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the police see film of a woman being apparently being dosed and made to vomit, stalked and followed by a man, apparently stripped of her tee shirt and hoodie somewhere, then taken into her house by him. when the enter the house after he emerges bleeding they find her with a knife wound, dishevelled, distressed, in her underwear. at the station she is not examined despite complaining of s of vaginal and/or anal bleeding and of having no memory of what happened. Is this lack of any basic competence or is it systemic abuse of women?

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Shocking and upsetting. Women are not safe and the justice system is not fair.

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I hate it but we need to realise just how much trouble we are in in our British cities.

It's crazy that carrying pepper spray could get the woman jailed.

It's 100% slow drip torture of women.

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Very clearly he raped her. It makes no sense that this isn't considered self-defense.

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He slips a drug akin to Rohypnol into her drink, a toxin to which she quickly vomits but the damage is already done, and the memory loss follows the next morning. I wouldn’t be surprised if revenge porn is already on the web. She is clearly the victim, he an abuser and the police misogynistic and incompetent.

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I'd trust Julie Bindel

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"At trial, the jury rejected self-defence and the partial defence of diminished responsibility despite the psychiatrists agreeing on a diagnosis of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder."

Why? To the extent that psychiatric evidence is credible (which it is not) complex PTSD is meant to be caused by trauma over a long time, not from a single traumatic event. In other words this is not, on the face of it, evidence she was traumatised by the events shown on the CCTV footage. Anyway, perpetrators often have trauma symptoms. We'd need much more detail from the psychiatric reports than the name of a mental health condition to draw any inference here. Not that I'd believe anything a psychiatrist was paid to say, working either for the defense or the prosecution.

Was that footage shown at her initial trial? Is it new evidence? How well did she know the guy she stabbed?

Reading this does not leave me feeling like this is a serious, dispassionate assessment of evidence, it leaves me feeling that the author wants to spark strong emotion in the audience about one side of a case, and providing none of the evidence that led to her conviction. Which is exactly what is happening.

That doesn't mean she's guilty, or innocent. It certainly doesn't mean the police are trustworthy or public defenders are competent. It just means I don't trust the author to provide me with the information I'd need to form a judgement.

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"Something must have happened for me to stab him. Lea Rose remembers nothing of the events that led to fatal stabbing of Dylan". It's possible.

A man is murdered and this leads to the conclusion that women are not safe.

"Court of Appeal to consider the conviction of vulnerable Liverpool woman, Lea Rose Cheng, found guilty of the murder of predatory male." Did the Court determine that the murderer was vulnerable and the victim was predatory? Pray tell. Looks like a classic case of victim blaming.

Whatever the truth of the matter one can be sure that Julie would never campaign on behalf of a male murderer. That's not to say that Julie comes from a biased viewpoint.

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“A man is murdered and this leads to the conclusion that women are not safe.”

I don’t think you’ve been listening. Vulnerable women are murdered every day by men. This is what leads to the conclusion that women are not safe.

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So she had PTSD. I've just spent the past 8 years receiving very intensive weekly psychological treatment for PTSD. On the NHS, so you can imagine how badly off I must have been. This was caused by a female abuser. Had I ever lost it and pushed back physically, I'd be in jail. These issues are almost impossible to get to the bottom of because they go on privately. The evidence is too hard to gather, or understand even if we could gather it.

One of the few things I'm really certain of in this area, is that I don't trust Julie Bindel. She's charismatic, and in a certain sense she strikes me as well meaning. But she's a zealot. She explicitly discusses bad experiences with men in her youth. That is driving her perception. Many of her perceptions are reasonable. But in truth: Sometimes it's the man. And sometimes it's the woman. Men end up dead too, "fell down the stairs", only no one looks into that. No one wants to. Including me, and it happened to me.

It'll never end while divisive figures like Bindel are whipping up gender (in the grown up sense of the word, meaning men and women) based anger.

I hate this shit, and I don't want to have a chat about it frankly, but like Bindel I don't like staying quiet. For some reason substack recommended I read this. I don't know why, it's not a topic I follow. I gave it (another) look. Still awful. We don't know what goes on.

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Either you didn't read any of the factual evidentiary details, or you are arguing in bad faith.

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Wrong.

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Dylan got what he deserved.

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Private Pike.

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