rape

The fact that rape threats are a thing says a lot about how rape isn't a lapse in self-control but often a tool to punish & control others.

The heated public discourse about the frequency of false rape allegations often makes no reference to actual research. When the discourse does make reference to research, it often founders on the stunning variability in research findings on the frequency of false rape reports. A recently published comprehensive review of studies and reports on false rape allegations listed 20 sources whose estimates ranged from 1.5% to 90% (Rumney, 2006). However, when the sources of these estimates are examined carefully it is clear that only a fraction of the reports represent credible studies and that these credible studies indicate far less variability in false reporting rates."Lisak, D., Gardinier, L., Nicksa, S. C., & Cote, A. M. (2010). False allegations of sexual assualt: an analysis of ten years of reported cases. Violence Against Women, 16(12), 1318-1334.

There's no being out too late in Whileaway, or up too early, or in the wrong part of town, or unescorted. You cannot fall out of the kinship web and become sexual prey for strangers, for there is no prey and there are no strangers -- the web is world-wide. In all of Whileaway there is no one who can keep you from going where you please (though you may risk your life, if that sort of thing appeals to you), no one who will follow you and try to embarrass you by whispering obscenities in your ear, no one who will attempt to rape you, no one who will warn you of the dangers of the street, no one who will stand on street corners, hot-eyed and vicious, jingling loose change in his pants pocket, bitterly bitterly sure that you're a cheap floozy, hot and wild, who likes it, who can't say no, who's making a mint off it, who inspires him with nothing but disgust, and who wants to drive him crazy.

Silencing women silences justice.

They are all innocent until proven guilty. But not me. I am a liar until I am proven honest.

She couldn__ get any farther away inside from her skin. She couldn__ get away.

The mistake we make is in thinking rape isn__ premeditated, that it happens by accident somehow, that you__e drunk and you run into a girl who__ also drunk and half-asleep on a bench and you sidle up to her and things get out of hand and before you know it, you__e being accused of something you__ never do. But men who rape are men who watch for the signs of who they believe they can rape. Rape culture isn__ a natural occurrence; it thrives thanks to the dedicated attention given to women in order to take away their security. Rapists exist on a spectrum, and maybe this attentive version is the most dangerous type: women are so used to being watched that we don__ notice when someone__ watching us for the worst reason imaginable. They have a plan long before we even get to the bar to order our first drink.

over and over victims are blamed for their assaults. and when we imply that victims bring on their own fates - whether to make ourselves feel more efficacious or to make the world seem just - we prevent ourselves from taking the necessary precautions to protect ourselves. Why take precautions? We deny the trauma could easily have happened to us. And we also hurt the people already traumatized. Victims are often already full of self-doubt, and we make recovery harder by laying inspectors blame on them.

Rape is so particularly traumatic and so meaningful in so many ways, that there__ something about using the word in other contexts that diminishes the reality of it, and the impact it has on women__ lives.

It was a catch-22: If you didn__ put the trauma behind you, you couldn__ move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.

Those who were molested or beaten as children or teenagers might later be vulnerable to sexual abuse or violence, because their natural impulses to protect themselves and protest (physical and verbal) were extinguished. Expectation of hurtful treatment by others or one's own failed capabilities can stubbornly persist despite overwhelming evidence that such is no longer the case.

Combat and rape, the public and private forms of organized social violence, are primarily experiences of adolescent and early adult life. The United States Army enlists young men at seventeen; the average age of the Vietnam combat soldier was nineteen. In many other countries boys are conscripted for military service while barely in their teens. Similarly, the period of highest risk for rape is in late adolescence. Half of all victims are aged twenty or younger at the time they are raped; three-quarters are between the ages of thirteen and twenty-six. The period of greatest psychological vulnerability is also in reality the period of greatest traumatic exposure, for both young men and young women. Rape and combat might thus be considered complementary social rites of initiation into the coercive violence at the foundation of adult society. They are the paradigmatic forms of trauma for women and men.

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it__ wrong what they say about the past, I__e learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

Sluts don't have a choice, darling. And you've forfeited yours.

My mom doesn't say anything. I don't say anything. Neither of us knows yet what you should say when rape victims blame themselves: 'It was not your fault.' It was not your fault, even if you were drunk, even if you were wearing a low-cut minidress, even if you were out walking alone at night, even if you were on a date with the rapist and kind of liked him but didn't want to have sex with him.

Denial forces victims to retreat in lifeless existence, dieing in the shadows of buried trauma and painful memories.

Convincing someone to have sex is the same as manipulation and does not actually count as getting consent.

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE... AND DEMONSTRATE TO EVERYONE... THAT THEIR FEAR IS GENUINE