I was hoping that there was a thread already started about the show I am watching today but I guess this is a past show on a sindicated channel. These channels are a week or so behind the current show.
Anyhow, there is a young woman who is afraid to be alone in her home and other situations because she fears rape and murder. She is engaged to be married and she fears the cruise ship and the "third world" nations for the trip's ports of call.
Considering the national headlines we have had these last few years, can anyone really blame her for having a fear that she will be next? Man, these cruise ships have policies of looking the other way when someone goes missing for fear that crime will be bad for business. I think it would cost too much to make the ships secure and and report each incident because they would be taking responsibility for each incident. As it is, there are many dozens of people missing right now and these cruise lines (who for the most part are not bound by US laws, much to the surprise of the victim's families) and there are teens by the dozens that foolishly engage in sex talk with strangers over message boards that are supposed to be anonymous but the teens end up disclosing enough information to be traced by the predators. There are 2 local 15 year old teens right now that ran away (according to their parents) and allegedly they have left messages on the board (myspace.com) saying they are "ok". It seems to me that they must have been playing dangerously and as I said, revealing enough info for the predator to find them. The predator then logs in on either the account of the victim or a "throw away" account and then leaves a misleading posting that is intended to lead the family to think they ran away to a new life and to leave them alone to pursue happiness. Of course this is ridiculous as well.
The point I am making is that with so many things changing our culture and the way we lead our lives, there have been plenty of changes that predators have been able to take advantage of. I believe that any subculture of people look to themselves for support and I have seen groups of men that share information on how to target women to persuade them to engage in sex acts. The objective is to use any means of deception or literally anything goes in order to get them to give in and then the male moves on. They keep score and so many of them I suppose they use the numbers to foolthemselves in to thinking of themselves as a success. Keep in mind the last group I mentioned are not doing anything illegal. Now take those same behaviors and add the element of having a set of values that says it is ok to break the law when you are not caught. Now you have a group of men sharing ideas on how to date rape, including which drugs function the best etc.
The very thought of these issues makes me sick. I had alread decided years ago that I would fight these demonic behaviors whenever I could. I was reminded of this today when watching the show and the young woman explained her fear. Now, I think she has more going on than even she realizes. I bet she had something happen she she can't remember. Only recently did I figure out what the trigger was for me. I am 42 this year and last year I remembered my reaction to a film I saw as a pre-teen. It was called "The Legend of Billy Jack" (I think). The film was about a school with hippies that went to a reservation to pursue freedom and artistic expression. That message was way over my head at the time because i was too young to understand how these kids would have felt repressed. What I saw was a bunch of kind-hearted kids that got together in a school and the local "brats" or "jock" that were spoiled by their parents. The leader of the brat pack had a convertible Corvette (again, this is all from memory about 30 years ago). The teacher of the school was a pretty women of about 25 and she tried to stand up to the kids that were picking on her students. This got the brat pack leader angry and near the climax of the film, the leader and 3 of his friends isolated the teacher and raped her. The was depicted very vividly and I found out years later that this film slipped through the ratings board somehow as an "NC-17) I think and setting all of this aside, the point I am making is that this event even portrayed as fiction was extremely disturbing and tramatic. As I matured through my teen years, I was always very respectful of women and their need to be protected from other men who might be predators. I never understood why I was more sensitive and protective than the others I observed. The thing I have learned through these past 30 years is that I think if more people had my protective instincts, a lot fewer women would be victims of rape and abuse. In general, the worst problem here is that if we assume we can't compell criminals to do anything we don't restrain them from doing the biggest factor that we have control over is the way *the rest of us* protect those that need protection.
The yougn woman that had fears of being raped was not the irrational one. The irrational attitudes were those that wanted her to just "get over it" and act as if these crimes don't happen every day! Every day, students get abused, young girls get molested, college students get raped and molested either with or without the use of drugs, etc. Sex crimes are at an epidemic rate. I don't care that statistically they are more or less the way it has always been. That is because it has been a problem since the beginning of time. What is unique is that in this day and age, with mass communication and means of reporting and tracking (TV, newspapers and computers) we are in a position to share information and finally take a stand against this. Instead, most people have a "so what" attitude and I beleive this young woman is seeing things the way I do except that instead of being in a position to do somehting about it, she is feeling exposed.
What I hope to accomplish by posting this is that I would like ot encourage anyone who saw this segment on the show and or anyone reading this is let's try to take steps to make women safer instead of telling them that maybe they are not normal to feel afraid of becoming the next victim. Let's focus of real solutions until the "canary in the coal mine" tells us that she feels safer. Let's not TELL her to feel safe, let's INSPIRE her to feel safe.
--Chris, 42 yo male in California
