They say you should never run alone. They tell you to go places in buddy pairs. To keep your purse close. Carry pepper spray. Walk on the main roads.
If you’re a soldier, they tell you to keep your head on the swivel – that means to always be watching around you.
Since when did being a pedestrian on a sidewalk become as unpredictable and risky as going to war? If you are a female, you probably understand. To be fair, if you are a minority in any unfamiliar area, you also probably understand (as the movie Get Out alarmingly portrayed in its opening scene).
To be female is to be uncomfortably aware of every large, male stranger you pass by when you are out alone. It’s at that moment that your brain decides to replay all of the horrible stories you’ve read or seen on the news of women before you, who just like you, were walking down a street like this one, only to be caught off-guard and taken advantage of. We’ve all heard the statistic: one in four college women will be assaulted on campus at some point during their undergrad career. And according to a 2008 survey conducted by the founder of Stop Street Harassment, 81% of women had experienced a passerby saying a sexually explicit comment to them, 75% were followed by an unknown man at least once, and 27% were assaulted on the street during their lifetime. It’s no wonder then why we make quick judgements of people we pass, though perhaps unfair, in order to keep our guards up for any potential nuisances – the necessity of survival is ingrained within our psyche.
In the last few weeks at Xavier, students’ phones have been blowing up with XU Alert Me notifications of recent crimes that have hit very close to campus. So often we brush off these alerts as just another notification to check when we get out of class, just another misfortune that happened to somebody else but doesn’t really affect us. “It could never happen to me.” But as time has gone by, these armed robberies, and just last week, a mugging threat to a student pedestrian walking home from studying, have started to take residence in the back of our consciousness, reminding us of the unsettling reality that we are never really safe. Especially as females, we feel more and more that we can’t walk back home without a buddy, preferably one who is 6 foot 5 and has a substantial background in karate self-defense.
But here’s the problem: I love being a pedestrian. I love walking and running on my own, and taking time to think to myself after a stressful day. I like to get lost in my thoughts and stare off into my surroundings. I get a huge rush out of running down streets I don’t know, and then testing myself to find my way back without turning around. It’s everything they tell you not to do, but it also feels so natural, that it’s a shame to go back to running the same old main roads or on a monotonous treadmill. I still get scared sometimes, but I’m also angry that I’m scared about participating in an occupation so ordinary, our parents and grandparents did it without a second thought in their times.
And for that reason, I think we need to work on demonstrating our own resiliency. I was still scared yesterday when I went for my Friday run after a long day of class. I was starting to feel paranoid as I proceeded down Dana and passed my first male pedestrian – but it was fine, and this man didn’t even give me a second look. As I went on, I passed by a girl I knew from school, running by herself. I smiled at her and we shared a momentary bond at our shared occupation. Funny enough, a few minutes later, I ran by another female acquaintance, also running alone. By the end of my run, I had passed three more Xavier women running on their own, off-campus, getting in a good workout. I felt a bubble of pride deep in me, rising up and empowering me to reject the advice people always give and instead take ownership of these sidewalks. I won’t let the misguided thugs and criminals have the power to force me into hiding, though I now will take wise precautions when I go out. Women shouldn’t have to be scared of doing something they love or feel like they can’t participate like males as normal sidewalk pedestrians without an escort. I’m not going to back down from the Norwood threats, I’m going to keep running.