I grew up on the edge of East Lindon but even so I remember the terror I felt about the Ripper. Sexual abuse of one kind or another was rife as I hit my teens in the early 80s. Mostly it was older boys in Ford Capris or dirty old men having a wank in alleyways, but there was other stuff too - a friend was raped by her friend's uncle, another was paid to go to an old man's flat on her lunch break for - well. You get the picture.
I remember the ripper but I never felt threatened by it, maybe because I lived a long way away in a village.
I remember a " dirty old man in his fifties " who I was expected to ignore who used to follow me in his car, asking me to get in.
Everyone knew who he was and what he was like, he had a reputation in the village, and I just ignored him and walked on the other side of the road, which is what my parents advised.
Nowadays the police would have had him for stalking, back then you just ignored him or if he came to close and made contact you slapped them one.
I wasn't shy of handing out a resounding slap when the need arose.
I'm not sure things have changed that much, except old men who stalk school age girls are taken more seriously now.
I think the attitude then was that if a girl didn't put up a good fight, she was asking for it.
That attitude has changed, I think.
Not by much and not nearly enough it hasn't!
Both my daughters at around age 14 were assualted.
The older one had her backside groped at the school gates in full view of a male teacher and, when she gave the boy a good slap, the atttacker complained to said teacher who advised him that if he had kept his hands to himself he would not have got hit, The boys parents tried to have my daughter charged with assault and only gave up when the teacher said he would give evidence in court as to the reason for the boy getting "assaulted" and the school said that they would make the CCTV footage available also.
The younger one was fairly physically precocious at 14 - she was at that age 40DD - and a boy, of North African origin, in class, grabbed her brastrap, twisted it tight and called on the class to "look at the size of her tits, they are bigger than my mothers" - he then told her that some time soon, when he was in the right mood, he was going to fuck her. Complaints were made, not least because the teacher of the class at the time this happened, who was in the room, was the school's headmaster. We were told that it was a minor incident, which, if pursued, would reflect badly on our attitude to both religious and ethnic minorities (an almost polite way of calling us racist) and that my daughter should grow a thicker skin. A few days later my daughter was told that, where he, the boy, came from, women did what they were told and he would be screwing her very soon. Needless to say she was in another school four days later. The Headmaster and his deputy were later dismissed for failing to protect female pupils from a temporary teaching assistant who was on the Sexual Offenders register. The boy spent a long holiday as a guest of one of Her Majesties prisons for a string of rapes and sexual assaults, his parents got sentenced for aiding an offender by trying to get him out of the country.
Thigs ARE improving but far far too slowly. There is still victim shaming as when my younger daughter was told that, to prevent a recurrence of the incident she should, perhaps, make her boobs look smaller!
