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"Did you lock it?"
A common trait among my social circle used to be that everyone shared an obsession with bicycles. Few of us had or even wanted a car in the city, and having everyone on two wheels made it much easier to roam down our house party itinerary. Between all of us we had a deep well of metis to draw from; everything from which wheels to buy to the easiest way to make derailleur adjustments. We were naturally attached to our steeds and none of us wanted our bicycles to pull a disappearing act, and so we discussed ways to keep safe.
U-locks were ubiquitous and we'd warn each other of the brands that were still susceptible to the infamous pen trick. Some of us of the more paranoid variety installed locking skewers to keep expensive saddles or wheels latched in place. We'd even caution each other to check bolts anchoring bike racks to the ground, since the U-lock was useless if the whole setup could be lifted away. It wasn't possible to reach full immunity but you never need to be the fastest gazelle to escape the cheetah, just faster than the slowest one.
Naturally, if anyone ever suffered the ultimate calamity of having their ride stolen, we would ask if it was locked and how. There was nothing sadistic about our inquiries. Our questions were problem-solving endeavors saturated with sympathy; we wanted to know what went wrong precisely to help others avoid the same fate. Maybe the local thieves discovered some new exploit in our standard security apparatus, or maybe this was just an opportunistic snatch while they left their bike unlocked outside during a quick peek inside.
"If you do X, you're likely to get Y" is the format to an unremarkable factual observation. "If you leave your bike outside unlocked, you're likely to have it stolen" is just reality and, on its own, is a statement that carries no moral judgment. If the victim wasn't previously aware of this correlation, they are now, and are better equipped to evade a rerun.
The parallels to my actual point are probably getting obvious by now.
Kathleen Stock charges right into deconstructing the surprisingly enduring ritual of affixing the "victim-blaming" reprimand to any advice aimed at reducing the risk of sexual assault. Now, in case anyone needs the clarification: I believe that rape is way worse than bicycle theft. Nevertheless the principles at play here remain the same:
Consider the victim of the unattended bike snatch again. Imparting wisdom on the implacable chain of consequences is about the most compassionate thing you could do. They can choose to accept that advice, and if it is sound then they'll be met with the disastrous outcome of...not having their bike stolen. Or they can choose to reject that advice and adhere to the mantra that instead of putting the onus on cyclists not to have their bikes stolen, we should teach thieves not to thieve. In which case, best of luck with completely overhauling the nature of man; here's hoping their bicycle budget rivals the GDP of a small country to withstand the inevitable and wholly predictable hits.
If your dad or friend tells you to cover your drink at parties to avoid being raped, they are looking out for you and are a good ally.
If the chief of police responds to questions about a rise in sexual assault rates in the city and says 'women should be covering their drinks at bars' and then does nothing else to address the problem through their office, they are blaming victims instead of doing their job.
The difference, as often happens in culture war issues, is between individual-level advice and society-levels policies.
The types of accusations of 'victim blaming' that you are talking about here, tend to happen when one person thinks it's their responsibility to give individual-level advice, and someone else thinks they had a duty to make societal-level policy proposals (or implementations) instead.
Except, there is little police can do to address this problem other than take reports and hope the half life of the pills hasn't run. There are some crimes police pretense deters, and others where its impractical. Police can really deter DUI's by placing a checkpoint right outside the parking lot of a bar, or near a string of bars and making that checkpoint well known well in advance. People will just Uber. They aren't well positioned to stop date rape and roofie-rape. Those activities occur inside of private property and, frankly, the behavior is subtle. The people best positioned to address this problem are the women themselves and their friends/chaperones. Police can attempt to pick up the pieces for you afterwards, but rape is a very hard crime to investigate and prove in court compared to murder, assault, and other major felonies.
Well, I disagree, but my standard position here is that neither of us are going to be actual experts on this topic, and what I'm advocating for is for the people who are to be given all the resources they need to do as much as they can. If they say they can do nothing then I'll be very surprised, but ok.
However, impressions I have on this topic as a non-expert:
-There's always stories going around about such-and-such a city has a bajillion untested rape kits, and whenever someone tests a bunch they find matches indicating serial offenders that the cops could have looked for.
-Ad absurdum argument, if you enhance the penalty for any crime to being slowly tortured to death in the public square over a series of months, that will shift the incentives for that crime enough to reduce its prevalence. I don't think we should do the ad absurdum case, but yes, on the margins the police can do things to disincentivize crimes through threat of punishment.
-Very many women report being reluctant to go to police out of fear that they will be dismissed or treated with suspicion. Police departments do not always make it clear how to get a rape kit or optimize procedures to get one immediately or even educate the public enough about their existence. There is much the police could do to encourage reporting and evidence collection.
-Do tester strips for teh relevant drugs exist? Could police distribute them to bars? If not, they could at least run public outreach programs to educate bartenders on the signs of those drugs being used, how to confirm/deescalate those situations or get police involved quickly, etc.
-I actually care about sexual assaults against sex workers, something that police are notoriously uninterested or unhelpful in prosecuting.
-Etc.
I don't think police can stop all crime from happening, but I do think that even for difficult cases like this they can have reasonably powerful effects on the margins.
What exactly are you disagreeing with? My information comes from working with police as a states attorney for a period of time and working as clerk for a judge. Sex crime is very hard to investigate because a lot of it looks like normal courtship just a little on steroids. Which also is often non-criminal. Also, testing strips exist, but mass distribution wouldn't work, they'd expire just like PH strips do.
The reluctance thing is probably real, but most police I've interacted with say this is victim led. The police, unfortunately, are very resource constrained, so complaining witnesses need to be on their game, or the police don't have the resources to extract info from them and follow up. People look at prosecutors having 99% conviction records and don't look any further, they have that because they reject 90% of their cases that aren't simple possession. I've seen people blow 3x the legal limit and get off on a DUI simply by being persistent and thus only 3 of the 4 necessary witnesses are in court on the day of trial.
Imagine the work needed to prosecute these kind of cases. First, our victim needs to come in quickly to report to preserve the evidence. Often they do not. Second we need techs actually capable of doing so. Often they are not on hand. Third we need to test that. Often that is not available. Fourth they need to be confident in their story. In almost all cases, they are not. Fifth we need to get corroborating witnesses or a confession. The former are rare, as are the latter. Sixth we need to assemble all this into a coherent case. Often it falls apart. One easy fail is the verification of physical evidence fails. Or the girl herself collapses under cross.
What is the solution? IMO it is that consent is not a good mediator for sexual encounters, never has been, and likely never will be. Instead we should use a visible public acts standard. Things like marriage, shutting a door, etc are should be what is important in sexual offense law, not subjective things like consent and intoxication.
The claim that there's not much police could do, even in principle, to fight sex crimes.
And it feels like your response here points out about a half a dozen ways in which we could give the police more funding, change the priorities o prosecutors, and do public outreach to help victims come forward sooner with better evidence, which would let the police do more.
Those are the kinds of things I'm advocating.
What exactly would be those half dozen ways? All those steps that are hard to do will cost a LOT to improve the situation at each step by even 5%.
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