With a title like that, you know Scottie is opening a big ol' can of worms.
To catch everyone up, a Canadiaan policeman got in a teensy bit of trouble when he advised students not to dress like sluts, in order to avoid being victimised. This has sparked a wave of protests around the world which, for some unknown reason have attracted a lot of media attention. Please do not respond in an angry fashion to this post until you have read the entire thing.
A picture of some of the protesters in the UK - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13739876
The protests are to draw attention to what they see as a culture of blaming the victim.
I hope to avoid getting myself in a whole mess of trouble, but here goes.
I think that a policemen giving students the advice of
"Avoid walking alone, especially at nighttime. Doing this will decrease your chances of getting raped."
Is perfectly reasonable advice, and I suspect that the vast majority of people will agree that this is helpful advice, and does not constitute victim blaming.
If we phrase the above slightly differently (the contrapositive to be precise)
"Walking alone, especially at night will increase your chances of getting raped.
This still seems fairly reasonable to me, although its phrasing is such that it more resembles 'victim blaming'
How about a policeman telling a group of students
"Dressing in clothing that covers the majority of your body has been shown to lead to a decrease in the chance that you will get raped"
Assuming that it is true, and there is evidence to support this, is that a reasonable thing to be saying? In my view, it is. I'm interested to hear from all of you.
Then we get to the final thing, which is what the policeman actually said, that the students should "avoid dressing like sluts" to avoid being victimised.
This last one is what is causing all the commotion, but in actual fact, it says the same thing as the previous sentance. Again, they are contrapositives. In my opinion, if the policeman had been slightly more tactful (using the word slut is never a good start) then he could have got his point across, without causing all the uproar. I do not believe that the policeman believes that it is people's fault if they get raped. There is a big difference between telling females that their actions can increase or decrease their chances of being raped (which is what this policeman's job was to do), and saying it is their fault.
So VGChartz, give me your opinion. Do we have a culture of Victim Blaming? Was this policeman a part of that? Or did he simply make a poor choice of words in order to communicate a very complex point to people.