Stop giving boys this advice
Louise Pryke/ The Conversation
“You’ve got one job here, keep the guys away from your sister.”That’s the unsolicited advice that US Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden reportedly gave a young boy during a campaign stop in Iowa last week.Leaving aside the fact that the girl in question is 13, and it’s just creepy that the first thing the former Vice President seems to latch on to when interacting with girls is their nascent sexuality, the exchange kicked off a heated debate about the role men should play in protecting women from other men.Some might argue that there was nothing to see here, that siblings should be encouraged to look out for siblings. Biden’s advice to the boy might also be regarded as a clumsy attempt to acknowledge the problem of violence against women.After all, the evidence is clear: men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators and women are overwhelmingly the victims of violence. In the age of #MeToo, this could be an expression of the change in the way we talk about violence against women, shifting the focus from women’s behaviour to that of men. That change was on display in Victoria, Australia, in the year between the murders of Eurydice Dixon and Courtney Herron.
After the murder of Dixon, police warned women to take more care.
After the death of Herron, Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius placed the responsibility squarely on men: “The key point is [that] this is about men’s behaviour, it’s not about women’s behaviour”.
For starters, Biden’s directive to the boy completely sidesteps the wishes of the girl. Maybe she wants to spend time with boys.
That’s a matter for her to decide. Not her brother and not Joe Biden.
Talking about girls and women in this way completely strips them of their agency.
In Biden’s world, girls and women appear to be nothing more than helpless objects.
It is men, not women, who have the “job” of deciding who girls and women should socialise with.Telling brothers to protect their sisters from boys also assumes that boys and men are natural predators.It’s essentially an admission of defeat when it comes to male violence.
It starts from the premise that men are not capable of stemming their violence towards women and therefore the best women can hope for is protection rather than autonomy and actual safety.