Be Your Own Hero: A Message from the University of Florida

Recently, the University of Florida has been making headlines throughout the country. Why? Not for its stellar academics, nor for its exhilarating football performance last Saturday (65-0 Gators). Instead there has been significant controversy over a serial attacker on UF’s campus.

Over the last week, five young women have been attacked near or on campus. Fortunately, each girl has escaped before the assault turned sexual. A catalogue of the attacks seems to indicate an increased level of violence with each victim, hopefully a pattern that will not continue before the man is caught.

What is not as widely discussed on the news is the internal controversy over what should be done to prevent such attacks and to protect the young women on campus. In response to the attacks, the University of Florida Police Department (UFPD) is offering a Rape Aggression Defense Program that aims to educate women both on personal safety (beginning with awareness, prevention, risk reduction, and risk avoidance) and hands-on self-defense techniques.

Others, however, are attacking the UFPD for its focus on risk reduction and risk avoidance—namely, the aspects that encourage young women to consider their clothing choices, social activities, and night-time travelings. Apparently, the UFPD made a horrific faux pas when it told young women that their chances of getting attacked increase dramatically when they are walking alone at night in less-than-normal clothing in poorly lit areas. The appropriate message, according to outspoken defenders of women’s liberation, is no message. The police should just focus on finding all the bad men and teaching the rest of mankind to control themselves.

If you are experiencing feelings of déjà vu, it is probably because the nation quite recently faced this same issue over the remarks of Miss United States, Nia Sanchez, who advocated self-defense knowledge for women to help prevent these types of attacks.  The feminists’ attacks on Sanchez boiled down to accusations of “propagating rape culture” by encouraging women to protect themselves rather than on only lecturing men on the barbarity of rape (for a fuller description of the controversy surrounding Sanchez, see “World Peace or Self Defense?”).

This accusation, however, contradicts the feminist message itself. Throughout the course of the feminist movement, the goal has been to establish, in various forms, women’s empowerment. What is more empowering to women than for them to rely not on the moral rectitude of men but on their own power? In a perfect world, women would not need to know self-defense. Sadly, we do not live in that world. As a consequence, women have the opportunity to learn maneuvers that could potentially prevent rape instead of hoping that the men around them will behave morally.

The opposing message, essentially, encourages a reliance on men rather than a reliance on oneself; it is subjecting women to a force beyond themselves. The response of the UFPD did not reduce women to mere victims, as did the response of feminists at Jezebel. Instead, the university police are encouraging women to be strong and take charge of their own fate. In a sense, they are equipping women to be their own heroes.

Press on, University of Florida Police Department. Don’t let the feminists get you down.