Respectfully, I have to say that I'm with the majority of the posters here, many of whom make excellent points about the ethics and manners (not necessarily the same thing) in this situation.

I just want to comment on a couple of things about which I am concerned.

First, I agree with the person who wrote that the father and mother were mediators in this situation. (I'm sorry. I'd have your name, but my browser keeps timing out and I can't get it download all the responses fully. I guess this particular column stuck a nerve. And froze out my computer.) The daughter's family introduced the host and boyfriend to each other. It was, in part, their responsibility to insure that the boyfriend and their daughter had a safe place to leave their things. So, they hold some responsibility. The father should have been the one to do the reimbursing, but I sense he doesn't like the boyfriend for some reason which we will never learn. So, he simply tells him it's all his (the boyfriend's) responsibility and walks away from it. Unfortunately, it sounds possible that the theft was going to cause a vacation to be cut short. So, the boyfriend probably needed the money to continue.

Next, while I understand the responsibility of guests, I'm don't believe there are too many places in the world, or too many circumstances where a host is not responsible for the following things: 1) a safe place to store personal items 2) honest communication to the guest.

Apparently, the house was not a safe place to store personal items. Let me give an example: If I had a guest over and my dog, for some weird reason, peed in my guests' suitcase, I'd feel responsible for cleaning that up--at my expense. If the house burned down, well, I'd be responsible for replacing their lost items. That's what insurance is for, if you've got it. If not, at least offering what I could, in my power, would be what I would do. Also, does this mean that, if the daughter had been raped while staying in the house, it would be her fault? I'm just curious which crimes would denote absolute personal responsibility on the part of the victim of the crime and not the responsibility of others as well, such as, perhaps the one who actually committed the crime.

I think in this rush to claim personal responsibility by the 'one,' which is the fad these days, we do forget how we are connected together. The father should have been kinder, if for no other reason than his daughter, who we presume he loves, needed him to be. He had the responsibility, in his love for his daughter, to do that for her. The host did the right thing by offering the money. That was his responsibility and any offer should be presumed as real, otherwise it's just a despicable sort of social lie, I think. The boyfriend had a right to accept the money. Period. It wasn't his fault his money was stolen from a private house, no matter how or where he left it. The father honored what he felt was his responsibility to his daughter and his friend by going to the host and giving him money, but he damaged his own credibility by going to the boyfriend and demanding it back. That was the rude act, and also, a very manipulative one. The power struggle he's instigating is damaging to his relationship with his daughter, with the host, and to himself. He'll be sorry for it because he'll eventually lose her respect and hurt that father/daughter relationship if he keeps that up.

Finally, I'm wondering ... this response was nothing like Cary's usual responses. All I keep thinking is that Cary must somehow know, personally, the people involved. He seemed to be filling in story gaps where I could see none in the letter. Is this true? If so, perhaps it would have been better to stay out of the advice game when objective advice isn't possible. If not, sorry, ignore that last part. The answer just seemed so curt and so, well, mean, not to mention a little patronizing, that I was surprised by it.

I disagree. Are you saying that thieves can't open drawers and look in closets? The boyfriend was in a private home, under the protection of the host and the associated protection of the daughter's parents. In a private home, a larger degree of trust is the norm, and if you want to talk about social contracts, that increased degree of trust in a private home is because, to behave otherwise, as if no one in the home can be trusted, would really have been a breach of a social contract.

Blaming the victim for someone else's crime is always interesting to me. Why do people do that? I think it's because they don't want to believe a crime can be committed against themselves. After all, there must be some complicity between victim and perpetrator or heck, it could happen to anybody. Since crime can and does happen to everyone, whether they 'deserve' it or not (how heartless and ridiculous is that 'he deserved it' stuff, by the way--right, well ...). I stand firmly by my conclusions. A reasonable degree of safety in a private home includes all contents within the house, be they on the counter, on the floor, in a drawer, in a safe, in a closet, etc.

And, your comparison (of the dog and suitcase) doesn't follow, not unless the boyfriend left a door to the house open and an arrow pointing the way to the wallet. Plus, if a dog in my neighborhood jumped through my window and peed in a guest's suitcase, that would still have occurred in my house, and I would be taking care of it. After I found the dog and put it in the circus ...

The one truly responsible for the theft itself is the thief.