No sentence for rapist? Hundreds protest court ruling in Belgium

A gynecology student in Leuven was convicted of rape—but the judge gave him no sentence, citing his youth and “promising talent.”

On Thursday, hundreds gathered to protest the ruling. Signs read: 🪧 “What about her talent?” 🪧 “His degree over our dignity?” 🪧 “Women are also talented and committed.”

Organizers Hanna De Boe and Femke Beutels said it best: 🗣 “No woman should ever be a victim of sexual violence again.” 🗣 “It is also unacceptable that someone who has the prospect of a supposedly good career gets away with it, while someone else who does not have the same career does not.”

The public prosecutor has since filed an appeal—but this fight is bigger than one case. Survivors deserve justice, not excuses.

We need real, systemic change. We must build a culture of zero tolerance for all forms of violence, including sexual violence. Always.

anyway, picrew chain anyone?

this is what makes the world go round and my heart so happy <3

a little 4 act play i put together with internet clips.

@spoonbread5 Bob here hates women, He is racist and hateful toward women here on radblr. All whilst peddling his nonsense and hatred toward women. He’s posing as a left wing saviour but really he plays the game of a long-term grifting troll.

Why does an old man spend his life jumping on tumblr, replying to every radfem post he can find, spread misinformation and harass women on here, many of which are 30+ years his junior. And as soon as somebody catches him he just remakes on another account because he’s obsessed, and it is creepy.

Bob Ibbitson: congrats on harassing me and everyone for deadass over half a year, if not more.

I'm not totally sure how historians will explain that America ruined its own economy for no good reason by electing the "let me ruin the economy" man

I hope to live long enough to find out.

Racism and misogyny.

True

pinkpantheress for Vivienne westwood

Shut it down.

And then several men have the nerve to ask me "wHy ArE u So BoRiNg?" "WhY dOn'T u LiKe pOrn?"

This is why. And DON'T YOU DARE TO SCROLL DOWN THIS!

REBLOG!

It's not only one child. It's not only one girl or woman. There are several who are trapped there. And it could happen to anyone.

the thing about being nonbinary is that you really do start to forget that other people have such strict walls around what is and isn’t allowed for genders. i thought we all agreed that we made that up. could you climb out of the cave real quick and feel the sunshine for a minute.

omg yeah I agree and the thing about "being" nonbinary? We also made that up. Do you think you've escaped?

every day gendies get on this app and admit that their identities are just some shit they made up and have no basis in reality, yet they still try to force them on the rest of us, OP you are the one making up rules and forcing others to follow them

"We made that up"... but when we say this! Horrors!

I'm not totally sure how historians will explain that America ruined its own economy for no good reason by electing the "let me ruin the economy" man

I hope to live long enough to find out.

CNN

—

More than 3.3 million American women ages 18 to 44 were raped the first time they had sexual intercourse, according to a new study, and “all demographic groups reported substantial roles of forced sexual initiation.”

The study, published Monday in the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine, notes the World Health Organization recognizes forced sexual initiation – “an unwanted first sexual intercourse that is physically forced or coerced” – as a distinct form of sexual violence.

The study says that 6.5% of women surveyed had an unwanted first sexual intercourse that was forced or coerced and it “appears to be common.” Researchers estimated that to be 1 in 16 US women.

The average age of women who experienced forced sexual initiation was 15.6. The average age of the partner or assailant at the time was 6 years older. Among women whose first sexual intercourse was voluntary, the average age was 17.4.

Some 50% of women surveyed said the perpetrator was larger or older. More than 46% of the women were held down. In 56% of the instances, men used verbal pressure. Men used a physical threats more than 26% of the time and caused physical harm in more than 25% of the instances. Some 22% of the women were drugged.

Survivors faced long-term consequences, such as increased rates of HIV, sexually transmitted diseases, pelvic inflammatory disease, endometriosis and menstrual problems. More than 30% said they had an unwanted first pregnancy, while 24% said they had ever had an abortion in their lifetime – higher percentages than among women whose first sexual intercourse was voluntary.

Earlier research has shown that more than 40% of women have experienced some form of sexual violence in their lifetime, and half of those have been raped. The authors of this study said there is no recent data focused on first experiences with intercourse. The survey included 13,310 women and was nationally representative of the population age 18 to 44. The data came from the National Survey of Family and Growth from 2011 to 2017.

“A practicing physician is likely to see several patients each week who have experienced this form of trauma,” the authors wrote in the study, saying doctors should develop tools to identify and help people who’ve experienced it.

It’s good for the ruling class if we focus on social forms of oppression, eg stigma towards ‘sex workers’, rather than material oppression, eg actual financial and sexual abuse of these women. Not saying social issues are not important but they usually stem from material issues. It’s why you can’t have feminism without politics and class struggle because the invisible hand of the market drives women into financial reliance on men, devalues work in the home, keeps women struggling and complacent in their positions, and keeps the women who do have the time and money alienated from fellow women and focused on consumerism

Men love to complain that girls outperform boys in school because ‘oh boys have a different learning style to girls we should cater to them too it’s not fair’ as if education wasn’t exclusively for men until relatively recently.

Diminishing the fact that girls are more academically successful than boys as some kind of advantage they’re receiving from a system that explicitly wasn’t designed for them is crazy. The truth is that, once women succeeded in implementing female education in the west, men decided that intelligence and academic prowess wasn’t an aspirational quality anymore.

As such young boys often discard this pursuit in favour of other toxic forms of social credit, while from a young age trying their utmost to derail the women who are working so fucking hard to be taken even the slightest bit as seriously as men who are ten times less worthy of admiration.

If JKR-fans and TERFs would talk about actual female genital mutilation as much as they talk about trans people, this world would be a better place

The world would be a better place if more people than "terfs" gave a shit about women, actually. Funny how your post reveals that you don't expect anyone else to care. Then again, i suppose that in order to care about FGM, you first have to acknowledge that sex based oppression exists and matters.

I excepted that everyone cares. But somehow JKR fans and TERFs always scream about trans people instead.

I want to see the same energy against FGM but I don’t. Look at JKR. FGM or Trans? I know what she did more posts about

JK Rowling is British. We both know that FGM is a cultural issue in some regions of Africa (Somalia, Mali, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Chad or Senegal) and that a British woman talking about it would not have any significant impact. Meanwhile, the irreversible damage caused to children due to trans ideology is significant in the UK. It took years of grassroot work from victims, parents of victims, gay people and women, to raise awareness about this issue, which was deliberately occulted by medical professionals and lobbyists, and which JKR's involvement finally forced the media to acknowledge.

Still, JKR donates a lot of money every year for programs designed to help impoverished women and girls. She opened her own crisis center for female victims of domestic abuse and rape. Two years ago she got hundreds of female lawyers and their families out of Afghanistan. She was one of the most vocal support of Iranian women during the Woman Life Freedom uprisings. She has nothing to prove, and neither do the feminists you call "screaming" "terfs" so dismissively.

Wasn’t one of the FGM activists who experienced it herself bullied off the platform for being "transphobic"? What about a viral TikTok that said that talking too much about FGM is "TERFY"? You silence it yourself