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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

The scale at which this happens and yet I feel like I've never seen it is pretty shocking to me. To be clear I'm not denying it, it's just amazing to me that this behavior is that frequent or common and presumably because I'm a guy, i'm not exposed to it.

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I was coming out of the subway with my GF and some guy came up to her and threatened a pretty violent act. I said "What did you just say?" and the guy, realizing she was with someone, turned a bolted.

I was angry but my GF just shrugged and said, "this happens all the time in Yorkville".

You don't see it because predators don't act out if there are other men around.

20% is roughly the same percentage of women that report being sexually assaulted during their four years of undergraduate college from similar self reporting surveys of a much larger slice of America.

If it is only one or two incidents per person, and only 20% of women experience it, I don't think it is very surprising that you wouldn't see it.

Yeah I guess the number of total "events" can be pretty small.

Just amazing that to me something that would seem totally out of place at work or seem "crazy" to have happen... a lot of people experience in the same workplaces I'm in.

and then you carry the possibility of more possible events with you into every interaction. You have to become hyper-vigilant for even average workdays.

The 'event' is more than the time it takes to happen, it colors the rest of your interactions with a company. (Do the other people know? do they condone? Who is safe? if the initial event was minor, will that person escalate?)

exhausting.

this is both a reason for and against working at the same company as your spouse/partner, you get to hear all the fucked up shit going on in another part of the organization

You're exposed to it all the time, but it's so common that we just don't notice. And that's kind of the whole problem.

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