Women, how do you protect yourselves?

[JohnnySavage]

actually most men aren't taught self-defense either, especially if you don't include the guys who enter police or military service.

most guys just think they're tough enough, or strong enough, to fend off an attack. and they usually aren't.

And even if they are, that's not enough when there are several attackers. Remember the navy Seal that was beaten to death here last year? A real-life attack isn't the fair fight some in this thread seem to think it is.

 

[pete]

And even if they are, that's not enough when there are several attackers. Remember the navy Seal that was beaten to death here last year? A real-life attack isn't the fair fight some in this thread seem to think it is.

word.
and even a trained person can still be taken out with a sucker punch, or a good connection right on the button.

 

[girlsmiley]

Fantasy land!

An emergency call could save your life one day.

Don't hate, appreciate!

 

[Wings]

actually most men aren't taught self-defense either, especially if you don't include the guys who enter police or military service.

most guys just think they're tough enough, or strong enough, to fend off an attack. and they usually aren't.

I agree, I was trying to stick with the theme of violence against women as this thread is. It's not really a male vs. female issue. It's a false sense of security, the "it will never happen to me" be it the person thinks he's a strong male or the female thinks she's in a safe area.

The best answer, of course, is to raise our men and women to not rape, not react with violence and to love one another. However that's not the real world, is it?

 

[pete]

I agree, I was trying to stick with the theme of violence against women as this thread is. It's not really a male vs. female issue. It's a false sense of security, the "it will never happen to me" be it the person thinks he's a strong male or the female thinks she's in a safe area.

The best answer, of course, is to raise our men and women to not rape, not react with violence and to love one another. However that's not the real world, is it?

true, sorry for the temporary hijacking
i'm not even sure raising kids the right way will solve it, that seems like more of a utopian ideal than a possibility.
a lot of violent offenders were raised fairly well, came from 'average' homes, and yet somewhere along the way they went nuts nuts nuts.

preventative meaures in the form of training and awareness is probably the best bet. i tell my 7 yr old daughter all the time to beware of strangers, to be nice but keep a distance. even had her watch 'taken' with me the other night, so she'd understand that the world isn't like its shown by 'dora the explorer'

 

[BotanyBoy]

The people acting like a gun will protect them are absolutely correct. Every assailant is required to make the following disclaimer prior to instituting the assault:


"Ma'am, I'm here to assault you. Kindly take your gun out, chamber a round, take off the safety, and prepare to be assaulted. Thank you for your cooperation."

That's why you carry with one in the pipe moron. Who the fuck carries an unloaded gun for self defense?

Most guns suggested for self defense (esp some noob who doesn't have thousands of hours of trigger time/training) don't have thumb safeties. Just draw and squeeze, which I have seen women who have trained get their weapons into a fight from a purse/IWB/belly every bit as quickly as guys can with IWB/Belly/shoulder holsters.

Ok... you're pretty, I see you walking down the street and hide around a corner or in a doorway. You pass and I jump out and punch you square in the nose, knocking you to the ground. Then I throw my 200 pound body on top of you.

Go ahead and tell me about how easy and fast it is to get your cute little gun out.

Living on a planet filled with humans is a dangerous thing because there are lots of dangerous people on it, and real life is nothing like the movies.

All she has to do is reach into her purse.....which she might not be able too, but if she can bad juju is in for a world of hurt b/c she can shoot right through the bag. Hell of a lot faster than she can dial 911......

No it's not a perfect cure all, but if I was a betting man I would bet the farm on the well armed/trained woman having better odds against the 200lb rapist with 15 rounds of +P 9mm than the unarmed woman who also may or may not be able to dial 911, a far more monumental task to accomplish while under attack than simply reaching in the purse and squeezing the trigger of a G19.

 

[Lorilei]

I just stay in the house and keep the doors locked.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

You are making up your numbers on the spot.

only 8.7% of rape victims are male.
In 0.2% of rapes the offender is a female raping a male.
in 0.8% of rapes, the offender and victim are both female.
20% of women report some instance of rape in their lives.

Where are your 40% of women who rape in these numbers? You won't find that number published anywhere other than in your own post, at least not by any reasonable authority.

We aren't talking "general violence" we are talking about gender related violence. Men killed selling or buying drugs from other men - skew the violence statistics, but fit nicely into your statement, "MEN experience violence more often."

You yelled, "let's not talk abuse" but in order to get your "men 10x" you have to use in-home abuse and drug related crime.

Try again.

I interned at a rape crisis center. Males dont report rape much. Too embarrassing.

 

[Wings]

true, sorry for the temporary hijacking
i'm not even sure raising kids the right way will solve it, that seems like more of a utopian ideal than a possibility.
a lot of violent offenders were raised fairly well, came from 'average' homes, and yet somewhere along the way they went nuts nuts nuts.

preventative meaures in the form of training and awareness is probably the best bet. i tell my 7 yr old daughter all the time to beware of strangers, to be nice but keep a distance. even had her watch 'taken' with me the other night, so she'd understand that the world isn't like its shown by 'dora the explorer'

I'd dearly like to tell a story here but I won't. Suffice to say this isn't the place to air it.

I love my Utopian dreams but I'm aware that they are just dreams. What will you do for your daughter as she gets older? Teach her self defense?

 

[JohnnySavage]

That's why you carry with one in the pipe moron. Who the fuck carries an unloaded gun for self defense?

Most guns suggested for self defense (esp some noob who doesn't have thousands of hours of trigger time/training) don't have thumb safeties. Just draw and squeeze, which I have seen women who have trained get their weapons into a fight from a purse/IWB/belly every bit as quickly as guys can with IWB/Belly/shoulder holsters.



All she has to do is reach into her purse.....which she might not be able too, but if she can bad juju is in for a world of hurt b/c she can shoot right through the bag. Hell of a lot faster than 911......

No it's not a perfect cure all, but if I was a betting man I would bet the farm on the well armed/trained woman having better odds against the 200lb rapist with 15 rounds of +P 9mm than the unarmed woman who also may or may not be able to dial 911, a far more monumental task to accomplish while under attack than simply reaching in the purse and squeezing the trigger of a G19.

Ummmm.... every other post you tell us you were shot in the head. Were you unarmed at the time? Why are you such a pussy that you couldn't pull out your .22 from your ankle holster and defend yourself

 

[koalabear]

Ummmm.... every other post you tell us you were shot in the head. Were you unarmed at the time? Why are you such a pussy that you couldn't pull out your .22 from your ankle holster and defend yourself

Only a metro-sexual like you would wear an ankle holster for personal protection.

 

[JohnnySavage]

Only a metro-sexual like you would wear an ankle holster for personal protection.

Once-ler was talking about an ankle holster. Try to keep up, there aren't that many big words

 

[koalabear]

Once-ler was talking about an ankle holster. Try to keep up, there aren't that many big words

Don't get snippy just because your ankle holster is too tight.

 

[JohnnySavage]

Don't get snippy just because your ankle holster is too tight.

I don't own a gun, so there's no need for a holster of any type. I'm not a girly-man who lives life as a scardy cat.

 

[pete]

I'd dearly like to tell a story here but I won't. Suffice to say this isn't the place to air it.

I love my Utopian dreams but I'm aware that they are just dreams. What will you do for your daughter as she gets older? Teach her self defense?

yeah, definitely have her take some form of self defense from an instructor. what i know is piecemeal, i don't think i'd be a good teacher for her.

i also plan on teaching her how to change her own flat tire, how to remove and install door knobs & locks, etc. she's a princess but she'll have the skills of a tomboy too

 

[Wings]

yeah, definitely have her take some form of self defense from an instructor. what i know is piecemeal, i don't think i'd be a good teacher for her.

i also plan on teaching her how to change her own flat tire, how to remove and install door knobs & locks, etc. she's a princess but she'll have the skills of a tomboy too

My dad required complete tear-down and rebuild of an engine before I was allowed to get my license. (Gear heads make great dads) The oil changing and certainly the ability to change her own tires is essential.

 

[CandiCame]

I find your links quite confusing - links to PDFs that I either have to buy or register for, or seemingly random links to spousal violence, trauma etc.
Anyway, the end result is that I have no idea if your statistical claim of 40% of rape perps are female is true.

Although it's true that the person most likely to kill a woman is her husband/boyfriend (ex or current), it is almost certainly true that the "stranger" murders would be a hell of a lot higher if women did not take the precautions that most of us do as a matter of course.
Things like avoiding walking home alone; being careful where we park our cars; leaving lights on in our apartments when we go out late; taking self defence classes; carrying mace etc.

Almost every single one of my circle of girlfriends have been harrassed, abused or attacked by strange men, even in broad daylight.

I've been flashed at more times than I can remember. I've been touched up on a bus and on an escalator - the guy on the bus hit me in my face when I lifted his hand off my boob! My fellow passengers did nothing to intevene when he got off at the next stop, because, as I found out once he was gone, they thought he was my boyfriend.
I've been followed home from work, I've had men stepping in my way when I'm going to the bathroom in a bar, et fucking cetera.

And this is not even mentionning all the times I've been called "an uptight bitch" when I didn't answer banter from some random guy, or being called "fucking whore" when I did.

This culture of abuse is rea and I'm not a victim because I take precautions that I shouldn't have to take.

Many of them are sources for a paper I wrote. I forgot that you have to be registered to read them- my school gives you the registration when you register for the class.

The ones for domestic violence are reports on how gender affects domestic violence, and how men are significantly less likely to report domestic violence then women, even though the actual rate is roughly the same. And also that the VAST majority of rape occurs within the paremators of a relationship.

Stranger rape is seriously, according to hundreds of studies less then .05% likely to happen. It's statistically insignificant. And focusing the beam of our 'rape avoidance' on that leads to the false assumption that that's how you're going to be raped. When it isn't. Rape victiums fall to their boyfriends, their husbands, their parents, their guardians. Many of them are children. Many of the girls get pregnant from it- most teenage pregnancies are the products of rape.

And I'm sorry that those things happen to you- but they happen to me as well. That's not limited to- or more likely to happen to- women. Women are more likely to report it.

But this culture of telling the victim that they should be preventing their own rape is a bad idea. It takes the focus away from real circumstances that lead to rapes, and it makes people think that they have the right to pass complete or partial blame on to the victim. We saw this on this very board in the teen pregnancy threads. Most teen mothers have adult baby daddies, but there were people on this very board who were saying that it was the kid's fault.

Hell, there are people in the mainstream media that say shit like that. http://mediamatters.org/research/2007/01/17/oreilly-abducted-child-liked-his-circumstances/137753

And the culture of fear leads to shit like that. And I just flat out don't find that acceptable. People are raped because of rapists. Most rapes are domestic or child abuse. This scenario that you folk are training for- it's less likely then winning the lottery or getting hit by lightning. And I think that focusing so much on it takes away from energy and resources that we could be using on actual rape victims.

 

[pete]

My dad required complete tear-down and rebuild of an engine before I was allowed to get my license. (Gear heads make great dads) The oil changing and certainly the ability to change her own tires is essential.

i used to change my own oil, but newer cars have made it tougher to get to the filter, which pisses me off.

but yeah, the last thing i want is for my little girl to be 'helpless'. fuck that.

 

[CandiCame]

Once-ler was talking about an ankle holster. Try to keep up, there aren't that many big words

Yeah, I was saying that most women I know use ankle-holsters. Because they do. I don't really know what that's about. I think that's what they teach in ladies' self defense classes or something.

 

[lynn-23]

There is no way you can ever make yourself 100% safe, but I agree you can't live in fear all the time. But women need to take some basic precautions. Like others here have said, I just try to be aware whats going on around me. My husband taught me some things along those lines. I work in an office and park in a parking structure. So when i leave the office, always look out into the garage before entering, try to walk with a coworker. Its no guarantee that I wont get attacked, but I can try to make myself less of a target.

 

[kbate]

Um... ok.


The orchestration of "rape culture" is a way of social control. It keeps women in fear, it keeps them down. And you are contributing to it. I might not be able to change your mind, but maybe if I can show one person that they don't have to live in fear, that they can 'take back the night' that they are a whole person and not a victim, then maybe i've done something before work today.

Your first 4 links, are irrelevant to any discussion of statistics in crime and rape especially.

Link 5 is about young black male crime, not about 'rape'.
Link 6 shows more women stalked than men by 3:1.
Link 7 shows 1/4 of women get raped (higher than most figures).
Link 8 is first that shows "female offenders" but is limited to "domestic violence".
Link 9 back to PTSD among victims. Not proving your case.
Link 10, 11: Sorry you do not have access to this article so no statistics can be referenced unless I'm willing to part with $72 based on an article's title.
Link 12, 13: more abstracts which both indicate more women than men risk attack.

What I learned is that you googled "Male Victim" "male Rape Victim" and "Violence against Males"

From your "non-Scholarly" links:

a study on how many offenders are convicted in England and Wales - hardly proves that rape isn't something of concern.

and the ever popular 'rape sorcery' really, this is your power statement to close?


Just another of your fantasy lives I suppose?

 

[CandiCame]

Your first 4 links, are irrelevant to any discussion of statistics in crime and rape especially.

Link 5 is about young black male crime, not about 'rape'.
Link 6 shows more women stalked than men by 3:1.
Link 7 shows 1/4 of women get raped (higher than most figures).
Link 8 is first that shows "female offenders" but is limited to "domestic violence".
Link 9 back to PTSD among victims. Not proving your case.
Link 10, 11: Sorry you do not have access to this article so no statistics can be referenced unless I'm willing to part with $72 based on an article's title.
Link 12, 13: more abstracts which both indicate more women than men risk attack.

What I learned is that you googled "Male Victim" "male Rape Victim" and "Violence against Males"

From your "non-Scholarly" links:

a study on how many offenders are convicted in England and Wales - hardly proves that rape isn't something of concern.

and the ever popular 'rape sorcery' really, this is your power statement to close?


Just another of your fantasy lives I suppose?

5: Men are more likely then women to be victiums of violent crime. Violent crime is more common then rape. We're discussing not only rape but violent crime.
6: You are more likely to get raped by someone you know, leading to the creation of stalking laws. Not abducted in a back-alley by a stranger.
7: Actually, this was to illustrait a point, because I knew that you would get 1/4 out of it, when really, "This is a rather common infographic retrieved from the RAINN website, and it’s as misleading as it is inaccurate. The problem is that the supposed “experts” writing this apparently don’t understand the difference between a “person accused of rape” and a “rapist.” In the same way, those “100 rapes” aren’t really “100 rapes,” they’re 46 alleged rapes and 54 guesses at rapes that may have happened but not been reported.

I saw a post recently that termed this kind of behavior “rape sorcery.” While these numbers might be considered shocking, in reality they’re entirely commensurate with other crimes. Note here that the actual conviction rate for rape is 5/9, or 56%, not 3% or anything remotely similar.

For now we can ignore the 54 alleged unreported rapes. The reality is that we have no idea, but when people are surveyed we overwhelmingly find that the reason so many “rapes” are unreported is because the “victim” didn’t consider it to be serious and didn’t feel they’d been harmed. If the victim didn’t feel they’d been substantially harmed, it’s debatable whether we can even consider a crime to have been committed, and at the very least we can’t count them. Once they’re subtracted, the number’s already taken a huge hit.

Of the 46 reported rapes, only a handful lead to an arrest. This is for a number of reasons. For some (this is actually quite rare, as most rapes are committed by someone close to the victim) the police might not have been able to locate a suspect. For others, they are removed as a result of accusation inflation. Basically, accusation inflation happens when someone reports a rape to the police, but for one reason or another (commonly jurisdiction issues) it’s dismissed and refiled elsewhere. This can result in an additional report even though there was only one crime. For still more, there are cases where a cursory examination demonstrates that the events reported don’t qualify as rape under the law, such as a case where two equally intoxicated people have sex. Additionally, there are cases where the alleged victim is believed to be fabricating their story outright. These aren’t the only factors, but even in short we can see how big an effect these could be.

Of the 12 that lead to an arrest, several will be dropped because the suspect is proven innocent (predominantly via alibi that wasn’t originally accessible), and others will be dropped because the DA feels the case was too insubstantial to prosecute. This could be a real crime with insufficient evidence, or a false allegation (or misdirected allegation) where the evidence doesn’t exist because the crime never occurred.

Of the 9 that are prosecuted, slightly less than half fail in court because while there was sufficient evidence to take the case to trial, there wasn’t enough to prove that case beyond a reasonable doubt. Additionally, some cases end through plea bargains, often when the DA doubts that there will be a successful rape conviction. There’s a reason it specifies “felony” convictions, as many of these plea bargains result in misdemeanor convictions. This may be accidental, or this may be a purposeful attempt to mislead.

Finally, we get to the most misleading of the statistics, that a number of the convicted rapists will not “spend even a single day in prison.” This, of course, is bullshit. The reason for this is that many rape trials end in convictions for sexual assault. Sentences for sexual assault are not as long as sentences for rape, and given the normal length of a rape trial and general proceedings what’s actually happening is that many of these offenders are being sentenced to “time served”; that is, they’re already been in prison for their entire sentence before they were convicted. As mentioned, this makes the statistic intensely and likely intentionally misleading. Even in cases where someone did in fact rape and were acquitted at trial, it’s common for them to have spent a considerable amount of time in jail first in addition to the community factors….of course this also affects a huge number of people who were falsely or inaccurately accused. They are not just letting convicted rapists go without jail time.

The worst part of this is that it utterly ignores the fact that while according to the CDC women make up roughly 40% of yearly rapists, they make up only a few percent of rapists that are actually convicted. While the attrition and conviction rates for rapists in general are roughly commensurate with those of other crimes, when we narrow things to female rapists we suddenly do start to see a massive gap.

But hey, why bother with silly things like accuracy when you can get a good infographic out of it, right?"

8: Your point? Women and men experience domestic violence in roughly similar numbers. Rape is most often a part of domestic violence. I wasn't limiting myself to rape but violence.

9: Men are more likely to experience PTSD symptoms following rape and domestic violence. That doesn't mean that women don't.

10&11: Sorry.

12&13: Are both showing that random violence against both sexes is a rarity and that violence (including rape) are more likely to be from people that the victim was already in a relationship with.

And finally, I don't have a 'case'. I simply care about people. It isn't about arguing on the internet, it's about rape victims and violence prevention. If you create this fantasyland where you're going to get grabbed on every corner and then teach that to people, you're creating an environment of fear that keeps people down and hinders actual rape victims. It leads people to think that they can blame the victims. It leads victims to think, "Well, that wasn't real rape". And it's just a bad thing. Again, you're not going to change your mind. You think what you think and that's your thing. But we have to live in the really real world, and I'm going to continue to advocate for victims, not for a culture of fear that makes it easier for rapists. If that's what you want to do, then that's your deal.

 

[TheLM]

This thread is reverse-mysogyny.

You're all bickering about who can pull a gun fast enough.... But the VAST majority of rape doesn't occur in a stranger attack OTHERWISE WE WOULDN'T HEAR ABOUT IT ON THE NEWS.

 

[richard_daily]

Running away works pretty well. The average violent offender can't run 10 miles.

Plus, having a cell phone all the time makes violence less likely, 911 is only seconds away.

You must live in a very nice neighborhood, if 911 is only seconds away.

 

[Wings]

This thread is reverse-mysogyny.

You're all bickering about who can pull a gun fast enough.... But the VAST majority of rape doesn't occur in a stranger attack OTHERWISE WE WOULDN'T HEAR ABOUT IT ON THE NEWS.

No, we are not all bickering about guns. Please read the whole thread before shooting off a retort.