The date rape debate

Five or so years ago I attended a District 10 budget town hall meeting, hosted by then City Councilman Bill Blaydes that featured a presentation David Brown who was then leading the Dallas Police Department's Northeast Substation. He spoke about crime statistics in the area and said the top crimes were property thefts, items stolen from homes or parked cars. He said property owners could help prevent many of these crimes simply by locking the doors of their cars and homes, not leaving garage doors open when no one was in the garage, and not leaving valuable items on car seats in vacant cars. Made sense to me and to this day I have followed that advice. But I never for one minute thought that Chief Brown was blaming property owners for property thefts.

During the City Council's Public Safety Committee meeting Monday, now Police Chief David Brown was again talking about crime statistics, specifically sexual assaults and said date rapes often occur when scumbag, cowardly sexual predators (my words, not his) take advantage of women who are more vulnerable than they might ordinarily be in the company of these gutless vultures they don't know that well because the women in question consumed too much alcohol. Unfortunately, what Chief Brown said is undoubtedly 100 per cent accurate.

But even more unfortunately, in an example of irresponsible reporting, Andrea Grimes of the Dallas Observer, paraphrased Chief Brown's comments in an entirely different way: "And we all know what the solution to date rape is: getting women to stop drinking, because that is what causes date rape. Not dudes raping women, but women drinking."

Then Bethany Anderson of D Magazine, who did not see Brown's comments but only Grimes's totally misleading interpretation of them, added in a blog entry headlined Dallas PD Chief' Solution for Date Rape: Women Quiet Drinking added: "So date rape solved? Don’t drink if you have two x chromosomes. Forget the fact that the drunk cannot consent to sex, and nonconsensual sex = rape."

I will give Anderson credit, however, for somewhat backing off her comments later in the day. In a subsequent blog entry headlined A Mea Culpa, of Sorts, she wrote: "I do think that the resulting discussion was, by the whole, a good leaping off point for exactly the sort of thing Chief Brown said we needed – more preventive measures that educate both men and women."  She wrote the followup after looking at a video of the chief's appearance before the committee and not just on Grimes' erroneous interpretation of that appearance.

I wished we lived in a perfect world, but we all know that we don't. There are places in this city, many of them establishments that serve alcohol, where I will not go very late at night out of concern for my own safety. I wish that was not true, but, unfortunately, it is. The definition of rape makes me ashamed of my own gender. I don't own a gun or a rifle or any other weapon designed solely for killing another human being, but if someone sexually assaulted my granddaughter I would get one pretty damn quickly and use it pretty damn effectively. I also know, however, that, as she get older, her father is going to educate her on ways to avoid dangerous situations, such as what Chief Brown said at Monday's Public Safety Committee meeting. I hope Andrea Grimes doesn't object to my son empowering his own daughter.