A babe in the woods

Katie Piper is the Englishwoman who, as a beautiful 26-year-old, embarked on a relationship with a thuggish looking man named Daniel Lynch. When Lynch became possessive and angry, Katie Piper tried to break off the relationship. Lynch responded by raping her and then arranged for an accomplice to throw acid in her face, disfiguring her.

Why revisit this story? Katie Piper has now explained in more detail what happened in the relationship with Lynch. And I was struck by this brief description of her childhood:

Born in Hampshire in 1983, I had an idyllic childhood. My father David owned a barber shop and my mother Diane was a teacher.They doted on my brother Paul, sister Suzy, and me.

As a youngster I was independent and fearless. I never suspected there was any badness in the world. 'You can be anything you want to be,' Dad used to tell me.

There is a clash between the traditional and the modern here. Girls are not naturally independent and fearless. Traditionally they grew up in the protective warmth of the family. Katie Piper had a traditional childhood in this sense and seems to appreciate it.

But she was also raised with very modern expectations. Her father drummed into her that she could be anything she wanted to be, in other words, that the highest good to aim at was that of maximum autonomy.

If you aren't by nature independent and fearless, but need to become so to be fully autonomous, then you might well make a big deal about these qualities. You might see them as signature qualities that you identify with and cultivate.

And if you believe that anything is possible, that you can do anything or be anything you like, then you won't recognise the realities of fallen human nature which do restrict us, including the vices (the vicious behaviour) of others which bring danger to ourselves.

In brief, Katie Piper had been protected as a girl by her secure family life; she made a great deal of being independent and fearless; and she saw the world as perfectly open and unlimited and without the restricting presence of evil or malevolence.

Which left her like a babe in the woods. How could she learn prudence, a "caution or circumspection as to danger or risk," when she saw herself as a fearless woman in a world without evil?

There are Western women being left vulnerable by this lack of prudence. Another Englishwoman, Katie Cullen, lost her life in very similar circumstances to that of Katie Piper. Her mother told reporters that  "She saw only goodness in everyone."

This naivety exists despite the fact that feminists bang on about all men being rapists and/or abusers. The feminist campaigns don't help women much, because they are based on the idea that men as a class use violence against women to uphold a privileged status. Therefore, the idea is pushed that all men are equally likely to attack women. The feminist ads often show middle-class white men as the perpetrators.

So there is little guidance to women in these feminist campaigns about how to evaluate the risk of a particular situation or relationship. And sometimes feminists go further in hindering a sense of prudence in women, by fiercely objecting to any discussion of the issue on the basis that it represents "blaming the victim".  Feminists want to focus on "changing men," in the belief that the cause of violence is a political one so that it's possible to eliminate violence against women through political reform.

I suppose, for the time being, it's up to fathers to try to cultivate the quality of prudence in their daughters (without going so far as to scare them from relationships with men).