Warning - Please Read
Some people, especially if you have been the victim of violence, may find some of the subject matter contained in this article disturbing or traumatizing. If you are still in the process of recovering from violence and abuse, you may want to consult with a mental health professional before reading this content. The subject matter is also intended for an adult audience, and so if you are under 18, you should have an adult read the material first (parental guidance is advised for people under 18). This article addresses the subject matter head-on, so reader discretion is advised.
Introduction
Would you ever get into a car with a stranger? When you think about this you can exclude “Known Strangers”, such as taxi and rideshare drivers etc., who operate in a context-specific role. You can also exclude getting into a car with a friend/acquaintance, whose friends you haven’t met before (strangers) are also in the car etc.
Probably, one of the first pieces of safety advice we were given by parents, teachers etc., was not to get into a car with a stranger, along with not talking to strangers. As children we are taught to be suspicious of people we don’t know and to trust those that we do, even though from a risk perspective children are more likely to be harmed by those that they know rather than by strangers e.g., most child sexual abuse (CSA) is committed by family members, friends and acquaintances, not by strangers.
It is far easier to warn children about the potential danger from strangers than inform them of the real risks they face without traumatizing them and making them feel unsafe around people they know, including family members, sports coaches, church leaders and friends of their parents.
One of a parent’s worst nightmares is that of child abductions, even though they are statistically extremely rare, and this is one of the reasons – parental fear – that one of the first pieces of safety advice we are given as children is not to get into cars with strangers/people we don’t know e.g., the scenario that is probably being envisaged is of us as children playing in the front yard when a man in a car (or a white van) pulls up and asks if we would like to go with him to see some puppies.
The fear being that the reward of seeing some baby animals will act as an effective lure. Whilst this popular “lure” has been used successfully, child abductors are often more subtle, creating socially awkward situations which children find difficult and complex to navigate. This is something that sexual predators who target adults also do.
When we, as adults, think about strangers trying to get us into their cars, we probably think about similar scenarios to those that we were warned about when kids e.g., a stranger pulling up to us in their car, when we’re in a public space (on a city street, outside our home etc.), and making up a story – using a lure – to get us into their car.
As adults we believe that we would easily see through the story being told to us, that we perhaps might have as children, and quickly identify the danger and harmful intent of the driver telling us their “story”. However, sexual predators who target adults understand this, and have other ways to get us into their cars.
Imagine you have met someone on a dating app or website and have arranged to meet them for the first time, perhaps for dinner one evening (better to choose lunch or a coffee during the day; a smaller commitment, and one which you may have legitimate activities and “obligations” to perform afterwards, rather than simply having to go home).
Everything is going well over the course of the dinner, and you decide that you’d like to see this person again. As the meal comes towards the end, your “date” (because this is now the role you are seeing them in/as) says, “I’ve had a really great time tonight. I’ve had a string of really bad dates from the app/website and you’re the first person I’ve really felt any form of connection with. It’d be a shame to end the evening now. I know a really nice bar across town. Why don’t we go there, have a drink and finish our evening there?”
The purpose of a first date is to hopefully get a second one, and this is effectively what is being offered. It’s also flattering and nice to have someone openly express an interest in who we are and want to spend more time with us. This can be especially true if our recent experiences of dating have not been very good.
As you both leave the restaurant, heading for your separate cars, he says to you, “It’d be stupid to take two cars, parking there can be a nightmare, and the GPS often sends you the wrong way. Let’s take mine and I can drop you back here afterwards.”
The sociologist, Harold Garfinkel, whilst attending a psychology program, came up with a simple experiment that looked at the ways in which the human mind can create “logical” arguments and reasons to explain why contradictory things both can be true at the same time.
He created cards that had a variety of character traits on them. For each “positive” trait card there was a corresponding “negative” one e.g., if there was a card that said energetic, there was one that said lazy, if there was one that said honest, there was one that said dishonest etc.
At random he presented sets of these cards, which often contained contradictory traits, to subjects and asked them to describe the person who these traits belonged to. Never once did a subject say it was impossible that such a person existed but rather, they created elaborate stories and creative reasons as to why someone could be two contradictory things at the same time.
Psychologist, Jerome Bruner, who witnessed the experiment concluded that with such a, “staggering gift for creating hypothesis…man… is infinitely capable of belief. Surprising that he has not been described as Homo Credens [the believer]”.
As a species we are incredibly good at self-deception. The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote in his book, “The Anti-Christ” (1895) that “the most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself”.
In the scenario above, our date has just put us in a socially awkward situation: they are a person we like and that we want to go for a drink with, but we’ve only known them for maybe 2 hours, and now they want us to get in a car with them.
To refuse their offer/request might come across as if we don’t trust them, or that we are someone who is paranoid or suspicious etc., character traits that don’t portray us in a positive light. This is a person we want to impress and so we are torn between not getting into a car with a stranger (the childhood “rule” we were taught) and not wanting to appear rude or weird.
The request could be innocent and contain no harmful intent, or it could be part of a more sinister/dangerous plan e.g., you could get into the car and have a great evening before being dropped back at yours, or you could get into the car, be raped/sexually assaulted, and dropped in the middle of nowhere.
When in such situations be aware that you have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive yourself and to create a positive “character” for the person you have just met, especially if they seem “nice” (“niceness” is a behavior rather than a character trait, meaning those who mean us harm can use it as a tool to disarm us). As Bruner concluded, we are a species that wants to believe.
Predatory individuals understand these things. They understand how easily we engage in self-deception, especially in socially awkward situations i.e., we have a truth bias that makes us want to believe in the face value of what someone is telling us, and we have an optimism bias that leads us to believe that bad things happen to other people rather than to us.
They also understand – maybe not consciously but intuitively – that we will rationalize any contradictions and fill in any gaps in their stories in order to make sense of them, and who they are.
When we hear stories of people who have been “conned” and victimized our initial reaction/response may be to think “I would never have done that”, or “why would someone be so stupid as to…” This is because we know the outcome and weren’t called on in the situation to navigate it.
It is easy to judge the person in the parking lot who gets into the stranger’s car and as a consequence is sexually assaulted/raped however such a situation is not an easy one to handle, especially when there is a potential positive outcome to it i.e., the person asking you turns out to be your life partner etc.
It’s easy to know how to respond and act when a stranger pulls up to you and asks you to get in for whatever reason, but most sexual predators have developed more sophisticated methods when targeting adults:
1. They orchestrate and use socially awkward situations.
2. They present us with choices that have positive and/or negative consequences.
3. They know how to gain our trust, using our ability to self-deceive and believe in the best outcome.
Unfortunately, there is no single profile of a sexual predator that we can use to detect them, however they do use common methods and processes to gain access to us and get us to hand over control of situations to them and choose the path that they want us to go down. Whilst there are those sexual assailants and rapists who ambush and blitz us e.g., jumping out from behind the proverbial bushes, such attacks are relatively rare, with most being preceded by some form of verbal/social interaction.
It is in this “phase” of a potential assault that we have an opportunity to identify a person’s/predator’s harmful intent and find ways to exit/end the interaction safely. In the next component of this course we will look at a variety of rape myths, and some of the origins concerning them.
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