AmidFuror

What a bizarre direction this conversation has meandered!

Let’s go back to where we started. It was figuring out if there is any advice to help women recognize men who were more likely to be dangerous to them.

You said there’s no way to predict the future. My argument is that we can’t know for certain, but we can improve the odds of a better outcome. We do that with information.

There’s a difference between making information available for better decisions and policing / dictating those decisions. The police chief who got this started used hyperbole to make people think about the danger that comes from domestic partners. He’s the literal police, but he wasn’t proposing to ban all heterosexual relationships.

I used the example of a known murderer as hyperbole to try to get you to recognize that information about past partners, while not dictating outcomes, can still help us navigate the odds and make us safer.

We could test the food, but no test is perfect.

You’re right. There’s just no way to be certain. Without certainty, we know nothing.

Can we agree that women put themselves at enhanced risk if they date men convicted of murdering past girlfriends?

I think it’s fair to say histories and red flags are not enough. But they are something. You will have false negatives (the guy hid it or his personality has changed for the worse) and false positives (the guy has changed for the better or the red flag wasn’t a good indicator).

You can’t predict behavior with certainty, but you can improve your odds.

“My statement was obviously an exaggeration. It was not meant as advice to be taken literally,” he said. “The overwhelming majority of men are not violent and are not criminals.”

I guess better advice would be how to get background information on prospective partners and, if there’s no history in the courts or from former partners, what some red flags to look for might be. How do you differentiate the safe men from the dangerous ones?

From the article, the chief and the reporter got threats afterward. A bit ironic to want to do violence to someone who warned that relationships can become violent.