Useful…

Well not on this occasion at least.

for those situations when the inherent humor of your remark is not visible to the naked eye.

So the humour was not visible to the naked eye. Is it ever? .
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I know war is horrible. One of my earliest memories believe it or not was as a very temporary refugee from a war zone. I also last year wrote a short play about the Hellish experience of women in war. The research makes you want to exit the species.
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My crack above was an expression of my excaserbation of the behaviour of very young men at the minute which is famously bad. Not all young men just enough. I’m afraid I find those who advocate the perpetual countenance of profound and melancholy sobriety always with serious issues don’t understand for whatever reason that humour is most useful in exactly those kinds of black scenarios.
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And the young, stupid and testosterone-gorged yelling stupid shit from their cars is pretty fucking far from serious.

It is pretty clear that these attitudes are inculcated at a very young age and so I think you have to begin work in primary school.

And talked about an “educational project”. Adrien said “It’s called: not being brought up right.” Emerging agreement here too, I think.

Primary school is a bit late to start. I’d begin at the pre-natal stage (I’m not joking).

I’ve been quite impressed with Matt Sanders when I’ve heard him on the radio. He has the Triple P Positive Parenting Program, the Parenting and Family Support Centre, a book and, indeed, Suncorp Queenslander of the Year for 2007. Appalled by the American Suopernanny TV program he made a series in Britain
Driving Mum and Dad Mad which was watched by 6 million people, and then did research on the audience.

Another guy I’ve been impressed with is the Canadian Fraser Mustard who spent time in Adelaide in 2006. An initiative alive at that time was the establishment of Child Development and Parenting Centres which would provide education and care services as well as advice and support to parents.

Here are some slides (pdf) giving some of his ideas. The CDP Centres come up at Slide 63.

In early childhood education and later for that matter attention needs to be paid to the primacy of the social/emotional domain instead of the traditional focus on the cognitive. Intervention needs to extend to the social setting rather than just the individual.

Tackling the ferals who escape attention during the education phase is another issue altogether.

Ah yes Adrien; because the military and theatres of war are harassment-and-sexual- assault-free-zones? Or are you talking about *gasp* exporting some of the worst excesses of patriarchy to keep our home-grown womenz safe??!!!

Su please note what this - means. Or perhaps you’d care to take advantage of this this offer

I don’t think you can prevent harassment per ser, or at least preventing one symptom is kind of beside the point if the underlying attitude remains the same. It is pretty clear that these attitudes are inculcated at a very young age and so I think you have to begin work in primary school. I think that a lot of adults would be genuinely surprised if they were able to confront what they are doing, what the meaning of their behaviour is and why it is that they feel they have to do it. So much better to catch those attitudes when they are still being formed and before they become automatic.

In many ways I think that this kind of educational project is akin to projects that tackle racist beliefs and I don’t believe that anyone has a fix on the best way of doing those, except that categorization itself is probably not the problem, rather the beliefs and affective responses that we learn to associate with those categories from a very early age are the things that we need to target. (/waffle)

Ah yes Adrien; because the military and theatres of war are harassment-and-sexual- assault-free-zones? Or are you talking about *gasp* exporting some of the worst excesses of patriarchy to keep our home-grown womenz safe??!!!

what do we do to prevent it?

Reintroduce conscription and start a war?

As I said, I don’t trivialize any of this and I’ve experienced all manner of public harassment. But my understanding, is that the actual numbers of women being sexually assaulted by men they don’t know in public spaces is low. And it often tends to be exaggerated by the tabloid press to create fear in women so they won’t walk the street. And I know that isn’t what you’re doing, Su.

As to how we react to public harrassment, I think that’s a personal thing. I figure most of those guys are jerks and bullies who you don’t need to worry about too much. I find it doesn’t affect me emotionally much. (By that, I mean give rise to a high level of anxiety or concern). But I think it’s completely understandable if other women feel terribly upset and constrained by it.

But coming back to what you’ve said - what do we do to prevent it?

Adrien; standing up for oneself is great, even better is not having to deal with harassment to begin with; we can do one and still work towards the other.

But I would like to make the point that statistically, it’s long odds that women are going to be assaulted randomly by these jerks, Crime figures tell us it’s the guys we know at home who are the real threat.

I don’t want to trivialise these sorts of behaviours. But I also dislike the sort of discourse which emphasises the danger to women on the streets, when that danger is actually quite small. I hate the fear that it creates and the feeling it gives to so many women that they can’t go out alone.

Do I think something can and should be done about arsehole lads? I sure do.

Look, see- we agree!

Who says the limit has been reached Adrien? Who says that there has been much of an effort to change attitudes? My son was 10 when he first heard a boy threaten to rape a girl at school. Casual harassment of girls and remarks about their bodies probably began even earlier.

And while a tiny little bit of me, thinks some of the reactions to car hoons is just middle class preciousness, this is only because, I’ve been subject to worse abuse and survived, ie. so ‘harden the fuck up’, but this really isnt any sort of answer at all

But it’s the only one. There’s just a limit to how much you can modify the behaviour of arseholes. That’s all there is. What can you do?
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Surry Hills has to have the highest concentration of dangerously perverse individuals in the country.

I often walk with my dog (day or night), who’s a whippet.

I’m often confronted with carload of hoons yelling out ‘Whip it good’. I always behave as if I haven’t heard the joke before.

But seriously, I blame Devo for the Decay of Western Civilization. And I defy Jack Strochi to prove me wrong.

I figured at the time, that this type of highly confrontational behaviour was disrupting their script, but it was a dangerous ploy, and I was very fortunate that I wasn’t attacked, nor was I ever followed by more than one bloke.

Dead set right, I think, jo. That’s an astonishing set of experiences, but sobering to think that it represents a slice of reality in our land.

My wife, who is a teacher, told me recently of an experience related by one of her dads. He is ex army special forces, now a lawyer, but with the necessary skills to kill a man with his bare hands and realistically take on the average bunch of louts by himself.

One night waiting for a late bus outside the courts he had an experience that shook him to the core. I don’t remember the details, but his general advice was not to let your self-defense skills give you a false sense of safety, to learn to recognise a threat and to put distance between yourself and the threat.

As to answers, I think ultimately it has to lie in fixing the perpetrator. There are problems with the development of prosocial male personalities in our society.

Designing spaces is only a partial solution. Mark used to tell me that the Queen Street Mall changed character late on Friday nights from a festive atmosphere with lots of people to one that was somehow brooding, ‘dark’ (not literally) and threatening in the space of an hour.