America’s ‘Top Criminal Profiler’ Says Lock Up Your Daughters If You Want To Keep Them Safe
You would think America’s “top criminal profiler” would have some interesting insight on safety, rather than resort to the tried and true method of victim-blaming. You would be wrong. Pat Brown, CEO of the Sexual Homicide Exchange, and television’s favorite go-to criminal profiler has penned a book titled, How To Save Your Daughter’s Life: Straight Talk for Parents from America’s Top Criminal Profiler. It should have been titled, Lock Up Your Daughter’s Until They Are Legal Adults Because They Can’t Be Trusted To Make Decisions For Themselves And Will Put Themselves In Harm’s Way.
From Maclean’s:
Raising her daughter, Brown did everything in her power to keep the girl safe from the perverts and psychopaths, and the drugs and depression that can ruin a girl’s life. She home-schooled all three of her kids and didn’t let her daughter date unchaperoned until she was 18.
This is great advice. Let’s not teach our children how to function in the world, let’s teach them that anything that could befall them is obviously their fault, which is why we’ll be keeping them locked up until they are 18. Let’s not take years of experience as a criminal profiler and use it to educate our sons about not victimizing women. Let’s instead drive home the point that women are in control of their own safety – and the best way to guarantee it is to not get into relationships or put ourselves in situations where “wild animals” can cause us harm:
To put it bluntly, talking about the perpetrator may be fascinating and educational, and we can rail about changing the system, locking these monsters up, and preventing them from being created in the first place, but it isn’t going to do much to save your daughter’s life today. It is like this: Suppose a young girl goes out on the African plain alone for a walk in nature. She gets eaten by a lion. Should I speak about how bad the lion is? How he shouldn’t have eaten the girl? Should I go talk to that lion and other lions and tell them not to eat people? Are those lions going to pay me any mind?
That is an actual excerpt from the Introduction to her book. Yikes.
Brown encourages parents to involve young girls in after-school hobbies like knitting and stamp collecting… Another way to keep a girl safe is to delay the milestones. If she drives at 16, she’s more likely to crash into a tree while texting at the wheel. Make her wait to get her driver’s licence and then drive shotgun with her everywhere she goes for the next year.
Delay milestones? Brown thinks if you let your daughter date before she’s 18, you’ll be a grandmother before she gets to college. I can’t believe years of criminal research would bring this woman to the conclusion that teaching your daughter to be an independent, alert adult is tantamount to setting her free in the “African plain” with raw meat taped to her body.
I’m sure she’s seen a lot of sick shit, and I imagine that jades a person. I think her work has made it impossible for her not to see the world as a sick, scary place. That’s understandable. But I think she should leave the child-rearing advice to the professionals – and give our daughters a little more credit.
(photo: Jandrie Lombard/ Shutterstock.com)
