Yes, it is our right to be able to walk the streets alone and not be attacked, but in too many instances incidents have happened when the outcome is a little scary.
It's never the fault of the person it happens to of course, such a horrible thing should never happen to anyone.
I think it's still sensible and important to take precautions and not throw common sense out the window either. In this case, she was on a public street, in full view of people, it was a totally brazen attack.
Even as a bloke though, there are some areas of melbourne i wouldn't go down alone. A lot of the people here seem to be pretty well off in general but there are some real dodgy suburbs around melbourne. I've had friends who have seen a guy get the shit beat out of him for no reason in sunshine (nice name, bad place). I've had mates that have been mugged walking home alone after a night out, granted through a dodgy suburb, on the same route i used to walk home on (going for something with a bit more lights, not that most people would do anything). Hell, i've even had friends that have been smacked with guns before (they weren't into anything dodgy either, wrong place wrong time).
If i walked down the places i knew were dodgy, alone, late at night, it isn't my fault they decide to take my wallet and i should be able to walk anywhere i want but it's probably not a good idea to go down there either.
It should never happen and it's definitely wrong but everyone should still be vigilant and take thought into what they're doing (again, this case is sad, theres nothing she could of done, she was on a busy road, i'm surprised someone didn't stop).
And what's more, WHY do people become rapists? WHY do people become murderers? I personally believe that these things should start being treated as treatable mental illnesses. We have to be careful here though. If we associate mental illness with "murder" and "rape," in that murderers and rapists will most likely have a mental illness (namely psycopathy or sociopathy), we have to be absolutely crystal clear that the converse does not hold. That is, mental illness of any sort does not imply psychopathy/sociopathy/rape/murder. And we don't want to drag down the connotations of mental illness like this because there are other illnesses that MUST not be treated so harshly, particularly depression.
I agree with a lot of what you said. Our model of justice is based on centuries old ideas of retribution, punishment and just locking people up.
I also agree with you on some level. It's not normal behaviour to kill other people, especially in a pre-meditated fashion, you've gotta be somewhat mentally unwell to be a serial killer and be able to take human lives time after time like that.
On the other-hand, i don't think we should associate every crime with a mental illness. The most popular diagnostic criteria continue to become more and more broad, casting a wider and wider net. Where would we stop as well? Would you say thieves have some kind of mental illness or are just opportunistic greedy assholes, at least some of the time? You could argue they have a mental illness but i think then we're implying there is a very, very normative narrow state that every human being must fit. If people aren't exactly like me or my ethics, they could have a mental illness.
There are plenty of drug dealers who know full well what they're doing and still do it for the profits, they're not necessarily mentally ill either. Human trafficking could be another example here.
I was watching an episode of cops one day and this lady hired a hitman (little did she know it was an undercover cop) to kill her husband because she wanted his money. She seemed relatively normal to me or at least able to think and control her thought processes and she did it anyway.
Whilst it's a totally seperate thing and i'm not comparing them at all, it wasn't too long ago that people thought being homosexual was almost a mental illness of some kind. We have to be very careful in creating narrow definitions of whats normal and what is mentally ill.
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