7. Talking to Strangers

Talking to Strangers. Malcolm Gladwell. 2019.

I have to preface this review by saying that I have been a huge Malcolm Gladwell fan for years.  I read this book in just a couple of days while on a trip to the Bay Area.  As expected, it is enthralling, insightful, and hard to put down.  I was intrigued by so much of the material, particularly the material about topics on which I would not consider myself an "expert."  But, here's the caveat.  He covered two topics about which I know not just more than the average reader, but about which I know a lot more than the average reader and probably more than the author and his coverage of these topics left a bitter taste in my mouth.  The topics: child sex abuse and campus sexual violence. 

I found Gladwell's premise regarding child sex abuse to be completely misplaced.  This is a book about what happens when we misjudge strangers and he treated the topic of child sex abuse in the context of the Larry Nassar case as if it belongs in a conversation about strangers.  Nassar is the doctor who sexually abused dozens (if not hundreds) of competitive gymnasts and other girls for decades. But, Nassar wasn't a stranger at all.  He was known to the girls, their coaches, and their families.  He also sexually abused neighbors and other girls who were not his patients, all of whom knew him and whose families knew him.  Many knew his wife and children, as well.  To even stretch the theme of the book a little bit so Gladwell could discuss Nassar's case within the context of this theme is a dangerous perpetuation of the persistent myths around sexual abuse.  Every time we talk about "stranger danger" in the context of child sex abuse, we shift our collective gaze away from the people we know are committing the vast majority of abuse: friends, family, and trusted adults in children's lives.  It is irresponsible of him to include that material here.  If the book were called, "Default to Truth," then I might not have had as much of an issue with it, but it isn't and throughout the book he comes back to this idea that Nassar got away with sexual abuse on a large scale because he was a stranger.  He extends this to the Penn State/Sandosky case as well and that also was not the case.  Nothing about those cases has to do with "talking to strangers," but Gladwell seems so intent on tying them together that it becomes obvious that he does not actually understand child sex abuse at all.

Second, his discussion of the Stanford rapist, Brock Turner, was similarly irresponsible.  His discussion about the impact of drinking and trauma on memory does nothing other than to undermine the credibility of every sexual assault victim, whether they were drinking or not.  Moreover, his advice, (that college women need to be told they should drink less so they are less vulnerable to rapists who drink a lot) is full-on, old-fashioned victim blaming.  He essentially chalks campus rape cases up to "misunderstandings" and "miscommunications" about "sex" and while he thinks we should feel "sympathy" for the women who have these experiences, his take-away from the Turner case, no matter how well written and superficially reasoned, is that someone should have told Channel Miller to drink less.  To support his premise, he focuses at length on Turner's testimony in court and Miller's lack of memory of the incident.  It isn't until he draws you into the analysis that he wants to make about alcohol impairing your ability to judge a stranger's intentions that he bothers to mention that Turner told police a completely different story than he told on the stand. No where does he suggest that if Turner wasn't a rapist, drunk or sober, that Miller would have not have been raped. He seems to accept Turner's position at trial that drinking and hook-up culture was to blame for Turner's assault on an unconscious woman in an alley behind a party.  

My take away from these two sections was that Gladwell might be smart and he might mean well, but he is not versed in the movement to end sexual violence.  He does not have a grasp on the nuances of grooming children or targeting women necessary to write for a large audience about these topics. It was a huge disappointment to realize that this might spill over onto other topics he has written about in the past, which is a bummer because so much of what he has written in other books has resonated with me.

This revelation that Gladwell is not rooted in the anti-rape movement in a way that lends itself to a nuanced and complex conversation on the topic impacted how I viewed the rest of the book, perhaps nowhere more so than where the book starts and ends, with Sandra Bland's case.  Initially, I was drawn into his thesis that the officer, Brian Encinia, and Bland were both at fault because they both made assumptions about the other because they were strangers and because neither of them were the type of person who would "default to truth."  After I finished the chapters on Nasser and Turner, though, and Gladwell circled me back to the Bland case, I was in a different frame of mind.  Now, instead of buying Gladwell's conclusions, which I will admit I did hook, line, & sinker in David & Goliath and Outliers, I no longer assumed he knew anything about things he didn't know about.  Indeed, I think that in a misplaced, "journalistic" effort to appear neutral, he gives the Encinia too much of a pass.  It made me think that as a man not rooted in the movement against sexual assault, that maybe he was similarly unable to write about other topics, either.  It really undermined his credibility for me in general, which, at the end of the day, was a huge bummer.  I suppose that when we are talking about hockey player birth dates and the number of hours it takes to be an expert and when entrepreneurs were born, then it doesn't matter if you understand the implications for vulnerable populations.  But, if you are going to talk about sexual violence and you have the stature, following, and respect that Gladwell has, then you ought to make absolutely sure you know the implications of what you are doing.

Not recommended.
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​Recommended by Marty: Talking to Strangers

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