Hereis an article about the football rapes at Baylor. The focus is how the athletic department was all kinds of aware of how widespread the incidence of rape was, but not willing to risk the “brand” by changing it. But buried in it is the apparently well-established practice of freshmen football players being “required” to lure a freshman girl to a “party” to be raped. This is how this happens. It’s NOT a bunch of guys thinking that they were going to watch movies at Bob’s house, but there was this girl and she was so drunk and wearing this tight little dress and they all just lost their heads.
Anyway, in the report the head football coach heard about a gang rape, and the players involved, and he said “Those are some bad dudes . . . why was she around those guys?”. She was there because she was tricked. She was lured. But it’s still her fault, as far as he’s concerned.
She was around those guys because universities do a great job of turning “those guys” into celebrities. Everyone wants to be around those guys, including heterosexual guys. So why wouldn’t a girl?
Yes, they absolutely do happen just that way. The ride with the football players is the Stubenville High rape case. And the single girl at a party with 20 guys was recounted by Master Wang-Ka here on the SDMB some years ago. (if you look it up, don’t link it here).
The reason I’m highlighting these scenarios is that they can easily be identified when they happen, and thus people can step in early to stop them. In the Stubenville case, someone trustworthy could have recognized the potential for harm and changed the situation. In the house party, someone could have called 911 early in the evening at the first signs things were going bad. These scenarios are real, recognizable, and preventable. They won’t prevent every rape, but they can easily prevent the ones which happen from these obliviously dangerous situations. I wish we could talk about scenarios like this without them being taken to sarcastic extremes (well then women can’t go to any party) or applied to situations where there isn’t the same risk (what about a man getting a ride or what if the ride is with her brothers). If someone is really asking a question like that because they want clarification, I’m more than happy to have a productive conversation where we break things down to identify unique traits in the highly dangerous situations (e.g. single drunk girl with 4 rowdy football boys) versus benign situations (e.g. 50-year-old coworkers driving a drunk colleague home).
You are projecting. You don’t know when the Stubenville victim became too drunk to be making decisions, or that she made a decision to get in the car with the boys. You don’t know if she was tricked or lied to. She doesn’t remember herself.
You also don’t know if one r more of guys was a good friend of hers, someone she had every reason to trust.
And it certainly doesn’t sound random. By the time they left the second party, they clearly intended to rape her. It may well have been their intend when they took her from the first.
She could have done some really unwise shit. I’ve stipulated since page 1 that getting incoherently drunk is a bad idea. But we don’t know what else she did, we don’t know she chose to get in a car with 4 strange dudes. And, frankly, they sound like dudes I’d also tell my son to stay away from.
It’s really, really not clear to me what you want. No one is saying it’s a good idea to get incoherently drunk at parties. Other than that, what is the conversation you think we can’t have? No one is saying it would have been inappropriate to pull the Stubenville victim away and tell her she needed to go home and sleep it off: she was stumbling, incoherently drunk by all accounts. I wouldn’t have let my friend leave like that, male or female. What other “rule” do you think that we need to tell women to impose on themselves that will keep them safer?
And do you understand my position–that we live in a world that, when a girls is lied to and lured to a party as part of a planned gang rape, the first response is “why was she with those guys?” We live in a world where a woman is accused of taking IMPRUDENT RISKS by walking down a neighborhood street, on Sunday morning, alone. When women who get drugged and raped as asked “why didn’t you watch your drink? Did you leave it unattended?”. Do you see those things as victim blaming? Do you think it’s foolish and unwise for a woman in a bar to go to the restroom in the middle of a drink, not carefully waiting to be done with her drink? These are serious questions because I truly don’t understand your position.
filmore, if you had a teenaged son who got drunk and decided to catch a ride with four boy he didn’t know, would your response be “OMG! My son did something monumentally stupid!” or would it be “He shouldn’t have done that, but since he’s not a girl, it’s really no big deal.” Because all we’re saying is that the first response makes more sense than the second one.
Now you seem to be switching the blame from the victim to “someone trustworthy” who is watching from the sidelines. Sure, if someone trustworthy had been there, they could have called 911. But I am not guessing there was a “someone trustworthy” in this case, where you’ve talking about a bunch of dumb kids who are drunk and unsupervised.
Or maybe a “someone trustworthy” was there, and they didn’t want to call the cops because they didn’t want to get anyone in trouble for crimes that hadn’t happened yet. But they cautioned the girl not to go with those boys. Teenaged girls aren’t always in the mood to listen to unsolicited advice.
You also seem to be equating teenaged girls with women in general. Earlier you asked me what would my response be if one of my girlfriends called me drunk from a party. I’m a 40-something and so are all of my friends. I will always be worried about a 16-year-old who is out partying. Sober 16-year-old girls aren’t known for being the most responsible or mature, let alone drunk ones. But a woman–a grown-ass woman who has been around the block a bit–knows some stuff. She would presumably appreciate the danger of a situation like the Steubenville case. I wouldn’t need to tell her about how dangerous it is to get wasted in an unfamiliar social setting with unfamiliars. A kid would need to hear this.
But I wouldn’t give her this lecture after she’s been victimized. Because at that point she’s (presumably) learned that what she did is risky.
I gotta say, filmore, it seems to me you’re trying to use the most extreme example to justify special pleadings targeted at women in general. If we applied this logic to crime in general, then we’d never stop lecturing men. Practically all the extreme examples of risk-taking have male poster children.
Filmore, what is your list of reasonable precautions that you think women should adopt–things you think reduce the risk of rape or other bad outcomes enough that they are worth the reduction in freedom, pleasure, and personal and professional opportunity?
Thanks for this and your other posts, Manda JO. I haven’t been able to post for the past couple of days, only partly because I’ve been traveling. But you said most of what I wanted to say.
But there is an anecdotal data point I want to make. And I wrote it out and read it and I couldnt bring myself to post it. But here’s the short version.
I also think the 1 in 50 is high. And the reason I think it’s high is that I’ve never been raped, and I spent several years engaging in EXTREMELY risky behavior. INSANELY risky behavior. I hung out in nightclubs and drank a lot and took lots of drugs. I left the clubs with men i’d just met all the time. Sometimes I had enthusiastically consensual, if drunken, sex with them but more often I didn’t. I used to drive around with this low level drug dealer that delivered to bachelor parties. And I’d stick around, because being the only girl at a bachelor party = lots of free drugs. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, I did crazy risky shit like that all the time, for several years. I’m too embarrassed to post the long version.
And I never got raped because I never crossed paths with a rapist. No one ever forced themselves on me, or even tried to. No one ever tried to do anything sexual with me if I was passed out or unable to consent. And I didn’t dress like a nun either. So there’s pretty much no level of risky behavior that will make me shift the blame to the victim.
That’s not to excuse the behavior of people that do stuff like I used to do. The need to take a good long look at the ways they make themselves vulnerable. My friends used to tell me I was lucky nothing bad had happened to me, and they were right. But I’m not talking about stuff like parking garages at night or going to bars or even taking a walk at night with a man you just met. I’m talking about pathologically self-destruction.
There’s a huge difference between:
“Hey, that’s a bad neighborhood, dont go there at nite alone”
and “Well, it was your fault to get assaulted, your should never have gone into that neighborhood at nite alone.”
We are talking here about victim blaming, not advice. While it may be a trifle sexist and even mansplaining to warn a woman about a bad area or whatever, that is not in anyway shape or form “victim blaming”.
As long as the advice is well intentioned, then take it or not. But it’s not victim blaming.
Speak for yourself. I don’t want anyone to tell me when they think I’m doing something stupid unless I ask for their advice. Or they are my parents.
If someone wants to be helpful, just offer to help. Like, a few weeks ago I told a coworker I was going to take the bus home rather than walk because I was carrying luggage with me. Instead of telling me he didn’t like the idea of little ole me standing at the dark creepy bus stop all alone in the big dangerous city, my coworker offered to give me a ride. And I took him up on it because I really didn’t feel like taking the bus. That was helpful. Unsolicited advice would not have been.
I think it’s part of a culture of victim blaming. It’s setting the groundwork, so that when the cop asks you why you were walking home from church alone, you know what he means . . Why did you break the rules? Why were you doing something you’ve been told is unsafe?
Valid advice? Sure, that’s fine. Tell everyone not to get shit faced drunk, that they shouldn’t go off with rowdy drunk strangers. But I had a coworker tell a room full of high school students that girls in short skirts shouldn’t be surprised when bad things happen. I’ve been tsk-tsked over driving cross country alone, or even walking out to my car after dark. I had my brother go all tough guy when me and my sister and my mom went camping in national park campgrounds, warning us about maniacs. I’ve seen a thousand movies and TV shows where girls who broke these rules were raped, beaten, murdered, flayed as grisly warnings. THAT sort of advice is getting the blame in before the fact, so that women won’t even report because clearly it’s as much their fault as anything.
According to Uber’s safety report, there were more than 3,000 allegations of sexual assault last year. So how do you stay safe on Uber and Lyft?
Here are some tips:*
Or this?
*Fort Bragg is a military community where many females are often alone due to a deployed spouse, or simply choosing to go out alone to meet up with friends. The Fort Bragg Patch collaborated with a local Special Agent with the FBI to come up with some precautionary measures for females.
Timothy Gannon, Special Agent, provided safety tips for females. He foremost recommends not doing things that call attention to yourself. This could include choosing clothing that is flattering without being overly provocative.*
or this?
*When traveling for business or leisure, travelers always need to be mindful of their personal safety.
James Hamilton, Vice President of Protection Strategies for Gavin de Becker & Associates (GDBA), a prominent global security firm, brings a wealth of experience to his role. A former FBI Special Agent, Hamilton developed courses to protect high-level government officials, and served as a personal security advisor to a U.S. Attorney General and two FBI Directors. He also managed the FBI’s Overseas Survival Awareness Program, a valuable resource to officials and corporations working in high‐risk areas.
Forbes.com spoke with Mr. Hamilton, asking him to draw upon his expertise to provide some common sense reminders for ordinary travelers:*
DrDeth, do you not see the difference between an article that presents facts/figures and quotes experts versus some rando person on the internet spouting facile and unsubstantiated advice on how a woman can reduce her chances of being raped?