Slut Walks
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There is a new movement afoot which is likely to change how we understand self-defense. As I have stated before, self-defense is a new idea, it is not instinctive. Self-defense is a notion which has emerged from a particular culture at a particular time and it is not yet fully formed.The new development is something called a Slut Walk. A Slut Walk is a street procession in which women wear whatever clothes they want and demand that the streets be safe enough for them to do so at anytime, under any conditions.
In a talk I had with Sgt. Rory Miller a few months back, he commented that as a community we get the crime we tolerate.
Here is the money quote from the article:
The protests began after a police officer told students at Toronto’s York University in January that if women want to avoid rape, they shouldn't dress like “sluts.” (If you thought the days of “she was asking for it” were long gone, guess again.)
Heather Jarvis, a student in Toronto and a co-founder of SlutWalk, explained that the officer’s comments struck her and her co-organizers as so preposterous and damaging that they demanded action. “We were fed up and pissed off, and we wanted to do something other than just be angry,” she said. Bucking the oft-repeated notion that young women are apathetic to feminism, they organized. What Jarvis hoped would be a march of at least 100 turned out to be a rally of more than 3,000 — some marchers with “slut” scrawled across their bodies, others with signs reading “My dress is not a yes” or “Slut pride.”
That all sounds great to me. But I can't help thinking that the whole thing was started by a misunderstanding. What the police officer probably intended, was to explain how to avoid being raped from the assumption that we live in a dangerous crime filled world. Not the assumption that we should tolerate it. What he most likely intended to convey was very basic advise like 'always pack your own parachute,' because it's your life on the line. If you get stabbed, and the knife is just sticking out of your chest, leave it there because pulling it out may cause more damage. I bet this officer also told them not to hitch-hike.
And I might leave it right there, except I've just been in Tokyo where a single woman can go out to a bar at night by herself and get so drunk that she gets lost walking home by herself--without it even occurring to anyone that she is doing something risky. We get the crime we tolerate.
Slut Walks may actually represent the influence of Japanese society on America. Then again maybe it is the internal dialog we have been having about women in the Islamic world being forced to wear Burkas and such.
All of this represents a difficult challenge for the theory of self-defense. Self-defense is justified if a threat has:
- Intent
- Means
- Opportunity and....
- You can demonstrate "Preclusion," which means that you can explain why you did what you did and not something else--such that a reasonable person in a similar situation might believe that they would do the same thing.
If a jury believes that it isn't safe to go out in certain neighborhoods after 2am they are assuming that there are men cruising around with 'intent,' and 'means.' The jury could ask, "Why didn't you take away these evil predators 'opportunity' by staying indoors?" When women are accused of risky behavior (ie. dressing like a slut) it is a challenge to the 'preclusion' part of the self-defense equation. The answer to the jury's question should be this, "I did take away those evil predators 'opportunity' to do evil, I shot them. I had to shoot them because this community tolerates them."
Support your local Slut Walk!
(Mexico gets in the game)
