Letter to the editor: I want to feel safe

Just this past Sunday I took part in a privilege walk during the All Campus Leadership Conference. If you don’t know what a privilege walk is, it’s where everyone stands in a line shoulder-to-shoulder, someone reads off statements, and if you identify with a statement, you take a step forward. It’s meant to make people aware of their own privilege as well as how they compare to others in their community. If you haven’t done one, I highly suggest it, it’s such an easy and eye-opening experience. While these privilege walks bring up so many different points of privilege, I want to focus on one in particular that stuck out to me. Now first I should explain the demographics in the room. It was a group of ten people—nine were female and one was male. The moderator asked, “How many of you feel safe walking home alone at night?”

Whoever identified with that was to take a step forward. When that question was asked, only one person in the room took a step forward. Can you guess who it was? It was the male student. All nine women stayed put without even a second thought, and the male student reluctantly stepped forward.

That experience I just described enrages me. Yes, you could argue that our small group this morning does not represent the feelings or experiences of the general public, let alone the rest of the students here at UW-Madison, and that might be true. But nonetheless, what I saw today was a group of women, including myself, who all felt unsafe walking alone at night, and one man who could not relate with that statement. Even if that feeling is only apparent in that room at that time and does not represent the experiences of the rest of our student body (which I highly doubt), it doesn’t matter. It proves something so real that women are facing every day, or should I say night.

I just want to take a moment to clarify a couple things. First, I am not a man hater. I mean I don’t think any woman is, but I certainly am not. All of the men in my life are absolutely amazing and I’m so thankful to have them. This article is not to say that all men are evil—of course they’re not. No one in their right mind would try to claim that. But there are staggering statistics showing how often women are physically and/or sexually assaulted by men, and I want to confront those. It’s not about all men being bad, it’s about all women having experienced some sort of harassment from men in their lifetime. Which brings me to my next point: This stuff happens to men too. Men are victims of physical and sexual violence by women, and I am not here to cover that up or paint it as a lie. It’s incredibly important and needs to be talked about.

But for this article I have taken my small amount of words and chosen to talk about my personal experiences as a woman and what I’ve learned other women experience as well. Being a woman, especially in a college town where drinking is so prevalent, requires extra thinking and care. Just the act of being out late at night can involve a lot of thinking and planning— “Who am I going to be with?”, “Do those people live close to me so I could walk home with them?”, “If they don’t live close, would someone be willing to walk with me?”, “But that person can’t be another woman, because then who is going to walk her home?”, “Could I take a bus that drops me off close enough to my house?” “I might have to stay out later if no one wants to leave when I do”, and so many more. These thoughts go through my head every time I am going somewhere at night because I am simply not comfortable with walking home alone.

And these are also questions that most of my friends who are women have to think about as well. Just to be able to be out at night for whatever reason we choose, women must have an action plan of how to get home in the safest way possible. This simply isn’t something that most men have to think about.

I wanted to finish by lightening things up a little bit with a quote from a comedian, but while he is a comedian, Louis CK’s statement from his standup routine on dating is anything but funny to me: “There is no greater threat to women than men. We’re the number one threat to women—globally and historically—we are the number one cause of injury and mayhem. We’re the worst thing that ever happens to them.”

Briana is a junior studying community and nonprofit leadership with a certificate in gender and women’s studies. Send all comments and concerns to opinion@dailycardinal.com.