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Notes -
Or more to the point - does an individual woman following all the advice decrease the total number of sexual assaults by one, or does it just drive their potential assailant to find a different victim that night?
My strongman for the blue button take is that telling women to police their behavior will push the assaults down the chain towards the most vulnerable targets, but does nothing to decrease the overall number of assaults, because it doesn't decrease the number or incentives of potential assailants and it will never be sufficient to actually make it impossible for them to find any victim at all.
If you are a concerned father and actually would prefer that someone else get raped instead of your daughter, give her that advice for sure. But if you're in a position that has a responsibility to society in general, you should be pursuing avenues that decrease teh total number of assaults, and telling women to police their behavior doesn't accomplish that.
Of course, that take can't be 100% true, there is some marginal effect where if a large enough percentage of women police all of their behavior strictly enough at all times it would actually leave few enough opportunities that rates would go down. But the question is whether that means 'everyone has to war burkas all the time and can never be in public unless escorted by a male relative', or if you get meaningful effects at very mild levels of self-policing.
My intuition is no, until you get to really debilitating and universal self-policing the criminals will still find plenty of opportunities and overall rates won't be affected much. And requiring that level of restrictions on women's behavior is holding them responsible for preventing their own victimization (instead of trying to solve it with like law enforcement or w/e), which is semi-reasonably labeled 'victim blaming'.
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