SIR – I am aware of the latest anti-rape poster, bearing the words ‘Looking good is not a crime, rape is’. (Worcester News, October 8). Not an unreasonable message one might feel, but then one should read the small print... particularly if that one is a man.
Two thoughts come to mind about this latest piece of ‘education’. The first is that rapists already know that it is both morally wrong and against the law to rape, so reminding them will have a negligible impact on their criminal behaviour.
The second is that this relieves women of any kind of responsibility for their own choices and behaviour, piling it instead onto men, since even the completion of a brief sexual contact initiated by the woman, who then changes her mind
mid-coitus, so to speak (or alleges to have done so), renders the man entirely responsible, and potentially criminally liable. 
This is incredibly sexist against innocent men, and represents the fulfilment of the feminist agenda. Where exactly is the woman’s responsibility for sexual encounters, and how can any man feel safe in engaging in a consensual sexual act?
If men have any sense of their own preservation, they will get to know a woman very well, before any intimacy, since apparently, they alone will pay the price for that woman’s fickle nature, or potential maliciousness.
Feminists still propagate the myth that women are somehow ‘victims’ and without rights, but it seems to me that increasingly it is men whose rights are routinely ignored, and this is just another piece of that sexist jigsaw.
WILL RICHARDS 
Malvern

We’re living in a 
crazy country
SIR – I refer to David Barlow’s letter, ‘A tale of two letters on global migration,’ October 5. I should like to point out that the following was edited from the letter I originally submitted:
‘Labour poured 7,230,000 people into our country between 1994 and 2010. Ten million people have come here since 1997; 624,000 foreigners came here last year. It’s madness! 
And that makes the recent government claim that ‘only’ 8,100,000 foreigners live in our country ludicrous. We live in a crazy country. 
We are repeatedly told we have a housing crisis. The governments are at it, the BBC are at it, the media’s at it, everybody’s at it. Nobody wants to admit that we have double the population our national ecological environment (and indeed our social infrastructure) can sustain! 
It’s time all of us woke up to that fact!’
My letter was therefore originally about what I see as the impossibility of our country coping with the numbers of people coming here.
I refuse to step down into Mr Barlow’s gutter and trade insults with him, because I really don’t give a fig for his opinions. 
I am quite accustomed to his ‘shoot the messenger’ responses, which I see as evidence of his complete inability to respond meaningfully to what I have to say.
N TAYLOR
Worcester

Voters knew full well 
what EU poll was for
SIR – Goodness gracious! Inadvertently and a little confusedly, it seems, Eurosceptic Wendy Hands (Letters, October 6) actually demolishes one of her fellow-travellers’ key myths: that we were not able to know what we were voting for in the referenda 40-odd years ago; that there was more to it than a “common market” concerning trade alone.
As she suggests, to anyone who had the wit to read and understand a newspaper at the time, it was obvious that some pooling of sovereignty was involved. 
After all, there cannot be a fair and free market without some collective agreements on working conditions, quality specifications, terms of trade and regulation of competition, for instance.
Let’s have no more whingeing from the
anti-European camp that we were kept in the dark about what we were voting for. 
This bleat has always been a nonsense, and we should be grateful to Wendy Hands for providing evidence of this, in the form, of all things, of a statement by a bloke from the Campaign for an Independent Britain as to the clarity of our press’s reports, that what was proposed was “not just economic integration”.  
DAVID BARLOW
Worcester

Blood donor figures are truly appalling
SIR –Thirty years ago my late wife was diagnosed with leukaemia. The treatment involved quite aggressive chemotherapy which necessitated many blood transfusions. 
Until that experience I had not appreciated just how critical were the available stocks of blood, without which many, if not all, surgical procedures would be impossible. I have been a regular donor ever since, even though I am now in my 72nd year.
I was appalled to see that only four per cent of people donate. Please consider how important your regular contribution can be. It is literally life saving.
It only takes an hour of your time every three or four months. Come on – you know it makes sense!
JULIAN WINBORNE
Evesham

Debate flowers out 
of prickly subject
SIR – I agree, John Phillpott (September 19). I regard a thistle as a beautiful, but prickly flower, not a weed.
GEORGE COWLEY
Worcester