This event was in response to a police officer advising a group of college students. The subject was safety techniques/ways to avoid danger. The officer recommended that some of the women walking home avoid dressing in a ‘slutty’ manner, or something similar to that.
The students reacted to this in protest because they thought that the policeman was saying that victims who dressed a certain way were complicit in provoking others to rape them. This is obviously terrible and wrong. Victims should not be blamed for what happened to them.
However, if I were a potential victim I would minimize risk through:
Dressing conservatively
Walking in a group
Having a cell phone
Carrying mace, etc.
None of the above carry with them the implication that doing otherwise provokes people into rape, and by so doing makes the rape the victim’s ‘fault’, but doing the above minimizes the chances of a rape occurring.
Why is it wrong to tell people on an individual basis to not dress ‘slutty’ in order to maximize their personal safety? It doesn’t matter about ‘fault’, only the end result of raped or not-raped. From a consequentialist standpoint, I’m having a hard time being outraged by the policeman’s comments. At the same time, I think that a ‘slut walk’ is a good idea because of the above, but I don’t think that it should have occurred as the result of a protest against the comments made by an individual policeman.
The following uses a layman’s grasp of Bob Altemeyer’s research and may ignore other relevant psychology.
From what I can tell, then, the greatest risk of rape within a given environment—indeed the greatest risk of any violence directed against traditionally low-status people—comes from two groups. The larger of the two tends to think in a relatively rational manner. Members of this group see themselves as maximizing what they perceive as benefit to themselves. The rapists among them judge, often correctly, that they can get away with it. They know a woman who reports rape will, empirically, have to face embarrassing questions and accusations of sluttiness regardless of her behavior. (After the fact one can always find ways that someone might have theoretically avoided rape; other women will tend to look for such ways in order to distinguish themselves from the victim and reduce their own fear and/or increase their own status.) A police officer using the word “slutty” to describe rape victims provides further evidence of this.
The smaller but more violent group resembles the first in certain ways but likes to think of itself as traditionally ‘moral’. As you might expect, this group tends to think less rationally. Its members tend to get the poor thinking and self-righteousness of those Altemeyer calls “authoritarian followers” without their tendency to follow the law. They value agreement with the community as a goal in itself (more than others do, I mean). If they think they see authority figures saying that a certain woman has broken the rules and deserves condemnation, they will not hear anything that follows about the woman not deserving X. Or rather, they will think that part applies to other people and not themselves, not the courageous people who need to enforce the rules because nobody else will do it.
We can therefore expect meta-condemnation of traditional bigotry and all that resembles it to reduce ‘traditional’ violence in general and rape in particular. Now the numbers I found on this topic confuse me, but we do have some evidence of good results from feminists’ fabled ‘lack of humor’.
This event was in response to a police officer advising a group of college students. The subject was safety techniques/ways to avoid danger. The officer recommended that some of the women walking home avoid dressing in a ‘slutty’ manner, or something similar to that.
The students reacted to this in protest because they thought that the policeman was saying that victims who dressed a certain way were complicit in provoking others to rape them. This is obviously terrible and wrong. Victims should not be blamed for what happened to them.
However, if I were a potential victim I would minimize risk through:
Dressing conservatively
Walking in a group
Having a cell phone
Carrying mace, etc.
None of the above carry with them the implication that doing otherwise provokes people into rape, and by so doing makes the rape the victim’s ‘fault’, but doing the above minimizes the chances of a rape occurring.
Why is it wrong to tell people on an individual basis to not dress ‘slutty’ in order to maximize their personal safety? It doesn’t matter about ‘fault’, only the end result of raped or not-raped. From a consequentialist standpoint, I’m having a hard time being outraged by the policeman’s comments. At the same time, I think that a ‘slut walk’ is a good idea because of the above, but I don’t think that it should have occurred as the result of a protest against the comments made by an individual policeman.
[Edited for formatting]
It sounds similar enough to blame to provoke the same response.
The following uses a layman’s grasp of Bob Altemeyer’s research and may ignore other relevant psychology.
From what I can tell, then, the greatest risk of rape within a given environment—indeed the greatest risk of any violence directed against traditionally low-status people—comes from two groups. The larger of the two tends to think in a relatively rational manner. Members of this group see themselves as maximizing what they perceive as benefit to themselves. The rapists among them judge, often correctly, that they can get away with it. They know a woman who reports rape will, empirically, have to face embarrassing questions and accusations of sluttiness regardless of her behavior. (After the fact one can always find ways that someone might have theoretically avoided rape; other women will tend to look for such ways in order to distinguish themselves from the victim and reduce their own fear and/or increase their own status.) A police officer using the word “slutty” to describe rape victims provides further evidence of this.
The smaller but more violent group resembles the first in certain ways but likes to think of itself as traditionally ‘moral’. As you might expect, this group tends to think less rationally. Its members tend to get the poor thinking and self-righteousness of those Altemeyer calls “authoritarian followers” without their tendency to follow the law. They value agreement with the community as a goal in itself (more than others do, I mean). If they think they see authority figures saying that a certain woman has broken the rules and deserves condemnation, they will not hear anything that follows about the woman not deserving X. Or rather, they will think that part applies to other people and not themselves, not the courageous people who need to enforce the rules because nobody else will do it.
We can therefore expect meta-condemnation of traditional bigotry and all that resembles it to reduce ‘traditional’ violence in general and rape in particular. Now the numbers I found on this topic confuse me, but we do have some evidence of good results from feminists’ fabled ‘lack of humor’.