In January, a Toronto police officer inadvertently stepped on a feminist landmine while conducting a crime prevention seminar at York University. What prompted it was a spate of late night attacks against women walking around on campus (which are continuing). Among the preventative measures discussed, Constable Michael Sanguinetti recommended that women not walk around alone at night ‘provocatively dressed’.
Sounds like common sense advice to avoid rape?
Not if you’re a feminist. The usual suspects promptly seized upon that comment as an attack by the police on women’s freedom. To drive the point home, a ‘slut walk’ was promptly organized in Toronto, which was then copied across various American cities, as this MSNBC article recounts.
Confusing practical advice with moral pronouncements is commonplace in the left’s knee-jerk grievance mongering ‘dialogue’.
To see why Constable Sanguinetti was not ‘blaming the victim’, lets reframe his advice in terms of a nonsexual crime. Let’s say I want to drive my Cadillac Escalade into downtown Toronto and park it late at night in Regent Park (a bad neighbourhood). I leave the doors unlocked, the windows rolled down and the keys in the ignition. I can do that. I have a right to do that. As far as I can tell, it’s even guaranteed by the constitution. And furthermore, I vigorously defend my right to do that.
But at the same time, when I report it stolen, the reporting officer has a perfect right to tell me I am an idiot. And if I ask Constable Sanguinetti about the advisability of this course of action at a community safety meeting, I expect him to tell me that it is not a very good idea. This is what the good constable did at York University in January, except the crime was rape not auto theft. But regardless of the crime under discussion, he is no more taking the side of the rapist than he is taking the side of the auto thief. (Psst..this example is adapted from one given by Camille Paglia from an article of her’s on the same subject.)
The police force would be blaming the victim only if they charged victims of sexual assault with lewd conduct - as they do in Saudi Arabia, or as the police in Canada do when they charge gun owners with unsafe storage who report their guns stolen.
All of this would be common sense if it weren’t for the fact that the left aggressively pushes a grievance agenda that is completely divorced from reality. And because their advice (‘go ahead and dress like a slut and walk around at night alone because you have a God given right to do so’) is so dangerous, it is precisely the targets of their compassion who suffer the most.
For if a young woman finds herself alone at night in an underground parking garage with a rapist, her sacred human rights will do her precious little good against the deranged pervert now confronting her. In this case, Constable Sanguinetti could help her a lot more than a community organizer would be able to. Of course, a close second best would be a snub-nosed 38 in her purse, but I suspect that the activists who are so strenuously championing her right to dress provocatively wherever she wants to would be just as adamant that she do so only while in a state of complete helplessness.