Victim Blaming: Not Just for Poor People

[Trigger warning for violence, including sexual assault]

As regular readers may have noticed, I have a love-hate relationship with the New York Times. One of the things I miss about being a Times subscriber is the feeling of being a fly on the wall at the meeting of a plutocratic secret society. Advertisements for watches that cost more than my car. Advertisements for shoes that cost more than my car. (Have you seen my car?) Recipes that require one to go down to Dean & Deluca's flagship store to buy two pounds of Kashmiri saffron. (Most. Expensive. Tuna Casserole. Ever.)

What I'm trying to say is that I'm not shocked when I run across articles like this one, which advises the super-rich how to keep their kids safe at college. The uber-wealthy need newspapers too.

I'm not highlighting this article to have cheap laughs at the expense of wealth, although:

For prominent families, the costs of a security plan to reduce these risks are part of life, but for most affluent families, such security is prohibitively expensive — even though their children may be just as susceptible to crime.

So you're saying crime isn't just a problem for the super-rich, but also for the very rich? lolgasp! Fetch me the soiled over-stuffed pillows that serve as my fainting couch!

The article is dripping with the insinuation that rich folks are targets, and must do whatever it takes to protect themselves from the others. I'm one of the others, and some dude recently broke the window of a neighbor's house, stepped over her mother who was sleeping on her couch at the time, and swiped a bunch of stuff.

The police said that there wasn't much they could do, and if my neighbor (ahem, ex-neighbor) didn't want that kind of shit happening, maybe she shouldn't live in such a crappy [poor? largely black? LGBT-infested?] neighborhood. (FWIW, we're working on that with the Chief of Police.) But just so you know, Mr. Sullivan, my local police department thinks folks like me are a likely target of crime.

I don't suspect Mr. Sullivan disagrees with me on this point. I think he's just talking about crimes that matter.

Then there's the article's discussion of sexual assault...

As far as I see it, the article seems to talk about property crime and sexual assault as if they're essentially different versions of the same thing, which, uh, I find problematic.

As for rape prevention, the problem with sexual assault is not that daughters of affluent parents are naïve. Rapists are the problem. And what of the sons of the affluent? Who, precisely, are these rapists praying upon naïve rich young ladies? Might some of these rapists also come from affluence? One way to prevent rape would be to teach one's sons to not treat women's bodies like their own personal property. That would certainly be cheaper than hiring a $41,000 personal safety consultant [TW: See Liss' discussion of the limits of self-defense training here].

Perpetuating the idea that rape victims have done something wrong, something naïve, something ill-advised is perpetuating the rape culture. Certainly, rape culture is not the bastion of the affluent. However, I wonder what these families who have millions of dollars have done to make society safer. You can't consult yourself out of rape. Instead, one must strive to create a world where people respect the value and autonomy of their fellow human beings.