When I was in high school, I used to walk around Pittsburgh at night a lot. It wasn’t really a matter of defiance or anything like that — it was just what made sense. Buses were inconsistent and unreliable after about 8 p.m., I didn’t drive, and any of my friends who did were usually too drunk or high to count on for a ride when it was needed. As a result, I frequently ended up walking home from parties, sometimes up to three or four miles.
Most of these times, I was alone. I liked being able to leave parties on my own terms, and finding my way home on foot turned into a more or less weekly ritual, during which I could process the abundant angst of my teen years. I never felt endangered or threatened. To the contrary: Those hours at night, around 1 or 2 in the morning on quiet, cold, intermittently spotlit streets, made up the few times in high school in which I remember feeling calm. I didn’t just feel like I owned the city — I could convince myself that I was the only person in it.
As girls, we are told again and again and again that the streets are not safe for us and we do not belong there. Last winter, my colleague Darby Minow Smith wrote a lovely piece on the experience of walking alone at night — and how as women, we can be scared to participate in our own communities because we have been taught to feel unsafe in them. The mantra is that to be alone in a city at night is to put your body at risk. As it turns out, the riskiest situation my own body ever ended up in was in a friend’s bedroom at a party, incapacitated by a Solo cup’s worth of terrible vodka. I was 16, and while all the adults in my life had urged me repeatedly not to be outside alone after dark, no one had ever warned me about that.
That blurry and awful night was, quite sadly, not an exception to the rule — far from it: The Center for Disease Control’s most recent statistics on sexual assault show that only 12.9 percent of rapes are perpetrated by a stranger, while 45.4 are committed by an intimate partner and 46.7 by an acquaintance. (If these numbers aren’t adding up, it’s because women were able to report multiple instances of sexual assault in this survey.)
[For more of this story, written by Eve Andrews, go to http://grist.org/living/why-wo...lkin-after-midnight/]
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