I know facebook isn't looked highly upon on reddit, but this needs to be seen

Alrighty this is a long post so I'm going to try to make this as brief as I can.

I agree that we can't make assumptions on numbers of unreported cases if they haven't been reported. However, through various academic studies we can infer an approximate amount based on the number of people sampled who say they haven't reported sexual assault. Given this, it's estimated that 1 in every 4 women will be the victim of sexual assault in their lifetime. If you'd like to look up this statistic, I'll provide my sources at the bottom. That number in itself is extremely troubling. That means approximately four million women have been assaulted in Canada. So, statistically speaking, the numbers of those who commit assault would have to be much higher than 1 in every 100,000.

Your comment on the witness being "proof" of there being nothing wrong with out culture is really not proof at all. I'm sure many people wouldn't have done anything in this situation. It's called the bystander effect. When you witness an event where you should intervene, the more people that are around the less likely a person is to help. It has to do with the displacement of guilt, so I think this is an extenuating circumstance. The fact that we're applauding the witness for coming forward really shows that.

And to this you might say "but this is obviously wrong, who wouldn't stand up for this?" and yes, you might be correct, more people would be willing to stand up for this because it is what our culture has deemed wrong. I'm going to segway into your point about the "pick up artist" with a personal example: when I was 17 I was coming back from work (at a restaurant) and I was sitting on the 99. Two men who were obviously much older than me began hitting on me, trying to get my number and to go out with them. I kept saying no, I wasn't interested, I was only 17, and I was visibly uncomfortable. There were 10+ people sitting near that heard the whole interaction, but didn't say anything. So by your agreement, this is also assault. Why did no one say anything? My answer to that is because the lines between "socially acceptable" and "assault" are blurred. So is training men to hit on women on the street really not assault? Or is perpetuating a culture of having women be the objects of desire, waiting for men to approach them?

Okay that got waaaay longer than I was hoping. Here are the links to assault rates in Canada I mentioned earlier:

http://sacha.ca/fact-sheets/statistics http://www.sexassault.ca/statistics.htm http://www.wavaw.ca/mythbusting/statistics/

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