An Australian detective is being slammed as “sexist” for suggesting that women not walk in parks alone at night after a teenage girl was raped and murdered in one.

Seventeen-year-old Masa Vukotic was raped and murdered Melbourne on Tuesday evening.

“I suggest to people, particularly females, they shouldn’t be alone in parks — I’m sorry to say that is the case,” Detective Inspector Mick Hughes said, according to an article in the Age, a local news source.

“We just need to be a little bit more careful, a little bit more security-conscious and we as a public need to look after each other,” he added.

To me, this seems like reasonable advice. But to columnist Brighette Ryan, that means I must be sexist against myself:

“Detective Inspector Hughes’ comments were way off in this case,” she wrote in the Australian on Thursday. “They were patronising and sexist.”

“If Hughes wanted to send a message at all, it should have been that violence against women will not be tolerated, ever,” she added.

(I might argue that the police did a fine job of sending the message they wouldn’t tolerate this by arresting and charging the suspect, Sean Christian Price, but hey, what do I know?)

Call me crazy, but I think we should be encouraging people to offer suggestions for avoiding this kind of tragedy — not discouraging them by placing the fear of God in their hearts that they’ll be branded “sexists” if they happen to make a “politically incorrect” one.

Ryan’s piece, by the way, is another manifestation of the modern-feminist talking point that we need to stop teaching people how to not get raped and start teaching rapists to not rape:

#related#“Let’s be clear on this — if a woman walks through a park at night and is attacked, it is not her fault,” Ryan wrote. “Hell, if a woman walks through a park wearing nothing but her underwear and is attacked, it is not her fault.”

Well, first of all: Of course it isn’t. Of course the rape is always the rapist’s fault. No one deserves to be raped, and I’d bet even Mick “Sexist Pig” Hughes knows that. But here’s the thing: I’m just not buying that the reason rapes happen is because rapists don’t know they’re not supposed to be raping. They’re rapists. They’re sociopaths. They don’t care what’s okay.

Sure, women should be able to walk around however they want and whenever they want and not have to worry about anything bad happening to them. But tragedies like this remind us that we do have to worry about it, and it’s definitely good advice to tell women to be aware of their surroundings and do what they can to protect themselves. That’s something called “reality,” and people like Ryan need to start accepting it.

— Katherine Timpf is a reporter for National Review Online.