Sorry all, new to the more serious sections. My title was meant to reflect that most of the main domestic news stories seem to revolve around allegations of sexual abuse at the moment.
quite right, there are a lot of them. I suspect it's not so much that there are more crimes, as that we're hearing about them more because people are less put off reporting them by legal procedures and authorities who don't believe them or just don't care. Good thing too.
It is true that there is a 'flavour of the month' topic in the news - a child is mauled by a dog, then every dog bite in the country is reported for a few weeks; then there was fox attacks; cow tramplings...
I am getting more and more uneasy about the way these people are being named in the media. As everybody is innocent until proved guilty, I can't see the point in naming people in this way, at this stage of the investigations.
If he proves to be guilty, than by all means name him of course, but until then, we should all have some respect for his privacy.
Good morning Sqad ! Typical Welsh Bank Holiday here...overcast and just about to rain.
Its this cult of celebrity that is to blame for most of the media screaming about this sort of thing. Andy Warhol was right...everybody will be famous for 15 mins. Not sure about the 50's, 60's and 70's though. I was born in 1953 and I'm sure that children were being abused back then, but it never happened to me. I was a very keen Cub Scout and nothing whatsoever happened to me. I was also a altar boy at my local Catholic church and ditto. Maybe I was lucky but one thing is for certain. If I had come home and told my father that someone had "fiddled" with me, he would most certainly not have ignored it, of that I can be sure. So many of the recent recipients of sexual abuse seem to have told various adults but those adults did nothing. I really don't understand that at all. There must be an awful lot of people in Britain now that are somewhat red-faced at their silence of years ago.
// Perhaps sexual abuse by whatever definition WAS the norm in the 50's 60's and 70's.// I think that more studies could be done into the pattens of behavior of Homo Sapiens from ''way back''. Remember when it was the norm & accepted thing for young men ''to sow their wild oats '' before settling down to a married family life ? No mention of young women of course who were deemed to be apart from ''that sort of thing'' & remain virginal until marriage. My point being that is it any wonder that men were of the opinion that they were expected to get what they could from any young woman of more or less any age who would be willing. Then came the explosion of the rock era & the birth of ''Boy Bands'' & guys who became famous over night & attracted many female followers, many who were quite overcome with the desire to get as close to their heroes as they could. I know that the men should have resisted the temptations & I am not condoning what has happened in the past but simply trying to understand some of the situations that happened in those days gone by.
What makes this story different from most, is the fact that a deputy House of Commons Speaker was arrested and questioned by the police over an alleged gay rape and sexual assault.
Both men are said to be in their twenties, what is hard to understand is how a young man can be raped by another man, without an almighty fight between the two taking place, we are not talking about a defenceless child or woman here?
AOG...I can assure you that men can be raped, at any age. Its a dreadful crime and goes mostly unreported because of the shame associated with it.
We should treat any report of male-on-male rape as seriously as man-on-woman.