Do men need a license to be allowed socialise (MOD NOTE IN OP)

Bringing in talk about pay equality and wolf whistling is making it seem like all men are murderers; you got more money than her? MURDERER!

How do you expect everyone to step up?

Did you read the post by @sekiro a few posts back? The type that are liable to engage in anti social behaviour are the type liable to turn their attention to some interfering busybody as they see it.

Unless you can, with absolute certainty, incapacitate someone instantaneously you are putting yourself at significant risk. If you do incapacitate someone instantaneously it is likely to be seen as use of excessive force.

Intervening could could result in your own death, life altering or serious injuries or a criminal or civil case against you. You can't just politely appeal to some people's better nature - they've already shown their willingnes to cause harm - how should someone step up?

A friend of mine got a stiletto in the back of the head one night for being a white knight defending a girl who had just been punched in the face by her scummy bf. I would approach these situations with extreme caution.

A potentially fatal or life altering injury. I doubt he got any thanks for his concern.

It's not just the perceived aggressor that has to be contained but the entire situation. If you aren't certain you can contain the entire situation you should think hard about getting involved.

Even gardaí, better trained, better equipped and more experienced in dealing with situations, would want to be able to contain both when intervening.

That about sums it up. Crazy though all the 'issues' being tagged onto this poor young woman's murder. Seems like some think society must be made to run along the lines of Mills & Boon.

cowards refuge

Its sexist and generalising.

Maybe women who dont want unsolicited comments dont want them from ANYONE.

Maybe consider that.

Same rubbish as the ones as saying a woman must be a "lesbian" because they don't want to be approached.

Myths.

The reality is the courts again and again give men who commit violent crimes a slap on the wrist, either very short prison time, or no time at all. These type of men are allowed to walk the streets until they escalate their behavior and really hurt someone

maybe replace the word men with ppl as women do really well in the courts in comparison to men

Justice system is a joke and honestly I feel for the gardai on this one.

Case in point, the perpetrator of this will be able to apply for parole in as little as 12 years into his sentence, certain to be released before serving 20. That's the same if you murder a man, woman or child.

Ian Horgan got a life sentence in 2002 for rape and murder, he was released in 2013 and is a serial re-offender since. Its an absolute joke

A friend of mine got his face scratched (there is still a slight scar there even now) by some girl in a pub. She was having a row with some guy and my friend decided to be the white knight. He got set upon by two of yer mans mates and then this girl who he was white knighting for jumped on him and startedclawing at his face. He ended up in hospital with a broken nose a perforated eardrum and stitches in the face. He wont be doing that again.

Things like this just do more harm and take away from the issue.

What happen to that girl was awful truly awful and I think it hits home because she did nothing wrong. Theirs no oh she shouldn’t have been running alone at night, she shouldn’t have been wearing revealing clothes, she shouldn’t have got drunk etc all those things people say to make themselves feel safe.

Like that poor woman a few years ago who had just got off a bus in the evening still bright out and was kidnapped and murdered.

This isn’t a men vs women issue. Violence is a problem for everyone but you can’t deny that there is definitely more for a woman to fear and that’s needs to be addressed.

ive always taken the usual precautions and never really felt too unsafe unless there was gangs of dodgy people around until I got a dog a few years ago and due to my work schedule and the dog being a little reactive walks have to be past 9 at night and the amount of hassle I have got from some men is unreal. I’m close to 40, average and plainer then a rich tea so it’s not cause I’m a supermodel. The worst thing is what if they hurt the dog to get to me, or the dog bites someone who is in my face and then has to be put down?

Could we maybe institute some kind of clothing colour-code or wear badges or something to that effect, to indicate that we are, in fact, okay with being chatted up by strangers as we go about our day? Because it happens to me relatively often in my local area (not in any way blowing my own trumpet with that, honestly I think I just come across as approachable!) and I would be a lot less happy if I didn't have those little random interactions as confidence boosters.

This is the problem - not everyone wants to live in a world in which the public realm is "muted" in this manner. I suspect that a lot of this has to do with where one sits on the extroverted vs introverted spectrum - I'm an ENFP personality type myself (Extroverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Perceiving) and random moments with random strangers can be the difference between having an absolutely sh!te day and having a nicer one. I'll give you one example - I tend to use far too much conditioner and blowdry my hair so it tends to be very big and floofy, and it happens relatively often that someone (male or female!) will ask if they can feel it 😂 Now, any time someone does this it gives my spirits a lift, but also makes me feel "wow, this person has feckin' balls of steel to say something like this to a total stranger in a world in which that is becoming increasingly demonised as socially unacceptable. Thank Christ for people who are ignoring that, because I have a bounce in my step now that wasn't there before the comment!"

I'm someone who was bullied a lot as a teenager and therefore grew up genuinely believing myself to be absolutely hideous. I very much opted out of 'the chase' for that reason, initiating a come-on with a woman was always insanely difficult because of that voice in my head saying "don't even try it, she's miles out of your league and you're a total loser anyway". For that reason, more or less every sexual encounter I had before the age of 26 was initiated by the woman - and I mean every encounter from just a random shift in a pub to full-blown relationships. I never had the confidence to initiate until a life-changing event in my family in 2016 gave me an epiphany of nihilism, and I just stopped caring about embarrassing myself because you really do only get one shot at life and wasting it being afraid of doing things you want to do is moronically short sighted.

Why am I saying all of this? Because for me, growing up with those confidence issues and feeling like I had to watch from the sidelines while the rest of my friends, male and female, played the whole flirting game, being randomly complimented even from across the street is something which always gave my spirits a lift from the dumps into the stratosphere. 

I'm not posting this to invalidate those who don't like it, I'm posting it to challenge the idea that nobody in their right mind enjoys being called out in this manner by strangers. Personally it can put a smile on my face lasting several days, I'd be lying through my teeth if I tried to claim that it didn't. I guess when you spend your teenage years utterly starved of any kind of physical validation in a world which values appearance so, so much, even the tiniest hint of it gives your brain the kind of dopamine rush that I imagine others get from posting a selfie on Instagram and getting hundreds of comments.

Interacting with strangers in this manner is such a life-blood for me that the social distancing era completely and totally f*cked with my mental health beyond anything I can even begin to describe. Not being able to mingle in crowds is utterly devastating to someone as extroverted as me. Having to stay two metres from everyone at all times is devastating, losing the random small talk encounters is devastating, certainly knowing that it's off limits to have a random moment of electricity with someone is devastating.

Hell, my first ever proper relationship would never have happened under the kind of social regime some folks here are trying to push. I was in The Village nightclub (known these days as Opium, Wexford Street in Dublin) and I sat down on one of the long benches they had around the sides of the room after tiring myself out dancing, with a freshly poured pint. The woman sitting next to me introduced herself, decided to use my shoulder as a pillow and fell asleep for twenty minutes or so while I drank my pint and pondered how I could get up without waking her 😂 By the end of the night we'd added eachother on Facebook, had our first date a week or two later and are still very close friends now, ten years later.

But as she was a total stranger to me, according to many on this thread, her behaviour was unacceptable and I was "sexually harassed", because she was extremely forward with me as a total stranger and couldn't possibly have known beforehand whether or not I would reciprocate.

If we create a paradigm in which it's assumed that literally nobody in the world ever wants to have a random encounter in the public realm with a bit of unexpected electricity and butterflies in the stomach, which feels like the natural conclusion of some of the commentary here, many, many people like myself will find the resulting world a cold, lonely, boring place devoid of life or colour. That's what the pandemic era did to me, and what I hate about these discussions is that they seem to be led by the kind of people who probably enjoyed that aspect of quarantine life. But there doesn't seem to be any room for voices from those of us who actually want nothing more than to be "bothered" by strangers when we're outside - indeed, those of us for whom going outside itself is often a vehicle for interacting with other humans, after spending a day working alone at home.

So what could a solution be? Wear certain colours to signal that you're someone who would be happy to be randomly chatted up or flirted with in public? Creating designated "zones" where it's implied and assumed that if you're in such a zone, you know that it's a zone where that kind of thing is considered acceptable? Create some kind of opposing signal to say "I'm in a bubble today and you'd better not intrude on it"? 

Like it or not, you will simply never bring the majority of the public along if your proposal is that all humans unknown to you be considered off limits for interactions in the public realm. Too many people enjoy such encounters for that to ever be reasonable, and it's monstrously unfair on those people to push this agenda of essentially perma-social distancing. 

I have every genuine sympathy with those who view interacting with strangers while traversing the public realm as a horrible, unavoidable evil of getting from A to B. What I hate about these conversations, though, is that a thought is never spared for those of us who feel the opposite - that interacting with strangers while traversing the public realm is one of the few things that makes a day worth living in.

There should be a way to create space for both types of people in the world. Creating a paradigm in which being out in public means everyone is automatically assumed to be in an unpoppable personal bubble of spacetime in which strangers are not welcome, is creating a world which, for extroverts, is genuinely hardly worth living in at all.