From: julie (Julie Wright)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Women's and men's safety
Date: 16 Dec 1992 23:24:49 GMT
Organization: The Cultural Elite
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu
Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu

biesel@javelin.sim.es.com (Heiner Biesel) writes:

>vanhoek@bend.UCSD.EDU (Karen van Hoek) writes:

>>I live in Ann
>>Arbor, a very nice town; my male friends all feel safe walking
>>in many parts of it at almost all hours.  I don't.
[...]
>>[...] if I fly 2,300 miles
>>and then drive for an hour, I can have a lovely nighttime
>>walk.  Male friends in my neighborhood can just step out
>>their front doors.

>It all boils down to the reason why you feel unsafe. Are your feelings
>based upon a reasonable expectation of experiencing violence, or are
>they conditioned by fear based upon an exaggerated sense of the dangers?

This is certainly worth considering any time one is evaluating risks.

>Given that you you say that the only place you've ever felt safe was way 
>out in the emptiness I'd say your fears are probably exaggerated.

Maybe.  However, if she walked around by herself at night on a regular
basis, I'm willing to bet more people would say she was foolhardy than
reasonable, and many would feel she was partly responsible for any attack
on her (remember the Central Park jogger?).

This next bit is what I really want to comment on:

>Consider: your male friends take a certain risk whenever they venture
>outside. That risk is dependent upon their behavior, and the location.
>The same conditions apply to you. The risks you take - the probability that
>you will experience violence - can be estimated from the general incidence
>of violence toward women in the area, something that is quantifiable. Again,
>the same applies for men.

>Now, suppose the risk as estimated by these statistics is the same for men
>and women, and yet men feel more safe than women. Obviously, the feelings
>of fear are then rooted in differences of perception and in the emotional
>responses of the sexes rather than in the actual risk. I'm not familar with
>Ann Arbor, or its crime statistics, but unless they're very different from
>most "very nice towns", I'd expect that roughly comparable numbers of men
>and women are the victims of violence there, and that hence women and men
>should feel equally (in)secure.

It boggles my mind the number of times I see this argument from apparently
intelligent people.  

As you point out above, the risk is _dependent on behavior_.  If men are
much more likely than women to venture out alone, or at night, or in high-
crime areas, and the statistics indicate that in spite of their lower-risk
behavior women are _still_ about as likely to be crime victims, it seems
obvious to me that women are at higher risk than men for equivalent 
behavior.  In other words, your statement that "the probability that you
will experience violence can be estimated from the general incidence of
violence toward women in the area" _assumes_ that she will _behave_ like
the average woman in the area; yet you compare the crime statistics as
if the average man and woman in the area behaved identically, an idea
which I find laughable, and say that this demonstrates she should behave
like the average man, since she won't be at any greater risk than he is.

>If that is the case you should ask yourself why you still feel so
>unsafe, and what you can do to overcome that feeling. Perhaps you're
>swayed by the prevalence of reports of grisly rapes and such in the
>media, which typically treat assaults upon men as uninteresting, but
>give sensational coverage to sexual crimes of all sorts. Perhaps men
>should feel the same degree of insecurity that you do. Perhaps, but
>I don't think so.

I don't think so either.  I think the average man _should_ perceive less
danger of victimization for walking around alone at night than the average
woman.  If average men started living in the same careful and cautious 
patterns that women tend to, I think the victimization rates would illustrate
the differences that our lifestyles illustrate now.  Alternatively, if
average women started living in the same freer patterns that men tend
to, I think you'd see crime against women skyrocket.  

>OBfeminism: perhaps the sexes respond differently to perceived dangers.
>If so, what - if anything - should be done about it?

Perhaps the sexes respond differently because the dangers really are
different.  I'm probably not any more likely to be burglarized than my
friend in rural Pennsylvania, but she leaves her door unlocked and I
have several locks on my New York apartment.  We're both being quite
rational in our perceptions of risk, _I_ think, but if I started behaving 
like she does, well, what do you think would happen?

Of course, if you think that in general, women don't take any precautions
against crime that men don't take, none of my logic above holds.  However,
I _would_ tend to question whether we are on the same planet.

---Julie


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