Women are being abandoned by their partners on hiking trails | Hacker News Reader

Women are being abandoned by their partners on hiking trails

theguardian.com

7 pointsasib7 comments

The article mentions, briefly, the case of the Austrian who was recently convicted of manslaughter for abandoning his girlfriend on the side of a mountain.

The story is apparently much much worse than it sounds from the brief coverage.

Rebecca Watson did a video on it recently: https://youtu.be/zf6rUxqrDes

There were, apparently, many many signs that things were not going well: beginning the hike too late in the day; passing a sign that said "do not continue if you have not reached this point by X time", despite reaching it hours later; Waving off a rescue helicopter; putting his phone in DND mode.

A former girlfriend testified that he has done basically the same thing to her years earlier, on the same mountain.

That sounds a lot more like premeditated murder than manslaughter.

Whatever the case, he's clearly a profoundly unempathetic person. If it wasn't premeditated, this woman died because this man could not summon any care for her at so many points in this story. That's just as sad to me.

Indeed.

His lack of care came before the actual hike, though. I regularly go hiking in mountains in the winter, and occasionally I'll take someone along with me.

Because this is an activity that can easily lead to disaster for the unprepared, anybody that comes along with me has to be prepared or I'm not letting them come. This means that they have to carry everything they'd need to survive for a few days if we get separated, and that I'm comfortable that they have enough knowledge and skill to survive and find help on their own if needed.

Letting someone come along into a dangerous situation unprepared (let alone intentionally abandoning them) isn't just unempathetic, it's malicious.

Excellent video, has a lot more detail on evidence the judge decided to ignore (including the testimony from the ex girlfriend) when deciding his sentence.

That one anecdote about the woman who was told to dress super casually for a first date and found out she'd been invited to a fine dining restaurant is really eye-opening.

Men who do this are pathetic and it's really sad to discover that they behave this way at seemingly every turn.

It is a shame articles like this imply that all men act this way, rather than a small subset of men. A better framing (avoiding psych words) might be "arseholes".