A couple UK studies with very disturbing results in the news yesterday.

One, a study of 89 11 and 12 year-old children in several Glasgow schools, showed that in many cases, the children thought a man hitting a woman was justified if she had done something wrong. Virtually all the children thought it was acceptable to hit a woman who had been unfaithful, while 80% of them thought it was justified if she was late getting her husband’s dinner on the table.

The same study revealed that many young girls expect their career ambitions to be curtailed by marriage and children.

From the BBC:

One of the girls said: “I want to be a dancer or a doctor.”

But she added: “When I grow up I’m going to have two babies and work part-time in the shop down the road.”

The other was a study of 1000 London-based people and found that women were more likely to judge a rape victim as partially responsible for her attack than the men were.

More than three quarters of women felt that a woman already sharing a bed with a man should take some responsibility if he forces her to have sex. One-third of women felt that if a woman dressed in a revealing way or went back to a man’s home, that they were partially responsible.

Elizabeth Harrison, manager of Whitchapel Haven — one of the Haven sexual assault clinics that commissioned the survey –  said,

Women look at court cases and think she was drunk, she wore a short skirt, I don’t do that so it won’t happen to me. But rape can happen to anyone in any circumstances. It’s particularly worrying that younger women are more likely to hold people responsible for what happens to them.

The 18-24 group were more likely to say that engaging in conversation in a bar or accepting a drink makes them partially responsible. But it is this age group that are more likely to be going out doing that. We need to get the message out in schools that rape is never your fault.
Telegraph

A full 13 per cent of men surveyed admited to having sex with someone who was too drunk to consent.

One in ten of the Londoners were unsure as to whether they would report an assault to the police, and two percent said they definitely would not.

Also, while people who identified as homosexual were more than twice as likely to go back to the home of someone they had just met, 35 per cent of bisexuals reported having been raped, almost double the per centage for heterosexual respondants.

A pdf of the report is available here.

The BBC have a page dedicated to the reactions of rape survivors to the study. One woman notes:

I was raped by my husband as he became increasingly possessive and violent. How can you blame a woman who has gotten into bed with the person beforehand? Where there is violent, intimidation, where you feel obliged to get into bed with the person just to quell their temper like I did. I never went to the police because I am glad to have escaped my husband. Now, I want to forget it.
Anonymous, Bristol

Popularity: 1% [?]