I’m a couple of weeks late to post about this but well pleased I got a mention. There’s tons to read over there if you haven’t already - the Carnival Against Sexual Violence #27.

Marcella, who hosts the carnival, will also be doing a 24 hour sponsored blogathon this Saturday, July 28th, to support Stop It Now! an organization that works to prevent the sexual abuse of children.

Sarah Clark took a late night bus on the 30th May after her train was cancelled. She disembarked outside a supermarket and was walking home when she was subjected to a sexual assault on Testwood Recreation Ground, Salisbury Road, Totton. Sarah did what women are told to do in such situations and went to the police. They interviewed her at the station and then she went to a Sexual Assault Referral Centre where she went through medical tests and more interviews. Then she went home and waited for the police to contact her.

Then on 2nd June, Sarah Clark, dismayed that the police had not yet contacted her and convinced they did not believe her, jumped from a motorway bridge into traffic and died after being hit by two cars.

Since her death the police have decided to actually start work on finding the man or men who raped her and have released CCTV pictures of men they wish to talk to who may have some useful information.

RIP Sarah. Fuck you to all rapists and the police who enable them.

Back at the beginning of the month Littoral Mermaid tagged me, so heres my random responses to the random facts meme.

Rules: Give eight random facts/habits about yourself then tag eight other bloggers.
1/ I like b movies, especially those with bugs, and especially those with giant bugs.

2/ Im really disorganised and Im trying the ‘leave post-its everywhere’ thing at the moment, but its not working, I just ignore them.

3/ I keep getting cravings for peppadew peppers.

4/ I’ve been a bridesmaid twice, once for my cousin and once for my aunt. I intend never to be a bride.

5/ I have a dentists appointment booked for the end of August. I havent had a checkup for about four years and we’ve been on a waiting list for several months.

6/ I hate going swimming. I can swim, just about, but the longest I ever swam was for my 100m swimming certificate when I was about 8. But I hate the feel of the water surrounding me, especially in swimming pools, because it doesnt feel or smell right.

7/ Something else I hate is butter or crumbs in marmite and jam. I also hate crumbs in butter. And it does me in when people scrape whats left on their knife back into the container. Its one of a thousand things that irritates the shit out of me.

8/ The last album I listened to is Alright Still by Lily Allen, which i’m dead keen on.

I tag: witchywoo, laurelin, liz, maia, pippa, lostclown, ms jared, and victoria.

eta - i missed it but liz already did this and so did lostclown.

Or just another sad excuse for a man who gets his jollies from imagining women in pain?

“I’m not misogynistic, I nether hate women or mistrust them, rather I just like to make cool photos and happen to have a little dark side along with being influenced by fashion, art, and tragic romance (ala Shakespeare).”
‘Conceptual Wedding Photographer’ John Michael Cooper.

cest.la.vie writes about this here - Misogyny as Art?

I read some discussion elsewhere about my post on The War At Home where the frightening level of attacks on women by strangers was mentioned. Feminist analysis and activism showed the world that violence against women was mostly perpetrated by men known to the victim - family members, partners, colleagues, and friends. A conclusion was drawn that stranger rape is a myth, but this must be seen in context. In the context of all violence against women it is true that attacks by strangers are a tiny minority, but that tiny minority is still in itself a huge number of rapes, assaults, and murders.

I always wonder how can it be that these thousands and thousands of violent crimes against women, both by men we know and men we don’t, perpetrated simply because we are women, are not officially classified as hate crimes. Other types of violent hate crime are much rarer but more likely to be big news, and even then there is plenty of homophobic and racist hate crime that passes unmentioned. Violence against women is so common and everyday that people in general don’t see it, it’s like that phrase ‘can’t see the wood for the trees’. There are still so many blatantly sexist myths around that it’s easy to take each example of hate crime against a woman and make it seem like an individual crime, without wider context, against an individual woman or girl who is often thought to have provoked the violence. The motives of the men who commit this crime are mostly ignored and excuses are made. Men who rape ten year olds are excused if she is thought to have been “dressed provocatively”; men who murder their wives explain that she “nagged and nagged” at him until he had no choice left but to silence her permanently, and other men nod with understanding and empathy, including those who hold responsibility in our law and justice systems. The main focus in cases where no sexist justification is possible is to single out the male perpetrators of an individual case as evil, mad, different from other men. Of course in the case of men deemed psycho- or sociopathic the “evil” men’s mothers are nearly always thought to be the reason behind, and bear the blame for, the men’s violent behaviour, thanks to Freud. With this constant blaming of women for men’s behaviour it seems as if men are all thought to be like children, unable to bear responsibility for their own actions.

This division, that some men are naturally evil and unlike “the average man”, allows us to ignore that violence against women is perpetrated by all sorts of men, most of whom “seem normal” to their friends, neighbours, lovers, colleagues. These men are normal. Violence against women is everyday. Where individual men don’t commit the crimes themselves, they collude in them, as we all collude in this violence every time we talk about “provocation” and make violence against women the problem of the individual woman herself, “a private matter” between her and her abuser.

We have domestic violence shelters and rape crisis counsellors throughout our country but even these are overworked and underfunded, unable to help a large number of the women who need them. The necessary existence of these shelters is enough to tell us that violence against women is a massive problem for our community. The only other sort of hate crime against people that would be allowed to reach this level without massive civil disturbance in protest is the victimisation of children, and in that too it is time for the full stop to be bolded and underlined.