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Originally Posted by martyh
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I think the poem is misjudged rather than bad as such. Reading through the poem it appears that the woman who is attacked in the poem has been out late at night, and gone home on her own. The poem appears to be intended as a warning against that.
The fact is that women do this. The time of year also means that a lot of people (male and female) are out, and have probably drunk a lot more than they can cope with. These can be easy targets for criminals of all sorts.
It doesn't help if they just get into the first car they see, as a lot do. A friend of mine, when she was single, used to come out for nights out. Many times I ended up taking her home in a cab even if the rest of my friends were staying out. This was purely because she had a tendency to get in the first car she saw, which was usually an illegal mini cab, and I don't think I could have forgiven myself if something had happened to her. Me being in the cab, being nearly six foot, with a large (and fairly muscular at that time) build ensured that nothing happened to her apart from she got out of the cab outside her house.
Every year, women stumble out of various pubs, bars and clubs at God knows what time and stumble in to the first cab they find. Some will end up being seriously attacked, and I think this poem is intended to make those who are going out think about how they are going to get home. I think we are relatively lucky in London because TFL spend a lot of money over christmas setting up, running and publicising numbers that you can text or ring to get phone numbers for licenced mini cab offices, and a lot of local mini cab offices offer iPhone and/or Android apps that you can use to call a cab without even speaking to someone. Handy if you are drunk and don't quite know where you are.
And. martyh, before you ask. Yes I do know someone who was raped, so have seen the effects first hand, particularly the fear.