I don’t think there’s a reasonable stance in opposition to the concept of people educating their sons.
The murder of Sarah Everard | Couzens sentenced to a whole-life order
- Thread starter VeevaVee
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This is what I hate about the whole debate. Somebody died (it seems) in horrific circumstances and all anybody cares about it posting their agenda and getting into heated scraps with people in less than 140 characters. It's depressing.
It's massively trending because of people saying "what the feck is this about" as opposed to it being pushed as an actual solution.
That’s Twitter for you. Replace “died in horrific circumstances” with every other major news event of the last decade and it’s the exact same circular, repetitive, attention-seeking bollox. Without fail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_white_woman_syndrome
She wouldn't have been front page news if she didn't look like she did. Doesn't make it any less sad for her loved ones, of course. But the papers know what sells. And what sell is mostly pictures of pretty blondes.
I do find it a bit strange that people are saddened that the dead body has been confirmed as Sarah Everard. As though it's any more tragic that the dead girl they found wasn't some other victim. This is where we can see how much the media influences how much we care (or don't care) about other people.
She wouldn't have been front page news if she didn't look like she did. Doesn't make it any less sad for her loved ones, of course. But the papers know what sells. And what sell is mostly pictures of pretty blondes.
I do find it a bit strange that people are saddened that the dead body has been confirmed as Sarah Everard. As though it's any more tragic that the dead girl they found wasn't some other victim. This is where we can see how much the media influences how much we care (or don't care) about other people.
Well surely sad because it confirms that she is dead.
I don't get this thought though? Do you not think most parents WOULD educate their sons? I mean how many 'normal' parents want to raise a son who will become a rapist or a sexist pig?
I can't speak for everyone but my parents/teachers and everyone in between have taught us from a young age about equality amongst men and women. There is a bigger issue and I don't think 'educate your sons' is the solution. I don't know what the solution is myself so I'm probably wrong... feck knows.
This guy who is suspected of doing the crime is a police officer, surely he would have been 'educated' right?
I'm not disagreeing with the sentiment entirely here but it does feel a little like 'all men should feel guilty' on social media at the moment.
This appears to be the world we live in now.
The family also did a good job of promoting it with their own missing persons poster. A friend who knew the girl posted it the day after she went missing, but within a couple of days it was everywhere.
It's a shame it's all now turning into yet another bandwagon.
Finding a dead body already confirms that somebody is dead. That should be the sad bit. The confirmation of identity is neither here nor there, except where we've been influenced to have a particular emotional connection with one victim over another.
Indeed. I've no doubt Twitter has good points but I fail to understand what makes it a worthwhile activity for those people who seem to regress into tribalism. I remember one of my old sociology lecturers proposing the idea that it could one day be considered a democratic version of 'the commons' where ordinary peoples' views are accounted for in terms of policy decisions. I was sitting there quietly thinking, have you been on the website before?
It’s a really sad story and I’m sure there will be more to come out of it. I do think it’s important though that society starts to tackle the way women are treated by men regularly. It’s absolutely soul destroying the amount of grief young girls receive. I’ve seen it regularly first hand when walking down the street with my GF. Cars honking, people whistling and that’s while I’m there, I can only imagine how bad it is when she’s by herself. It’s a very real problem and unfortunately I’m not sure society has any real solution to it.
That's not true, the case was making national news before the police officer was arrested.
And it's not even strictly race, it's the demographic.
This has definitely been said this time, pretty much outright by some. I've seen loads on social media bandwagonning on to shaming every man for not doing more, but you don't get away with that with any other demographic. Can't say it overly bothers me, not about to start joining MRA forums or anything, but it's something I've noticed.
There obviously is an issue with harassment and we def should do more to call it out, but I find the shaming innocent people the wrong way to go about it.
It's difficult to say this without someone assuming you're poorly disguising that you're a raging MRA, or someone saying "oh poor men who've had it so tough all this time", but this time I can actually see where some of the frustration has come from.
There has been a lot of 'good' stuff shared as well though, bringing some light to the issues and getting people talking about it. That I think has a very positive effect.
Still, this has little to do with a kidnapping/murder. Maybe we should make a diff thread?
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So these people getting hysterical about men are actually passing some of the blame for this guy's actions onto his mother for doing a bad job at raising him? Seems to go against their own arguments.
Educating people is part of the process towards fixing these issues though right? There have been behaviours in the past from men towards women that men have needed to be told isn't alright. That's how we start to move forwards. Why wouldn't we want people to educate their sons?
I don't think the 6pm men curfew thing was a serious suggestion, the point was more that in discussions around this topic it's not uncommon for the idea of women not going out at certain times to be mentioned.
The big problem is these things are being left unchecked and it's causing a major us and them situation, which isn't helpful at all.
Yes but that's partly down to how quickly and aggressively the family and friends acted, and all credit to them for that, and also the circumstances of her disappearance pointing pretty unambiguously towards something sinister.
It wouldn't be headlining on the BBC front page had someone not been quickly arrested and had a body not been found. And the reason it's such mega news now is because it appears to have been a serving police officer behind it.
Also the disingenuous link that men doing better at reducing street harassment is somehow going to make it safer for women to walk the streets at night. No amount of "educating boys" or "men calling out other men", or indeed curfews, is going to make these sorts of horrific attacks/abductions rarer. That's just the sad reality.
Can I play devil's advocate here? Does this only happen to girls/women?
I have sons who look like Greek gods. One in particular is 6ft 2 and a very handsome young man.
I've been shopping with him and he gets plenty of attention. He doesn't cope with it well tbh.
Even friends of my wife have said things like "if I wasn't married" to him.
Now he is a grounded lad generally, academically brilliant and has a long term girlfriend but this attention makes him very embarrassed. But he is told to basically man up.
*Admin as a newbie I'm not always sure how you decide things are off topic. I got a warning earlier on this thread (during the police bit) and I don't want to make a habit of it so please remove this if it's taking it off topic.
I'm not disputing this. I just think something more has to be done and potential solutions are not even being considered because the Twitter mob wants to push this exact message and suggesting something else, literally anything else, or even looking at the issue from a different angle means that you are are attacked and are a rapist sympathiser.
We should be educating about many things like:
All races should be treated the same
Men shouldn't treat women as game
All religions can live in harmony
And a million other things and in an ideal world, that would be enough. But it's not. So simply saying 'educate your sons' I think is such a simplistic way of pushing a message that is far more complicated. The solution is not this simple in my opinion.
I honestly do feel most people are educated on these things (like the three above I have just said there) but for whatever reason, this changes as people experience different life lessons.
The guy who did this (if it is that cop) MUST have been educated to a level. It's not like he was some immigrant homeless dude, you know what I mean? But clearly, this isn't enough.
I think I'm going round in circles without being able to articulate what I'm trying to say (sorry, operating on 40 minutes sleep!) but essentially, I feel there has to be a larger and more considered response/solution to this issue. Saying 'educate your sons' is so simplistic and is something most parents/teachers do anyway and is obviously not working.
I think the big issue with this kind of thing is that if it escalates then a female is in more danger, so it’s a scarier situation for them. I saw a stat that said something like 97% of women have been harassed in some way, and I thought, well it probably wouldn’t fall much if you included men too, but it comes back to that again.
Plus women experience it far more often than men do.
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I mean yea it goes back to the comments made earlier regarding the people who need to hear this stuff not actually being amongst the audience for the most part.
Looking beyond the obvious things though there’s stuff we can all get better at. Reading some of the tweets from women in the last week about how even well meaning things can contribute to their fears at times.
One that stuck out to me was being in a lift alone with a woman and you’re both exiting on the same floor, my instinct every time would be to allow the woman to walk out first but there were a number of tweets saying they’d prefer to have an unknown man step out first so they can see him and not be wondering about what’s going on behind them.
Even just things like crossing the road, or making your presence obvious if you have no option but to pass from behind (“runner/cyclist passing on your left” for example).
Essentially I think the message is we can all learn.
Honestly it’s just not the same level. I’ve experienced it the other way to some degree. I’m not a Greek god but I work out and I’m 6’4 so I’ve experienced flirting and been whistled at from houses a couple of times but my girlfriend is actively afraid to leave the house at night for fear of men. She’s been sexually assaulted at some traffic lights where a guy grabbed her arse only for another man to jump in to save the day...before promptly asking for her number. I don’t think most normal guys can even imagine that level of attention, in fact most are so starved of attention that even one compliment can be an ego boost.
Good post - my university experience had lots of examples of this. Not as in, I surrounded myself with creeps, but in 2010-14, behaviour that I would now call 'harassment' was everywhere, largely tolerated, and rarely-if-ever called out if you saw someone behaving in appropriately in a club.
I also completely believe the idea that every woman I know has some kind of story of harassment/ abuse. My girlfriend has had several - men following her on the street, saying horrible things to her in daylight, at night, someone putting his hand in between her legs in a club when she was a student. It's endemic, and there needs to be more of a public campaign to put an end to it.
Twitter has a natural tendency to make opinions and views appear bigger than they actually are, you see it in a lot of threads in this CE forum regularly. You then get the tirade of folk on twitter who believe tweeting adds weight & credence to a campaign, feeling comfortable that they've done their bit and in reality its like they're shouting into an empty room with no audience. Ricky Gervais nails it well.Indeed. I've no doubt Twitter has good points but I fail to understand what makes it a worthwhile activity for those people who seem to regress into tribalism. I remember one of my old sociology lecturers proposing the idea that it could one day be considered a democratic version of 'the commons' where ordinary peoples' views are accounted for in terms of policy decisions. I was sitting there quietly thinking, have you been on the website before?
Wow I didn't think about that lift thing. Luckily I'm a rude bastard that barges women out of the way so I can go first! (I don't actually do this).
I can understand it, especially if they have to pass you to get out first. That would feel creepy.
It's difficult to think "someone might find this creepy" if you aren't actually being creepy though. You'll carry on not knowing how what your doing can be perceived.
Which part are you referring to there?
The curfew trend
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I don't think the education bit just refers to teach your sons not to attack women, it's also about the little things we can do to reduce the anxiety we cause to others. For instance, I'm a fast walker so I don't doubt that plenty of times I've come up behind people and gone past them without any thought. If someone then informs me that it actually really worries them when I do that it's a learning opportunity for me or at least a chance to have a discussion about it.
It also very much relates to how people talk about people who do get attacked. While like you said comment sections aren't everything, it's pretty common to see people wondering why the victim is walking the streets alone or in that area at that time, especially when the victim is a woman. People also like to throw in how a woman was dressed as well, never really see that with men. That sort of stuff probably falls under things everyone should be educated in though.
Wow! I'm sure Jackson Katz, famous gender-politic grifting boomer, definitely undertook a thorough and detailed study among a broad range of the population and definitely didn't just make this up entirely to match his predetermined ideology.
The whole act of 'men feel completely safe walking the streets at night' is just silly. I'm 6ft4, well built and I take precautions when I'm walking alone. If I'm walking past a group of people on a quiet road, I worry....I'd cross the road to avoid it. I don't wear headphones at night if I'm alone. In really sketchy situations - like when I'm visiting the estate I grew up on to see my cousins, and I find myself out alone and walking past a group of people - I'll even go as far as dialling 999 on my phone and have my finger hovering over dial.
I'd hope I'm not uniquely cowardly or something and this also goes for the vast, vast majority of men. It's just situational awareness.
No doubt women are more vulnerable - although men are an overwhelming majority when looking at victims of stranger violence - but it's just odd to act like men are walking round like everyone they meet is Mary Poppins.
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That's probably more down to the context being lost though. It should really be starting a conversation about what we can do to solve these issues in society rather than us doing the usual thing and telling women how to keep themselves safe.
Even if you just changed it to "assault" for men, I don't think the lists would be comparable. If anything I suspect men tend to underestimate the risks they face in some situations.
I see this point, obviously it's about equality and saying 'it's not fair that one party can do it without consequence'. But as someone said the threat level is just not the same. It's hard to push the equality factor into this topic of sexual harassment/assault. When you're talking about the 'light' levels of it all (whistling, saying things, staring) as a guy I know that I can brush that off. Mainly because I know it *rarely* (I say rarely, I have been grabbed before) goes any further than that. In no way am I saying this makes it ok, but let's say it's tolerable because I'm not threatened by it.
I would imagine (as well as having been told) it's a different story in the mind of a female. And rightly so if you'd look at the statistics when it comes to the severity of sexual harassment from male to female.
I think it’s a really poor way to start the conversation though, personally
Well, you might be doing the right thing by being as cautious as you are, but I would say you're probably quite unique in thinking those things to that extreme, but who am I to say. I think there's been a couple of threads here asking how people feel walking alone at night, I'll see if I can find them.
I'm 3 inches short than you and a total lanky prick, I go out for walks at night and never really feel unsafe. On Sunday night there was a group of 4-5 people (some might refer to them as chavs...) and one walked over to ask me something and even then I didn't really feel too nervous.
Marina Hyde’s column in The Guardian today addressing this issue. You start to wonder whether these people are mentally ill.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/12/what-happened-women-uk-harassed-street
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/12/what-happened-women-uk-harassed-street
I strongly suspect the majority of men are less cautious than you've described there. Though I'm not saying you're wrong to be so. It's just that in my experience men do tend to underestimate risk in these situations.
Personally, I would probably cross the road if there was a group of lads I didn't like the look of ahead of me but that's about the height of it. I quite happily walk around listening to music in headphones at night and it wouldn't even occur to me to to do the 999 thing. I've also often walked home at night while shitfaced drunk when even I know it's on paper an unsafe thing to do. Again though, all of that is mostly because I'm an idiot who assumes he's safe for no discernible reason.