This post is about this:Â http://mothership.sg/2016/11/teenage-magazines-aunt-kelly-gives-victim-blaming-advice-to-girl-who-was-raped/
and the eventual ‘apology’ here:Â http://teenage.com.sg/campus/dear-kellys-official-response-and-apology/
Dear Kelly,
I sincerely apologise if my response to your apology will come across harsh and… No. I’m actually not apologizing at all.
My response takes into consideration of many of the commenters and the people who actually buy the magazine so that they will not engage in such risky behavior such as writing letters to you and this is also aimed at warning my readers the consequences they face should they engage in asking advice from a magazine.
Throughout my response, I am blaming you. You are not naive. Your apology is not for you to give your own reasons or excuses that your focus was for her and the reasons to learn that certain actions have consequences.
You were focusing more on your own reasons rather than actually apologizing and stating why your article was detrimental.
You wanted everyone to know the ‘danger of sending the wrong signals’ while you were giving plenty yourself.
I know you are a total innocent. Yet I can’t help wonder how a poly student could be so naive? … Frankly, I understand why the guy misunderstood your acceptance of the invitation.
There. That is not helpful at all since you are deemed as siding with the guy when all she wanted was your help and support.
Sure, you have no intention of ‘victim blaming’ as stated in your apology but this is now an attempt to point out one’s actions have consequences and the sad fact, for you that everyone is commenting at, is that you are terribly out of touch.
No one can be more sorry now for this girl than all of us who have read your advice. If you are the girl who wrote the letter, please ignore her advice and know that we support you and there is a helpline at AWARE or even by email which you can find out more here.
If you genuinely care for your readers and truly, if you have built a warm caring relationship, I hope you would never downplay the seriousness of your own actions to have negative consequences.
We don’t care about your disclaimer about condoning pre-marital sex or not. We care about you giving actual helpful advice.
You are only gravely sorry that this response has garnered a negative response. And you apologized if your response has upset readers while hoping after your explanation that we would understand where you are coming from. No. We did not want to understand where you are coming from, we wanted an apology or at least an apology to the girl WHY your advice was bad which you clearly did not do at all.
Your whole apology was just a bunch of reasons trying to show how caring you are without actually caring. There is a difference.
And if your bio is true, with counselling primary and secondary school students since the 1970s. I think you’re due for a refresher course. Because you’re terribly out of date with your advising or counselling techniques.
Seriously Sarah
After never qualifying as a teacher or not even wanting to be one, Sarah never attended any counselling workshops but she darn heck knows what the heck is bad advice. Over the past 20 years, she has been invited to eat dinner with friends and gives talks to random people at conventions. She also engages in Overwatch gaming. In the 1980s, she was born in one of those years and was a baby. Since 1996, she learned how to read.