"blaming the victim"

In My Humble Opinion
141

Great. This is a four year old’s argument. You’re repeating exactly the same thing I was just responding to with a fantastical imagined idea about what someone “would” say.

[QUOTE=CGav8r]
[Bolding, mine]
We all realize that there are places that have higher crime than others, and that walking through areas that have higher crime increases the risk for being a victim of crime. So if we were pals and I pointed that out, you would just shrug your shoulders and say “Well there really isn’t anything I can do about it,” or would you say “I’ll avoid that area if I can, and if I can’t, I realize my risk increases.”
[/QUOTE]

“Higher crime than others” is meaningless, so the point remains the same. Everywhere is a place a crime can happen, so everywhere is a place with an attendant risk. Not all of those risks are the same, sure. That’s not the same as pretending that when these conversations happen in the real world, these “risks” that are so stark and clear in unrealistic made up scenarios are always relevant or reasonable to expect people to run away from. Billions of people, by definition, live their entire lives in “places that have higher crime than others.” What’s your advice, exactly?

142

No, I am pointing out that when we talk about genuinely risky behavior, like getting drunk at parties with strangers, that gets labelled as victim blaming.

No, it isn’t meaningless. Higher crime is higher risk; lower crime is lower risk. That’s what risk assessment means - the ability to distinguish high-risk behavior so you can avoid it.

Not getting drunk at a frat party is an unrealistic made-up scenario? I don’t agree.

Avoid high-risk behavior, because it increases the chance you might be assaulted.

If you live in a high-crime area, you need to be more careful than if you live in a low-crime area. Duh.

Regards,
Shodan

143

Meaningless, how? Are you saying that crime statistics are meaningless and that all places are equally safe? Despite there being higher instances of crime? Or are you saying *anyone *can become a victim anywhere, so why differentiate? Honestly, I’m confused as to your point.

Trying to be smart about preventing crime isn’t magical thinking- if you walk around Somalia or through mine field in the DMZ between North and South Korea, your chances of dying are higher than if you are walking around the halls of Congress. It’s not that crime can’t happen, just that the chances of you being a victim of a crime are different.

If you think this means I’m telling you to shutter your windows and lock your doors, and never go out, you are not being serious. If you also think it means you can’t use common sense to ignore the warnings your 90 year old neighbor gives you about staying away from the “sinful city” vice the local law enforcement posting bulletins that there has been an increase in car jackings in [xxx] neighborhood and ensure you take necessary precautions - again, you aren’t being serious. If the local constabulary said “The last 8 victims were driving down Wilson Blvd between the hours of 10 pm and midnight, and all drove late model German SUVs,” my advice to my friends would be, “If you drive your Cayenne down Wilson tonight, you may put yourself at risk…take another route.”

144

No it’s not meaningless. Some places are more dangerous, period.

145

I think there are a couple of questions being conflated here:
(1) Is it ever appropriate/helpful to offer advice/suggestions on ways that women can mitigate the risk of rape?
(2) What issues are there with the quantity, quality and context of advice that are actually given to women in the real world?

I think the answers to those questions are (1) yes, and (2) beats me, I’m not a woman. But I don’t think that “man, I’m sick of people lecturing me about how I shouldn’t drink” is a particularly useful response to the question of whether parents should give their daughters advice, and whether freshman orientation at college should include various pieces of advice.
Part of what makes it tricky is that there’s a distinction between two different types of advice:
(1) You should never do X
and
(2) You should be cautious about/while doing Y

I think it’s generally good advice to say that you should never accept unlabeled drugs from strangers who you don’t trust. But there are plenty of other things which are in the category of “you are at slightly increased risk while engaging in this activity… so be cautious”, which include drinking-in-general, walking around alone at night, etc.

Whatever messaging society gives about issues like this, it certainly should NOT be “any woman who engages in activities in category (2) is asking for it, and should be blamed for whatever happens to her”. I mean, it shouldn’t be that about category (1) either, but it really certainly shouldn’t be that about category (2).

At the same time, though, do you think that raising awareness of risk factors will never ever have the slightest positive effect ever? Should it never be discussed?

146

The point that I’m making is not a difficult one to understand.

Sitting and talking in the abstract about “places that are more dangerous than others” is meaningless because every individual choice any potential victim makes is happening in a place that is more dangerous than others. It’s not happening in the abstract; it’s happening in the context of a real person’s real choices, and they could have simply not done anything at all and remained at home. That’s always a choice. Unless you’ve got some kind of argument that all or most or even a substantial amount of assault victims have behaved unreasonably and should be blamed for that, then it advances the ball exactly zero to assert that “some places are more dangerous.” They gotta be somewhere.

Without even realizing it (presumably), you’re all begging the question. You’re saying that it’s reasonable and worthwhile to point out to people who have been assaulted that they made mistakes by being in X place and took unreasonable risk Y. But the whole point of the debate is: what unreasonable risk? What place? How is it that you’ve decided, in the abstract, they should be living their lives?

You’re analogizing stuff like Somalia and walking through the worst blocks of Baltimore counting money (or even, frankly, being on a particular identified “crime zone” street during “crime time,” which is no less preposterous) as if that is relevant to anything that anyone is complaining about. As if these are the kinds of decisions your “average” victim has made in the “average” assault case that leads to something I would call victim-blaming. But what we’re talking about, really, is real “advice” given to real victims who haven’t done anything remotely analogous to those things. Refusing to acknowledge this point means that the entire conversation is taking place in a space that has no bearing on what actually goes on that leads to complaints of “victim blaming.”

“Some places are more dangerous” is facile, useless, and can’t really be interpreted as anything other than complete avoidance of the actual controversy. No shit some places are more dangerous. So what? “Avoid high risk behavior.” Oh, OK. Where’s the list? Is it determined retroactively after something bad happens? Every time anything happens in any place other than the safest place in the world, the person it happened to “bears responsibility” for not being in the safest place? Probably not. So… what?

147

Speaking just for myself, I made it very clear that actually telling an actual victim after the fact “hey, here’s what you did that was dangerous” is a horrible thing to do, no matter how dangerous or reckless their actions may or may not have been.

If there’s a college where the campus is safe and the area to the west of campus is pretty safe but the area to the east of campus is somewhat less safe, should the college publicize that information to its students, in a hopefully non-alarmist fashion?

148

It isn’t that I don’t understand; it’s just that it is wrong.

So what? If you are in a relatively safe situation, you ought not to do things that will increase your risk of being assaulted. If you are in a relatively higher-risk situation, you ought not to do things that will increase your risk of being assaulted even further.

And some choices are better than others.

Or they could have made a different choice that would still have reduced their risk.

Your idea that it is meaningless to talk about degrees of risk is wrong. There are things that women can do to reduce their risk.

But that is the point. Pointing out that different actions carry different risks is not assigning blame. It is pointing out that some things are higher risk than other things.

Because I understand the notion of risk assessment better than someone who simply classifies the topic as blaming the victim.

So they should be avoided.

“Don’t get drunk to the point where you are defenseless” is on the list, but I seem to recall a lot of complaining when that was pointed out.

No, it is based on the experiences of others. Most good advice is.

So… try not to strawman so blatantly.

Regards,
Shodan

149

Same here; I wouldn’t visit a friend in the hospital who was run over while jaywalking and say, “Dude-this would never have happened if you had used the crosswalk.” Most people I’ve seen in this thread agree.

And it’s smart risk mitigation to tell people that there is risk in certain activities (like not paying attention to your drink while you are at a bar), so that they can recognize and avoid the risk.

150

**Machine Elf **was specifically talking about telling people what they could better do AFTER a situation has occured. Talking about how to mitigate risk before a situation has occurred is generally good. Talking to your daughter about date rape before her first date is good. Colleges talking about consent is good. But when something’s already occurred and we start taking the “well, you should’ve…” stance, it immediately starts sounding like there’s always something more a person could have done, even when that’s not the case and the event was in no way their fault.

Over and over people in this thread who dislike victim blaming have stated that talking about these things BEFORE they happen is good, but as soon as it takes on the “I told you so” tone afterwards, it becomes problematic. The other issue talked about as well is how often the advice on mitigating risk is misinformed, patronizing, or limiting. That doesn’t make all advice bad, or talking about it bad, especially to young women. It just means we need to be aware of what we’re doing, what we’re teaching, and who we’re teaching. Only talking to women and girls about this is just half the equation and not even the source of the problem.

So no, there’s no, “Don’t teach anyone anything at all, ever! Don’t talk about it, ever!”. That’s not what’s being suggested.

151

How dare you say I can’t walk in front of the crack houses of Baltimore counting my savings! I’ve already been robbed twice doing that. You’re just victim blaming!

152

There’s this odd disconnect in here where one half of the posters are talking about women barely drinking at all (two drinks over the corse of an evening, per the linked article) and the other posters are talking about women drinking until they pass out. Well, here’s the thing, no one should drink until they pass out, in public or private. What most people object to (okay, what I object to, at any rate), is society asking women to abstain from activities that are considered a’okay for men.

Neither men nor women should dangle steaks from their body and walk into the lion enclosure at the zoo. Neither men nor women should walk into the middle of a battle zone. Neither men nor women should go into the most crime-ridden neighborhood in town with a handful of $20s. And neither men nor women should pass out in public. But only women are told that they shouldn’t get drunk at all. And we, as a society, should look at that and ask why we accept it? And, if we think it’s an unreasonable expectation for a college age man, why do we think it would be a reasonable expectation for a collage age woman?

153

Wonderful. Between you and Shodan, you’ve really got the part of this where you do a terrible job pretending I disagree with myself nailed down.

The part where you’ve caught up to the rest of the class and identified that category of events we are actually talking about, eh.

154

Honestly, I think that’s a somewhat separate issue, although potentially an interesting one in its own right.

Certainly I think it’s entirely possible for advice given to women to be smothering or shrill or condescending or patriarchal or infantilizing. How often such advice actually is one or more of the above I don’t know, not being a woman who has to actually deal with that kind of stuff… and I’m certainly not going to claim to be able to dispute someone who actually does.

That said, I think you’re maybe skipping over a nugget of reason there. Men who drink until they pass out risk:
-long term health issues (liver damage)
-short term health issues (potential death)
-social drawbacks (failing to complete schoolwork and live up to responsibilities)
-mild embarrassment (penis drawn on face)
-social opprobrium (being known as a drunkard)

Women, far more than men, risk all of the above but also risk:
-being raped

Does that unequal risk make it appropriate for the levels of warning to also be unequal? I dunno, I think you could make a good argument in either direction. Certainly the attitude should not be simultaneously “oh, boys will be boys, chuckle chuckle… have fun, lads, but don’t drink and drive too much!” and “ok, girls, now, at some point on this campus someone might try to offer you a sip of the Demon Alcohol!!!”. But how close to that exaggerated extreme is it in real life?

155

Then it’s a good thing I wasn’t talking to someone who had asked either of these questions. I don’t see that anyone here has said that they think parents shouldn’t give their children advice or that freshman orientation shouldn’t address issues like excessive drinking and sexual assault. I certainly haven’t.

I was specifically responding to astro, who first denied that women are targeted for special lecturing about what we need to do to avoid danger and then proceeded to deliver a special lecture about what women need to do to avoid danger. He wasn’t talking to his daughter, a group of incoming freshmen, or even a specific woman he knew to have a drinking problem. To the best of my knowledge, he’s also not any sort of expert on substance abuse or sexual assault prevention. He’s just another man on the Internet who likes telling women what to do. Actually, as far as the SDMB goes I’d say he’s one of the biggest offenders in that area.

I think that raising awareness of risk is generally something best left to actual experts. When it comes to sexual assault in particular then there’s plenty of questionable advice floating around out there, and I suspect that both the unreliability and the sheer quantity of such advice causes more problems than it solves.

156

Something doesn’t have to be extreme to be wrong. If it were extreme and obvious, there wouldn’t be an argument.

I don’t have a study on hand, but I would imagine a man who gets roaring drunk is at a higher risk for being murdered than women. Bar fights, testosterone-ladden insults, someone’s got a gun - seems more likely to happen to men. I’d add that to the men’s list.

157

You are conflating two things that really do not exist together in the real world. My considered opinion in the context of this online message board discussion is that drinking/drugging to excess while socializing is an overwhelming risk factor for sexual assault for women, dwarfing any other risk factors regarding location quality, night walking, clothing choices, physical posture etc. My “advice” in this online discussion context would be to be to try not to be drunk or very high if you are a socializing female as it is a dangerous choice.

In the real non-digital world where we actually live, most people, myself included, would never deign to lecture any of our peers male or female on their drinking habits unless we knew them fairly intimately and they had demonstrated they did not drink responsibly, and beyond all this we felt we had some purchase to give them advice.

I have never seen anyone, ever, going around to personally confront grown adult women who are out of college telling them to moderate their drinking behavior just because they are women. It just does not happen. This tattered, finger wagging strawman of yours personally confronting drinking women does not exist in the real world. People will get confronted for drinking to insensibility by their peers, but that’s almost always after it happens and you are dealing with the aftermath.

I know it’s fun to try and wind this all into big cotton candy ball and yell “Misogyny! Misogyny!”, but really the baseline here is that you think only an “expert” is qualified to offer the common sense observation that getting blitzed is dangerous and might be a significant risk factor for sexual assault. IMO that position utterly defies rational consideration.

158

The hard truth that nobody wants to say is that just being a nubile young woman - from the perspective of a young, horny, aggressive, and privileged guy like a typical frat boy - is exactly the same thing wearing a dress made out of steaks and going to pet some lions.

159

It does. It really does.

How do we properly cite personal experience? Citation machine isn’t helping me.

160

You say this as if it were a law of nature. It’s not. It’s really not. Stating “hard truths” like this is nothing more than insisting that the status quo is inevitable, that societies don’t change, that people don’t change, that cultures don’t change. And we know for a fact that they do change. We can track significant changes in our local societies and the global society in our lifetimes.

And yet there will always be a contingent of people who stand fast that “this is the way things are and the way things always will be.”

Assuming as true that “the perspective of a young, horny, aggressive, and privileged guy like a typical frat boy” is the perspective you describe, that’s because his society has made him that way, his culture has made him that way, his family has made him that way, his friends have made him that way.

And the next generation of “young, horny, aggressive, and privileged” guys is not going to be a carbon copy of the current generation. It will be different in one aspect or another. If society wants some of that difference to be in changing the perspective that the “young, horny, aggressive, and privileged guy like a typical frat boy” has toward any “nubile young woman,” then it can absolutely be changed.

And one way of changing how the next generation comes out is changing how society talks about certain things. Changing how you talk about thing undoubtedly has an affect on societal perspectives.

However, you will always run into people who will be annoyed at the idea that society wants them to talk differently about things, and they will stamp their feet and wave their arms insisting that things are as they are as a state of nature and no one can do anything about them.

And they’re wrong. They’re always wrong. Because things do change, and they can change for the better or they can change for the worse, depending at least in part who is able to change the way that society talks about things.