– Blaming the victim for her own murder —
I have paid some attention to the media chatter about Imette St. Guillen, the young graduate student who was murdered here in New York City ( I used to teach at the college where she attended, in a different department). There are many angles to cover, but since this is a blog on Fatherhood I’ll just stick to one topic.
Recently, some talk radio idiots were arguing that it was her fault for allowing herself to get drunk and be out late. Scarily enough, some of the pig-heads of Fox News actually sounded like voices of reason in their calls not to blame St. Guillen. Bill “phone-sex-with-my-producer” O’Reilly was chatting with Geraldo Rivera about it, and both agreed that while St. Guillen made a mistake, it was unfair to blame her for her own horrific end.
That said, here’s a comment by Rivera on the subject of making a “lapse in judgment”: Rivera said that “nothing good happens after 2:00 in the morning” (this from the transcript). Such a statement does imply that the young woman should have been more careful.
I’m sure Camille Paglia is saying something similar on CNN or wherever. She definitely believes that masculinity is by its nature as destructive as it is creative, and that women have to use common sense and not go into places where they know they are likely to be attacked.
The assumption behind all of this is: MEN ARE PIGS.
That’s right. Men are pigs. And frankly, I find it insulting.
I don’t mean to say it’s not entirely true, of course. I know a lot of men who are jerks. And sure, most violent crimes are committed by men, although random acts of murder are not as likely as those committed by men involved in some serious way with their victims. But that does not mean that we should accept that “it’s a jungle out there” and blame women for being out in bars at two in the morning.
It is, as anyone can see, another double-standard in action. Why are we not calling for men not to be out after two in the morning raping and killing women?
Apparently, it’s okay for men to be out in the wee hours of the morning looking for women who will have sex with them – and it’s okay for those men to rape and kill any woman who might deny them sex – but a woman who’s out at that same time has no right to expect that she can get home safely. That’s nuts.
In claiming that Imette St. Guillen should not have put herself in the position where she could end up bound and gagged and left for dead on the Belt Parkway, people are accepting that homicidal lunatics run about New York City and that we should simply AVOID them by not being there.
Homicidal lunacy is NOT like the weather, people. We can DO something about it. Whatever your views on what to do about crime, we can find a way to make city streets safer 24/7. We have to make it not acceptable for men to think that they can treat women the way they do. That’s what can be changed.
Do I want my daughters to go out to bars until two in the morning? Of course not. I’d prefer they stay at home until I select their husbands for them when they graduate high school, but that’s not going to happen, either. I know there is no way to stop these kinds of awful attacks completely, but we’re not going to help our daughters by doing nothing.
Yes, I’ll give them karate classes. Yes, I’ll warn them not to drink from glasses they didn’t see themselves when the drinks were being poured. Yes, I’ll harass them by cell phone. But how about we stop making jerks think it’s okay to beat up women? Could we try a little harder on that score, please?