>Women and girls are "terrified" to go out due to "sinister" means being used to try to attack them, an MP has said. Anna McMorrin, Labour's shadow minister for victims and youth justice, spoke out following reports of women being injected and having drinks spiked.
>Home Secretary Priti Patel has asked police forces for an update following a number of cases of women reporting being spiked by needles in nightclubs. A boycott of clubs is being planned in some cities, including Cardiff, on 29 October. Ms McMorrin said her eldest daughter, who is a university student, told her she and friends were taking extra precautions as they were "scared to go out at night". "Dealing with the perpetrators, that is the issue, and that is doing things like making misogyny a hate crime - that begins to change the culture," said the MP.
Am I wrong to see a connection between what has been over a year of vaccination paranoia and the emergence of needle spiking incidents? It seems odd to me why someone would go out and manage to inject people like that without them noticing or the needle breaking.
You know, I was thinking about this a bit while reading some of the outrage bait about the whole "evangelical youtubers forcing lesbians to have sex with them" thing.
Is that similarly an insignificant issue which isn't happening in any great capacity in real life, but which the media is making a big fuss about in its enduring committent to women being eternal victims of the fundamentally predatory nature of male sexuality?
I don't think I'm entirely wrong in seeing a parallel. Same thing with a more terfy flavour.
>>35788 I haven't seen anything about that on TV, where the reliable news is. I have only seen it online, where anyone will publish any old shit about any fucker talking about themselves. Therefore, I consider it perfectly safe to ignore it. In terms of perceiving it as somehow anti-male, I don't see it that way; I see it more as a transphobic backlash against the past decade of having to agree completely with the willy-slicers on everything, and daring to question their own personal truth has led to online lynch mobs trying to harpoon your kids. The actual dick-snippers have reasonable people and militants, their Twitter allies are almost exclusively insane extremists, and now people are starting to get fed up of indulging the Twitter allies. Even though indulging the winky-whackers themselves is good and righteous, indulging the "allies" is a thankless chore that makes you just want to write a news article about how they're all predatory rapists actually and should be shot.
FullFact has collated info on this. Let's all have a read before either dismissing it as not real or suggesting it's an epidemic.
>The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) lead for drugs, Deputy Chief Constable Jason Harwin, has said: “We have now had responses from all forces across the UK in relation to incidents involving some form of injection, with a total of 56 confirmed reports from across September and October.
>As of 23 October, the NPCC had also collected 198 reports of drink spiking, in addition to the 56 reports of incidents involving a needle.
>However, not all of the reports made have shown evidence of widespread needle spiking. Three women who reported feeling unwell after nights out in Exeter and suspected they may have been spiked via needles were found to have no traces of spiking drugs in their systems, while police in St Albans said there was no evidence to suggest a woman who reported a potential incident of spiking via injection had been the victim of an offence.
...
>To get a better idea of what could be happening, we spoke to Guy Jones, senior scientist at The Loop, a non-profit organisation focused on drug safety, and John Slaughter, senior forensic toxicologist at Analytical Services International, which provides toxicological services, including forensic toxicology which is used to identify legal and illegal drugs and poisons.
>Both said that the recent cases were the first time they had heard reports of needles being used in spiking cases, and agreed that while it was certainly plausible that one or a very small number of attackers could have attempted to use needles to spike victims in bars and nightclubs, it’s unlikely that perpetrators could replicate the method easily on a wider scale.
>>35791 >When will women be able to have their concerns addressed without being told they are lying?
>Three women who reported feeling unwell after nights out in Exeter and suspected they may have been spiked via needles were found to have no traces of spiking drugs in their systems
Trust but verify, what else can you ask?
It's simply not a realistic fear, so just flat believing people is fraught, and would cause more of a panic. The media pump it up for clicks, the natural response is that people think it's happening more often/worrying about it more, whereas only 50 cases have been proven over a period of 2 months. Murder, rape, both happen much more frequently but which is gonna be the primary concern of your average lass heading to the club when this miniscule issue is in the limelight? It's irrational, and the fuss around it is making it worse. There is *nothing* you can reasonably do to prevent this happening to you whilst living your life, same with being randomly stabbed or having a heart attack.
Part of the problem, and I don't think it can be ignored, is the effect social medai has had on public debate/discourse over issues like this. Any issue really, but the powerfully emotive, controversial ones like violence against women, paedophilia, hate crime etc have been particularly strongly affected.
In years gone by you could have made a simple Richard Littlejohn style hot take analysis about hoe People These Days have stopped valuing personal responsibility and started looking to an omnipresent nanny state to fix everything, the nretreat into a fantasy world where all danger has been sanitised from the world outside their doorstep. That hasn't happened- I don't think anyone is really that naive. But what they have done is started to use that kind of rhetoric as an ideological end point that holds together their performatively right-on Twitter takes and what have you.
Everyone knows it's not realistic to prevent every crime that might ever happen. Everyone knows you could dedicate the entire budget of the US military to a new Department of Women's Rights, and it still wouldn't stop a few rapists slipping through the net. But what you can do is you can pretend that's a realistic standard to hold society's collective behaviour against, in order to give your otherwise incoherent social media ramblings credence. It's become one of the most tried and true motte and baileys for terminally online cultural commentators and navel gazing op-ed writers to build their ideological position around.
>>35795 >whereas only 50 cases have been proven over a period of 2 months
How many cases would no longer count as "only"? Earlier in this thread, people (>>35679) said it wasn't happening at all. So we've been wrong once; could we be wrong again?
UK had 150 gun deaths last year. How worried are you about being shot? Would you tell someone who was worried they were going to get shot when they're going out that they're a div? Why is it any different for this?
And do you think that the media could suddenly focus on gun related deaths, and completely change the perception of the probability of gun deaths by running stories on not only confirmed gun deaths, but suspected gun deaths? Of course they could, we saw it happen in America with Johnny Gosh and the 'America's Most Wanted' guy's son. The reality of this happening was tiny, but it completely changed the culture in America due to the perception of danger. It was barely a concern one week, and every parent's nightmare the next. Despite the probability remaining incredibly low.
It's an interesting question I guess, at what point do we consider something a valid threat to society or something that needs to be dealt with, rather than an anomaly?
>So we've been wrong once; could we be wrong again?
This seems a bit disingenuous. Who is this 'we'? One person an imageboard whose tagline is "Lies and propaganda" wherein people frequently pretend to be other posters to take the piss and take up objectionable positions just to see others have a teary?
To be less facetious, you're reading them literally when it could just as well be read as "This isn't happening (to any notable extent)". It's like the thing with amputee sex slaves someone told me about. Sure, it's happened somewhere. There are billions of people in the world doing tonnes of things. But is it a realistic fear to have your limbs whacked off and be suspended from the ceiling? No, of course not. Has someone spiked someone with a needle? Absolutely, of course it will have happened somewhere at some point, but is it a realistic fear? Not at all. Is there anything you can do to avoid it other than simply not going out? No. So don't worry. Just enjoy life, one day you'll be dead.
There aren't 50 confirmed cases, there are 50 confirmed reports. I have been unable to find a single case of "injection spiking" in the last year that has been verified by toxicology. There have been two arrests of people who were jabbing strangers with needles, but there were no drugs involved.
I'm reminded of the panic in the US in the 1980s about people hiding needles and razor blades in Halloween candy. It was major news every Halloween for many years, some police departments offered to run your trick-or-treat candy through a metal detector, but the only confirmed case happened in 2000, well after the panic had died down; virtually all of the cases that were investigated turned out to be hoaxes.
I don't doubt that there are people who believe that they have been jabbed with some kind of date rape drug, I have no doubt that there are one or two actual cases, but I think it's quite clear that we're in the midst of a moral panic. People are anxious about going out post-COVID and we've got a double whammy of students who are going out on the town for the first time.
If you've been out on the piss and wake up the next morning with hazy memories and an unexplained bruise then there's a really obvious explanation for how that happened. If you're not used to getting drunk and you're in an anxious frame of mind, it's easy to make 2+2=5.
>>35795 This is hard news, but from a full time alcoholic people just have no fucking idea what alcohol can do to them. Particulary women. It's not predictable in the way you think it is, it's not benign if if you just have a few, you cannot line your stomach, you cannot prepare. And fundamentally it's not safe.
You know I'd really like to somehow conduct a scientific test here. We'll investigate the gender double standards once and for all and see who's right.
I'm going to get on Grindr and hit up the gay clubs, get a few lads off their tits on GHB and start cutting knobs off. We'll see how the media handles it, how fast the response it, and most importantly what the online reaction to it is.
The most prolific rapist in British history is Raymond Sinaga. He drugged and raped at least 195 men, most of whom were heterosexual.
Stephen Port drugged and raped numerous men between 2014 and 2015, murdering four of them. A report by the Independent Office for Police Conduct identified numerous failings in the police investigation and missed opportunities to stop Port. A second inquest into the deaths of the four men is now being held to establish whether police misconduct led to their deaths and to what extent homophobia and incompetence were responsible for that misconduct.
>>35826 How do you go about not getting drugged and raped and murdered? I met a dude on a gay BDSM site, and thinking about it now he could have easily been some John Wayne Gacy style wrong un.
Text a friend to tell them where you're going and what time you expect to be back. If you're closeted or non-scene, try and make friends with some people on the apps so you can be wingmen.
If you can, meet someone on neutral territory like a sauna, sex club or hotel. If you're hooking up at someone's house, arrange to meet beforehand at a cafe or bar, or at the least talk to them on the phone.
Trust your gut. If a person or a situation seems off, walk away. A very large proportion of victims of this sort of crime say that they knew something wasn't right, but they felt silly or paranoid or didn't want to be rude. Your instincts will tell you the difference between normal hookup nerves and alarm bells, but you've got to listen.
The overwhelming majority of people on the apps are just normal horny blokes like you, but it's worth taking a few precautions. The kind of people you'd want to hook up with won't mind in the least if you're a bit cautious; guys who get pushy or cagey or aggressive are showing you a clear red flag.
>>35840 >Text a friend to tell them where you're going and what time you expect to be back.
Do you know of any instances where this has actually prevented something terrible? It just seems like reassuring security theatre.
>Kacey Edgar-Hedges, 18, was out with friends in Swansea's Fiction nightclub in the early hours of Thursday, October 21, when she said she felt a "sharp pain, like a pinch" on the inside of her upper right arm.
>A short time later, she said friends helped her locate the pin-prick mark which quickly began to ache while she was still in the club.
>A South Wales Police spokesperson said the force has received nine similar reports over the past few weeks which are being investigated.
>>35845 It was bound to inspire copycats the moment it hit the news.
When I was at school there was a phase where some brilliant lads thought it'd be funny to jab unsuspecting people with a sewing pin. I think one lad ended up getting hepatitis. I can certainly picture edgelords taking a pin to a club to frighten others into thinking they've been injected.
>>35845 >Later on outside the club, she said she lost all sense of feeling in her arms, her legs began to shake, and her eyes began rolling to the back of her head. She was rushed to hospital in a taxi and the police were called.
Jesus. Shame she hasn't got the blood test back yet.
Surely even >>35823 fulltimealcoholiclad can admit that this doesn't sound like she just can't handle her drink?
Unfortunately, without the blood results there's really not much to say about this. The experts say it's very unlikely, a few people say they've experienced it. It would be helpful if a proper lab result came back showing if they've been stuck with something strange.
But even then, what if the report comes back and there's ketamine in her blood? Can you inject ketamine? Because if so, did someone, or did she take it recreationally and lie? If you can't inject ketamine, how about methadone or something? A lot of drugs that make women rapeable are also recreational disco party drugs that make fun girls have fun. If anyone here has an agenda, I don't think even a toxicology report will divert them from their holy mission to prove that ugh white men are problematic / bitches is sluts and hoes y'all.
>>35853 You clearly know absolutely fuck all about drugs or toxicology reports so I'm not sure how you've ended up so firm with your sjw boogeyman nonsense at the end.
>"At around 2.30am I felt a sharp stabbing pain in my right arm, so I went to the toilet with my friend to check it out. Quickly after, my arm started to ache really bad, and that's when we located a small prick mark toward the inside of my upper right arm."
>Kacey said she did not feel anything immediately and felt "okay" in herself for a few hours.
>She said: "The club closed at around 4am this day so we headed out for the taxi bay down the bottom of Wind Street. At this time, my arms began to feel numb and I lost all sense of feeling in them, so my friend sat me down and rang 111."
Ketamine has an onset time of a few minutes for intramuscular injection, or up to about 30 minutes for subcutaneous injection. Benzos, barbiturates, Z-drugs and opioids all have similar onset times.
I'm racking my brains to think of a drug that could plausibly match this timeline, I've had a flick through the BNF, but I'm drawing a total blank.
Her symptoms are remarkably similar to those of hypoglycaemia.
Absolutely. She started feeling unwell at 4am and likely hadn't eaten for many hours. If she had been dancing strenuously, exercise-induced hypoglycaemia is a real possibility. If you did four hours of aerobic exercise on an empty stomach, you'd probably feel quite wobbly.
Alcohol increases the risk of hypoglycaemia, as does the fact that she looks very slim and petite. Artificially-sweetened drinks cause increased insulin production because the nervous system reacts in anticipation of sugar, increasing the risk if she had been drinking something like vodka and Diet Coke all night. If she was mostly drinking shots, then dehydration becomes a factor.
>Could someone have jabbed her with insulin for some weird reason?
They could have, but you'd expect the reaction to be within minutes rather than hours. That's the thing - injection is a very quick way to get drugs into someone's system. I can't think of any plausible substance that could be quickly injected but cause someone to collapse an hour and a half after injection. I'm not saying it's impossible, but if it is possible then it involves something properly exotic.
I hate to be that cunt, but who gets injected by an unknown stranger in a club and then just....carries on clubbing? "oh, yeah - look, that's definitely a needle prick on my arm. Oh dear. Anyway..."
>>35848 That's the thing, language like "handle your drink" minimises what it does particularly to young people. Eat like shit so your body has no reserves and poison it and you will get all manner of effects. Hypoglycemia in particular is a common issue because alcohol is basically sugar with added acetylene. Add exercise and you have a double whammy of bad expectations.
There are folk tales about "clear alcohol" for fucks sake. Like it's some kind of diet coke. Don't get me wrong, get high if you want to and sod the laws that restrict that. But educate yourself, for fucks sake, and consume responsibly. And if that sounds like a drinks lable think about how much legislation would need to happen to slap a warning on anything else that makes oodles of money.
>MPs were discussing a petition, created by university graduate Hannah Thomson, calling on the Government to make it law for nightclubs to search guests on arrival to prevent 'harmful weapons' getting inside.
>Speaking at the Westminster Hall debate, Warwick MP Matt Western said: “The escalation of scale seems to be quite extraordinary. They have to treat it with as much urgency as terrorism. It is really alarming.”
>The debate heard there have been 280 cases of spiking with a needle in the past two months, compared to 2,600 recorded cases of drink spiking between 2015 and 2019 in the UK.
>Politicians also heard there was an “information vacuum” on spiking with calls made for police chiefs across the country to convene to uncover the full extent of the issue.
There's no real evidence for it, but it is scientific fact.
>>35866 That's grand, but I'm concerned at how easily lead some of our MPs are. A few more victories like that and we'll be legally required to glue Ring door bells to our foreheads.