Well, we've all heard the phrase "don't blame the victim". As in, if someone gets raped, blaming the victim would be "She wore a miniskirt so she was asking for it" or "It's his fault for getting so drunk." It is pretty clear that retroactively blaming the victim of a crime is stupid and cruel and takes the onus off where it belongs, which is on the criminal.

However, I have encountered people who think that giving people any cautionary advice is also "blaming the victim". Like, if you tell a teenager "Don't let your drink out of your sight at parties, someone might drug you", or "Don't get so drunk that you don't know what you're doing," then you're implying that it's their own fault if they get raped or robbed. Isn't that warped logic? How is telling people to use their common sense blaming the victim?

I don't think telling people to be cautious is the same thing as blaming them if they didn't take your advice and something happened because of it. They might have presented the opportunity by being foolish and were thus preyed upon because of it, but if someone puts a drug in a girl's drink because she wasn't cautious enough doesn't automatically lay the blame on the girl's feet. The blame should still be placed on the person who was vile enough to commit such an act in the first place. If the criminal wasn't willing to commit the crime, the crime would never have taken place at all.

Apart from some hipshots, where someone sees some general pattern and fires off the standard triade, which happens all too often.

It is not always easy, to define where the line is between beeing negligent and being paranoid.

Are girls, who don't watch their drinks negligent? Or are thoose who constantly watch their drinks paranoid?

I never did any checking of data (and i don't really know where to begin with that), but drugs in drinks tales did always strike me as that kind of tales, that have much traction, not because they happen that often, but because they make you helpless in an everyday situation, which means they hit you home more emotionally.

Not getting so drunk, that you no longer know, what you do, is actually a good advice, though also there i think about accidents first.

And then there is the idea, that being scantily dressed and female is negligent, where i have sofar not heared a consistent explaination, why this should be, that is in line with what you hear about rapes in the media, but it still gets told as obvious.

I don't agree entirely with these people you've encountered, but I do think that sometimes the cautionary advice goes too far and can skirt the line with victim blaming. If only she hadn't been drunk. If only she had watched her drink. And so on. Give a list of rules for someone to follow, and you run the risk of the victim being blamed if they take even the smallest detour.

For example, there was a how to not get raped check-list that wandered the Facebook statuses of my friends recently. The checklist, which you can find on Snopes, is almost totally bunk. But one can imagine someone nodding sagely after hearing of a rape and saying "That's terrible. If only she had short hair..." In one set of comments below the traveling Facebook note, a woman claimed to never go grocery shopping in the morning because of this list. And none of the tips are likely to prevent rape! It's literally like rubbing a rabbit's foot and whistling to the four corners of the earth while also limiting what you're willing to do in life in an effort to not be raped.

Again, it's not a bad idea to give simple cautions to watch for - watch your drink, come to and leave a party with ALL of your friends, lock your car door to prevent theft, don't go outside during a rainstorm. But it's good to remember when giving this advice that frankly, it won't prevent a determined disaster from happening - roofies aren't needed to rape, often friends are the rapists, a person with a rock can still get in the car, and sometimes lightening will hit the house in such a way that if you're by a window, in a shower or near a wall you'll be just as shocked as a person standing in an open field holding up a wire hanger.

To further expand on weatherwaxes point, a while ago i read an interview with a muslim woman, who had worn an heard scarf all her life and at some point decided to change her ways. She had said, that she had been quite suprised, that basically nothing changed and she had not been suddenly subjected to lots of unwanted sexual attention. Not a big suprise for a westener, but if you are afraid of something, you don't check if your precautions actually work, by not implementing them and see what happens.

Some western sex crime preventions seem to follow similiar patterns.

As a sidenote, a female friend of mine had recently explained, why she can't get her head around womens parking spaces. It's like you have a big sign saying "Here you will find timid women, travelling alone".

Womens'... parking... spaces.

Yeah, that seems like a really bad idea.

As for the main topic?

I think a lot of it is that it's not what's needed at that moment. No matter how well-intentioned and accurate it is, the timing is wrong. She needs support, not advice, right then.

Another part is when the advice would curtail normal behavior. It's demanding that people live in fear.

Another part is when the advice is phrased so that it implies assumptions about what the victim did that are/may be false.

And that's assuming that the comment was meant well.

I guess people differ over whether getting black-out drunk is a normal activity that should not be curtailed.

That's not one of the examples I'm thinking of. More of the 'miniskirt' case, or the not letting your drink out of sight even for a moment, at a party that's not particularly sketchy.

I think it's only 'Blaming the victim' if you try to take the responsibility away from the attacker.

Also I think it's reasonable to make a distinction between acting in a way that's obviously dangerous and acting in a way that, if all human beings are awful, is dangerous.

If women are expected to act in a way such that if all men in the world want to rape them, they will get raped, they ought to lock themselves in their apartments with a gun pointed at the door for their entire lives. You can't live your life in fear of awful people, and if those awful people hurt you, it's totally on them.

I wasn't referring to your post, per se. It's just that recently our minister for security reacted to a police report that rape cases were on the rise by noting that alcohol consumption was a factor in most of the cases and advising women not to get too drunk. Needless to say, this statement did not go over well with local women's groups.

This was an impolitic thing to say, but in general, not getting too drunk is a pretty good idea. (It's not just women who are at risk of becoming crime victims - after a night of heavy drinking, my brother once woke up face down in a strange bar, with no wallet or phone, and a swollen lip. The last thing he remembered was his friends putting him into a taxi alone.)

I think this is what people far too often assume is being done, as if blame is some kind of additive thing, whereby more blame for one actor is less blame for another - but that's not how it works. If I lend someone my Ipad*, and it is stolen from the back seat of their unlocked car, where it sat in plain view; then they are more to blame than if it was taken from inside their locked boot. The responsibility of the theif remains the same in both cases though - they are 100% responsible for the crime, despite the fact that my idiot friend is also responsible in the first case.


*I don't have an Ipad

If a men becomes victim of a crime and survives, he has a story to tell his grandchildren. If it happens to a woman, she has a trauma that scars her for life.

This attitude is there and it is quite annoying. And most gender specific crime avoidance advice will be recieved that way.

Erm, I think that depends on the crime, doesn't it? I can laugh about the time I was burgled several years ago, but I can hardly imagine any man telling his grandchildren about the time he was raped in the bathroom of a sleazy bar.

Granted it does not work with actual rapes.

But something like getting manhandled by thugs intent on bullying. Getting in a fight and loosing it, sustaining some injuries. And (while not a crime) getting smash drunk and waking up next to someone revolting.

I think a great deal of the psychological effect of a crime is how your mind perceives the likelihood of it happening again.

That's a big part of why rape is so scarring. If I'm doing something obviously dangerous and I get hurt, or if I intentionally get drunk and wake up with somebody unappealing, I can think 'I'll never do that again' and none of the fear is transferred to my everyday life.

When somebody is raped, the fear that it may happen again is transferred to everyday life. I remember when I was in college there was a woman who was raped when she went jogging at night, and I overheard people saying 'She shouldn't have been out alone in the dark.' If a woman can't go jogging at night what else can't she do? Should a woman then be afraid of any situation where she is remotely vulnerable?

It is true, if a man is attacked he's a warrior, if a woman is attacked she's a victim. That's why crimes against women are underreported, because victimhood is a 'Demonstration of low value' which will make other people think less of them. It's a really sucky aspect of our culture.