Shortly after I published my last post, “What happens when a healthcare company’s employee takes down a rape survivor support site?” I received permission to publish an email from yet another PAT-FetLife user. It’s particularly relevant because it directly counters one of the most frequently cited justifications for why the healthcare company employee, Caroline Tyler, attacked Predator Alert Tool for FetLife and made it unavailable. That justification being that “it was set up for use in USA to identify people with a criminal record in our society, it has no use whatsoever in the UK.” (Definitely follow the link to FetLife and chime in, yourself, if you want.)

Of course, that is itself at best a grave misunderstanding of the purpose of the Predator Alert Tools and at worst yet another intentional lie from the Bitter BDSM’er Brigade about the tool. The truth is I intended Predator Alert Tool to be used wherever ethical people want to act in resistance of rape culture. National boundaries are not a sensible demarcation for such a demographic. (And it’s also why not having any moderator is a necessary, intentional design feature.)

So, without further ado, here’s the email:

Hi :)

I’m in the UK so I don’t know how good it will be to you, but if you ever turn up in Surrey my sofa is available for a kip. […]

I don’t know, your inbox is probably flooded with these kinds of messages so you probably don’t want to hear but I just wanted to thankyou for helping spread the anti-sexual-violence message and the whole thing with FAADE. I’m just incredibly grateful. It enabled me to warn people about Jack, also known as Fox_Vanweasel amongst other things, when the criminal justice system failed me. I think he and his honeytrap girlfriend Renegade-Hearts have deleted their accounts now, but it gave me a voice when I felt like I had none.

Jack restrained, raped, tortured and humiliated me for 6 hours but more than that he lied and betrayed my trust as well as physically overpowering me when I was a naive barely-18 year old, and he was a fully grown man. I was naive, but teenagers should be allowed to be naive without predators taking advantage of this.

He groomed me before executing a deeply violent attack, switching between sweet and caring and gift-giving to anally-raping and humiliating, then back to play video games and run me a bath. I was trapped in his house for 8 hours, too afraid to even speak. Yet the police told me I should have ‘fought back more’ when the blindfold slipped because his piss had dampened it. They told me it was a ‘he said, she said’ situation even though I later found his accounts on other sites expressing a desire to rape someone prior to my assault. They dismissed the case entirely and there was a report some time later on crime statistics in Croydon, where this was carried out, saying that a lot of people are dissuaded from taking the individual to court, or the police won’t do so, in order to make the official crime statistics (based on court cases) look lower.

So this unbiased, user-owned PAT tool is ideal in such situations of corruption, bureaucracy and pencil-pushing taking over from protecting real persons from real attacks. It’s a shame their accounts are gone so people can’t be warned, but maybe the interview with the police scared them off- made them realise they can face consequences.

Anyway. The real message is that you’re doing a good thing and you’re welcome to a drink or the couch if you’re ever in the UK.

-[Mia] :)

The takeaway here is that there is a very big difference between BDSM’ers and ethical kinksters. The overwhelming majority of information about kinky-sexy-things on the Internet isn’t useful. It’s rape apologist propaganda.

There’s no better demonstration of this than the fact that Predator Alert Tool’s most vocal and insistent attackers come from the supposedly “safe, sane, and consensual” BDSM community.