Police association chief Dirk Peglow has stirred debate with his advice to women to avoid relationships with men for safety's sake. But his provocative tip is not without reason, as statistics show.
As I indirectly pointed out with my first paragraph, even if we don’t dispute the choice of this specific overgeneralistic segmentation of people to talk about violence, it’s still intellectually dishonest: men aren’t specifically more violent towards women than towards other men.
In fact the statistics show that men are the main victims of violence committed by men.
Further, to me this whole “advice”, especially coming from an important police official, has a stink of “don’t dress slutty to avoid getting raped”.
It should be about reducing criminality, not about telling potential victims to be less free with their own behaviors (how typical of the German authorities) so that they’re less likelly to be victims, and guess what’s important in reducing criminality: narrowing your scope to the most likely criminal element so as to focus more resources on them.
because it’s low hanging fruit and easy stereotyping that plays into people’s irrational fears. people like having their biases confirmed.
the social script in western societies is largely ‘woman good, man bad’. and westerners generally agree with that that bias.
As I indirectly pointed out with my first paragraph, even if we don’t dispute the choice of this specific overgeneralistic segmentation of people to talk about violence, it’s still intellectually dishonest: men aren’t specifically more violent towards women than towards other men.
In fact the statistics show that men are the main victims of violence committed by men.
Further, to me this whole “advice”, especially coming from an important police official, has a stink of “don’t dress slutty to avoid getting raped”.
It should be about reducing criminality, not about telling potential victims to be less free with their own behaviors (how typical of the German authorities) so that they’re less likelly to be victims, and guess what’s important in reducing criminality: narrowing your scope to the most likely criminal element so as to focus more resources on them.
That’s what’s behind the main point of my post.