anyone does here.

Castrated maybe, but even that doesn't deliver satisfaction, as it'd probably make them angrier, and drive whatever sick non-sexual violence that makes them rape women in the first place.