6/13/2023 0 Comments Girl caught plaaying in public![]() ![]() In reality though, these incidents are crimes and, if victims or witnesses feel able to do so, should be reported to the police. It is also about the normalisation of sexual offences within a culture that suggests women should just shut up and get used to it. This is about men feeling entitled to sexual ownership of women's bodies in public spaces, about a sense that they are powerful and in control and a belief that they will not be punished. The fact that so many victims are so young, and the sense of fear and helplessness they report, point to the important fact that, like rape, this is a crime that is about power and control. ![]() Some women kept quiet because, when they did try to tell someone what had happened, they were blamed, or asked: "What were you wearing?", as if they had somehow 'provoked' the incident. Some recalled reporting incidents to the police, but many more said they had never told anyone – out of shame, fear, or the worry that they wouldn't be believed. One simply described it as a "hazard of bus travel". Some described changing their route, or avoiding particular areas. Girls are growing up in a world where this is such a widespread experience that some don't even see it as something unusual – just part of being a woman.Īs with so many forms of gender inequality, harassment and abuse, many women reported that the problem had become so much a part of daily life that they simply modified their own behaviour to try and avoid it. When I spoke to a group of teenage girls at a careers event last year, they used the word "normal" to describe men masturbating on the tube in front of them while they were on their way to school in their school uniform. Police got involved and I didn't even know the word to explain". One tweet read: "I was 11 walking home from school, man following masturbating. The phrase "I was thirteen" recurs again and again, as do mentions of uniform and walking to school. Certain words jump out from the entries, repeated again and again: "frightened"… "horror" … "frozen" … "fear".Ī staggeringly high proportion of the entries, both on Twitter and to the Project website, specify that the victim was a child when the first incident occurred. Looking at the Everyday Sexism Project database, I realised that in the past two years, 525 women and girls have reported this particular experience. Third time in Richmond Park, he had his trousers down." ![]() The second was on a bus in Italy guy pressed against me and started rubbing his erection against me. Several women listed multiple experiences: "First time was in front of school aged 14, guy opposite watching us and masturbating. The locations were as varied as the victims – from libraries to buses, courthouses to hotels, parks to toy stores. One woman wrote that she had brought up the subject with the women in her office at their morning meeting: "Practically all of us have a story of this happening". "Multiple occasions"… "At least once a year" … "Too often to count" Many emphasised that these were not isolated incidents. Within two hours, over 400 women and girls had come forward with their own experiences of being masturbated at. From grandmothers to girls who were six when it first happened, their reports came from London, Sydney, Frankfurt, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Brussels, Las Vegas, New York, San Francisco, Canada, Mexico, Ireland, Ukraine, Peru, and even Vatican City. A deluge of replies flooded in from women who had experienced the same thing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |