• Sat, Jan 12 - 4:00 pm ET

America’s ‘Top Criminal Profiler’ Says Lock Up Your Daughters If You Want To Keep Them Safe

shutterstock_105902411You would think America’s “top criminal profiler” would have some interesting insight on safety, rather than resort to the tried and true method of victim-blaming. You would be wrong. Pat Brown, CEO of the Sexual Homicide Exchange, and television’s favorite go-to criminal profiler has penned a book titled, How To Save Your Daughter’s Life: Straight Talk for Parents from America’s Top Criminal Profiler. It should have been titled, Lock Up Your Daughter’s Until They Are Legal Adults Because They Can’t Be Trusted To Make Decisions For Themselves And Will Put Themselves In Harm’s Way.

From Maclean’s:

Raising her daughter, Brown did everything in her power to keep the girl safe from the perverts and psychopaths, and the drugs and depression that can ruin a girl’s life. She home-schooled all three of her kids and didn’t let her daughter date unchaperoned until she was 18.

This is great advice. Let’s not teach our children how to function in the world, let’s teach them that anything that could befall them is obviously their fault, which is why we’ll be keeping them locked up until they are 18. Let’s not take years of experience as a criminal profiler and use it to educate our sons about not victimizing women. Let’s instead drive home the point that women are in control of their own safety – and the best way to guarantee it is to not get into relationships or put ourselves in situations where “wild animals” can cause us harm:

To put it bluntly, talking about the perpetrator may be fascinating and educational, and we can rail about changing the system, locking these monsters up, and preventing them from being created in the first place, but it isn’t going to do much to save your daughter’s life today. It is like this: Suppose a young girl goes out on the African plain alone for a walk in nature. She gets eaten by a lion. Should I speak about how bad the lion is? How he shouldn’t have eaten the girl? Should I go talk to that lion and other lions and tell them not to eat people? Are those lions going to pay me any mind?

That is an actual excerpt from the Introduction to her book. Yikes.

Brown encourages parents to involve young girls in after-school hobbies like knitting and stamp collecting… Another way to keep a girl safe is to delay the milestones. If she drives at 16, she’s more likely to crash into a tree while texting at the wheel. Make her wait to get her driver’s licence and then drive shotgun with her everywhere she goes for the next year.

Delay milestones? Brown thinks if you let your daughter date before she’s 18, you’ll be a grandmother before she gets to college. I can’t believe years of criminal research would bring this woman to the conclusion that teaching your daughter to be an independent, alert adult  is tantamount to setting her free in the “African plain” with raw meat taped to her body.

I’m sure she’s seen a lot of sick shit, and I imagine that jades a person. I think her work has made it impossible for her not to see the world as a sick, scary place. That’s understandable. But I think she should leave the child-rearing advice to the professionals – and give our daughters a little more credit.

(photo: Jandrie Lombard/ Shutterstock.com)

You can reach this post's author, Maria Guido, on twitter.
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  • http://www.facebook.com/paul.white.3532507 Paul White

    Well, as a parent, this is something I’m struggling with. I don’t have a daughter, but a son.
    Still–let’s take something as an example here…

    I want Sam to know that it is dangerous to engage in certain behaviors that are high risk–getting drunk and walking around downtown at night ups your changes of being robbed and beaten. How do I balance teaching him that, with making sure that he knows that him being in a vulnerable position doesn’t morally excuse the people that attack him if he is? I can focus on teaching him that it’s never OK to take something from someone against their will, but that doesn’t help him when some druggie wanting a fix shoots him and takes his wallet, so I’d rather he avoid those behaviors.

    That isn’t just a hypothetical issue either; I’m seriously trying to figure this out. I want my son to grow up knowing what is right and wrong, but I also want him to realize that not everyone respects the difference between those two and he has to be alert and aware of the fact that there are predators out there.

    • K.

      Well, for one, explaining to your kid that you want them to refrain from certain behaviors that pose a threat to their personal security needs to be in the frame of telling them that it’s because you don’t want them to have to experience something terrible. And that’s outside of right/wrong–most victims of violent crimes don’t give a crap whether they get ‘justice;’ they are too busy just wishing it hadn’t happened, period. You don’t get brownie points for being an innocent victim; you get years of therapy. You don’t want that for your children. So explain to them that the reasons for enacting safeguards for their personal safety are for their welfare.

      Helping your children learn to exercise and protect their freedom responsibly is what parents should do–and that is different from seeking to eradicate every possible danger from their childhood. For one, unless you literally lock them away in a high tower somewhere (which it sounds like Brown has done, more or less), you can’t. And two, it’s never a great idea, in my mind, to parent out of fear. To be a parent is to worry, all the time. But at the same time, I think that good parents don’t allow worries to get in between their enjoyment of their children and their children’s enjoyment of life. So yeah, I wouldn’t allow my own son to have a private Facebook account or a Smartphone that I don’t have complete oversight with (sorry, son!), and I would try my best to teach my son basic “street smarts” (don’t try to walk home drunk; don’t have sex without protection; don’t get into a friend’s car if they are high, etc. etc.). But in the end I have to just do my best and hope because every kid is an independent person and grows into living life on their own terms.

      And I believe that allowing my son to attend school, engage in afterschool activities (beyond knitting and stamp collecting), attain a driver’s license when he is of age, provided he is mature enough to handle the privilege, date girls and go out with friends without me, go away to sleepaway camp/college/club retreats/Europe–to have all those experiences is fundamental in helping him have a rich childhood and prepare for a fulfilling adulthood. NOT allowing him to have those things out of fear that he *might* be victim to a terrible crime is too great a sacrifice because it’d be sacrificing HIS quality of life to cater to MY anxiety.

      I am by no means a parenting expert and just like you, I have the same fears and questions about raising my own child. This is just my take on it as another parent.

    • http://twitter.com/ProfilerPatB PAT BROWN

      Interestingly, you say a lot of what is ACTUALLY in my book! I think you sound like a very good parent. Neither my daughter nor my sons were locked up in the house as the reviewer claims and they had many great experiences on the way to adulthood. They played sports, went to friends’ houses, and went to camp. As adults, they have traveled to many countries – my daughter, the sex abuse detective, has been to China, Turkey, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Portugal, Costa Rica – to name a few – my son, the economics guy – has lived in Mexico (I sent him there when he was 18) and in India (he attended University there), and my other son, the federal officer, is more into the Caribbean Islands and US travel. I don’t have wimpy kids, so I guess the fact I homeschooled them because our country schools were so terrible and parented my kids in my fashion didn’t stifle them. Everyone will make different choices in raising their children, but I hope parents will recognize that helping children to be safe and make good choices is going to increase the odds of them reaching adulthood in one piece.

    • K.

      If that’s what you actually wrote (and sorry, I haven’t read it b/c I generally don’t buy things these days unless recommended or I find a review that looks interesting), you should contact the editors here because there’s some mischaracterization of your book.

  • K.

    Yeahhhh…Does Brown realize that the justification for the oppression of women in the Middle East is largely for their ‘protection’?

    Not only is Brown’s argument insulting (I may be physically smaller as a woman than most men, but I am not helpless, nor stupid, nor incapable thankyouverymuch), but we should empower, educate, and support young women and fight for their rights and freedoms. Not doubt their strength and resourcefulness and chain them up at home out of fear.

    • http://twitter.com/ProfilerPatB PAT BROWN

      I happen to have practiced martial arts and boxing and that daughter that I actually did not chain up or oppress became a police officer. I used to do ride-alongs with her (before she became a detective) and she was a pretty tough cop. But she knows when to call for back-up. And no matter how great I am at martial arts or boxing, I am not foolish enough to believe I can fight a heavyweight (which is why weight classes exist). It is smarter to make good choices so as not to end up in a confrontation with a large male psychopath on a jogging path. Men also have to consider where they go and think of their own safety. A guy could have a black belt but if he ends up facing two thugs in an alley with guns, it is pretty easy to figure out he is not coming out a winner.

  • Sarah

    Oh my gosh. I wasn’t super sexually active until I was 21 (by my own choice), barely drink or do drugs (again, by my own choice, since my parents would only care if I was being reckless or stupid about it), and was homeschooled through middle school when kids are the most vicious and I still ended up with depression and I was raped twice in college. It’s almost like those things AREN’T EVEN RELATED. CRAZY.

  • http://twitter.com/argillic argillic

    “Should I go talk to that lion and other lions and tell them not to eat people? Are those lions going to pay me any mind?”

    What Brown implies here is that males are not legally competent. That they either have not acquired language or can’t distinguish right and wrong or that they are unable to control their actions. We have a place for people like that – we lock them up. If we believe Brown, girls are not the ones we should be locking up.

    To carry the analogy further, do we tell a girl who survives being mauled by a lion that we don’t believe her? That it was consensual? That she shouldn’t bother reporting the attack because the village elders won’t take any action? That if she insists on reporting, it will ruin her reputation and she will be seen as the girl who likes to get mauled by lions?

    • http://www.facebook.com/paul.white.3532507 Paul White

      I’m going to try to be charitable and assume she was talking about that narrow subsection of people that are straight up predatory without much regard to gender.

    • http://twitter.com/ProfilerPatB PAT BROWN

      Yes, Paul, I was talking about dangerous people, not all and only men! Thanks for noting that! The point of my analogy was that where there ARE predatory people, they are already full-blown psychopaths and I can’t fix them nor can any book. Since they DO exist, we have to help our girls (and our boys….my next book) not get into their hands.. For example, Joran van der Sloot iwas (and is) sex predator who was looking for a sweet, naive girl who had too much to drink (so she would be easy to lure and control). He found that girl in Natalie Hollaway and that beautiful girl lost her life to him that night. Joran is guilty of his crime, but I wish Natalie had been more aware of how alcohol (especially those very potent shots – assuming no date rape drug was added) would put her in danger and how going off alone with a guy she just met is an unsafe activity even if he was cute and didn’t seem dangerous. Such awareness might have saved her life.

  • http://twitter.com/ProfilerPatB PAT BROWN

    Of course, I never said to lock your daughter up or a number of other things claimed by this reviewer who never bothered to actually read my book. Please go to Amazon.com and read about the actual contents of my book and the real reviews over here or go to the Profiler Pat Brown channel on YouTube and watch the videos of me discussing the book on FOX and Friends and The Today Show. How to Save Your Daughter’s Life is about educating parents and daughters about dangers in our society which impact girls in a very negative way and how to help teens to make good choices that suit their personalities and their family dynamics. I want parents to empower their daughters so they can be successful and happy instead of losing them to early pregnancy, abuse, drugs, depression, bullying, sex predators, and dangerous relationships. I want the same for the boys being raised out there, but that is my next book.