/\ /\ /\ This. /\ /\ /\
It's fucking staggering how bad it's getting, even if you only take the conservative 1 in 5 statistics:
Minister says domestic and sexual violence against women and children are at ‘epidemic proportions’
www.theguardian.com
The hardest thing to wrap your head from a blokes point of view, is it's not something women are likely to discuss with you. There's a good chance several friends/families have been the victim of sexual assault or abuse, and you just don't know about it. I used to think it was mostly a media beat-up until I sat down and asked some female friends and family members what their experiences have been and the responses were surprising in their frequency and alarming in the severity of several of them (Bear in mind I only asked about 4 of them). Getting flashed seemed to be especially common when they were teens (by weird old dudes in overcoats), getting groped as teens/adults (on public transport or in the workplace) was also commonplace, a couple of them had been stalked home from the train by total stranger
s (ie: different men on different occasions), one had been grabbed and had a man try to assault them (at night, walking home from a night out but they were not intoxicated luckily) - she had managed to escape and run away. There was also another young woman I knew who sadly had been raped, and more than once at that. First time during a toxic relationship, then by the same bloke several times after leaving him. She shacked up with another bloke who was the big burly "protector" type afterwards but unfortunately he turned out to be a domestic violence-committing piece of shit who beat her when he didn't get his way on trivial things. I also remember that my sister had walked down the same stretch of road as Jill Meagher before Meagher was taken, raped and murdered. My sister had gone through only about 10 minutes earlier, and I still remember my sister talking about it later - much like Jill Meagher, my sister had turned down the offer from a friend to walk to the train station or home with her assuming she’d be safe on her own. She was annoyed with herself for not taking her friend up on the offer, but also
so angry that she even has to consider it.
Obviously
@Dales Cannon hasn't set out to do anything malicious (aside from the obvious prank), and I was probably a bit blunt with my phrasing given I couldn't sleep and it was 2:30 in the morning - to his credit he's acknowledged it possibly wasn't the best idea with the benefit of hindsight.
(
@ozzybmx) I'm all for a 'jump scare' with mates or family, and would suggest just sneaking up behind and yelling "boo!" or rapping your knuckles on the window of the car would be fine as you're basically announcing yourself and it's only a momentary thing where they get startled and then all's good when they spot you. I love a prank generally, but just thought that climbing into the car was a step too far and that the associated fear would/could be too real or too much until she realised what was going on. Fight or flight is a weird thing and you never know how people are going to react. Life goes on, but yeah...