h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ah! Thanks for the explanation for ATM cameras xyroth.

I'll come back and read your previous post after I've had summat to raise my blood sugar (in the hope that it may help raise my level of intelligence )

I wish I did anything exciting enough for anyone to be interested in...

k

Tefkat: you seem to live in a different world from me. Crime exists. Violent crime exists. But not on the scale imagined by many people. A few myths are exploded here: http://www.anxietyculture.mcmail.com/crimef.htm

DrG, shortly before I moved out of London I was burgled 3 times in the space of two weeks, beaten up and raped and then had a lump of concrete thrown through my window at 4am a couple of months later.

Don't think telling people like me violent crime is uncommon is going to make us any less scared. We do live in a different world. You're a man. You can afford the luxury of walking down a CCTVless street on your own at night. I'm 5'2" with very little strength and not comfortably able to walk very far, let alone run, or grapple with an assailant.

I am a man, so I am more likely, statistically, to be violently assaulted.

No-one should have to put up with what happened to you. I hope they caught the b*****d, and, if they didn't, I hope they come to violent and nasty end. But I don't think that more CCTV would prevent violent crime. In my opinion, the answer is different.

But you're more able to fight back.

(The polis said it wasn't worth pressing charges 'cos he'd only be likely to get 6 months at the most and they wouldn't be able to protect me when he got out.)

Our towns have had to get CCTV because the criminals from the cities used to come out for easy pickings. We have very few and the populace are constantly up in arms because the council won't pay for any more... (CCTVs, not criminals )

"The polis said it wasn't worth pressing charges 'cos he'd only be likely to get 6 months at the most and they wouldn't be able to protect me when he got out"

Now that's worth getting angry about. If ever you want evidence that sexism is still alive and well, you only need to look at the way rape is treated by the establishment.

rape is a special case for any criminal justice system, but the british system seems worse than most.

by its own statistics, most rapes don't get reported.
of those that do, most don't get taken seriously.
of those taken seriously,most don't have enough evidence to send to the criminal prosecution service. (especialy in the case of date rape / marital rape)
of those sent to the cps, most don't have a reasonable chance of conviction, so they don't go to trial.
when they get to trial, the victim has to prove that they are not a slut (despite this supposedly having been made illegal in most cases).
the sentences seem to be light, and when they get out, some come back, as rape isn't usually about sex, but is about control.

And of course this all feeds back into not reporting it.
And there are cases of false accusation, and of (a few) women saying yes, but deciding after the fact that they meant no.

The whole subject is a mess, and needs sorting out properly.

I think the last set of figures said that 90% of reported rapes don't secure a conviction.

"And of course this all feeds back into not reporting it."

That's the nail hit on the head right there.

We need a bit of positive discrimination in the legal system to help sort this out, IMO. More female judges, for a start.

A woman should be able to say no, at any time, to any person. Any qualification of that is b******t

you are right, no is no, but when talking about the justice system you have to cover the extreme cases.

False acusations do happen, and so do people changing their mind after the fact. If the system can't cope with that, it needs fixing.

having said that, it needs fixing anyway.

On a seperate point, it looks like the stupidity surounding the legal attitude to sex change in britain will have to go.

The european court of human justice have just found that by not allowing change of sex on the birth certificate, and thus forcing the broadcasting of their sex change status, and not allowing them to marry, it is in breach of human rights.

considering the original case used an invasive and arbitrary test, it is about time that this got resolved.