Afraid

My daughter had a track meet today at high school in southeast Seattle. She finished her events early in the meet, and was ready to go home. Instead of waiting to take the school bus back to northeast Seattle, she took the light rail to the university station. She would have to walk about five or six blocks from the high school where the track meet was held to the light rail station. It is spring, so the sun was still up at 5:30 or so when she called. I told her to text me when she got on the train, and then when she arrived at the university station so we could pick her up. A half hour later, I was making tortilla soup, and I started to get a little pit in my stomach wondering where she was. I thought about calling or texting to see if she was okay, but I didn't want her to get mugged for her smart phone. Just then, my phone pinged and I got her text. She was on the train.

Claire Adele rides the bus downtown every other week for a youth group event, so I know she has some street smarts about riding public transportation. In Seattle, middle school kids who live between one and two miles from school are given an Orca card (aka city bus pass) instead of a yellow bus. My sophomore is not the youngest kid in town on public transportation.

That being said, I was at a student run event at the same high school of the track meet last fall. The students were asking the school district and city to give all students bus passes, regardless of where they live. The students, especially girls, were concerned about their safety. Several students had been mugged walking to and from school. In their own words, the kids did not always feel safe in their own neighborhood.

And here I am letting my daughter walk through this unfamiliar of town. She accused me of being racist a few months ago when I would not let her attend a presidential campaign rally by herself in that part of town. In that case, she would have get down there by herself, hang out, and then get home by herself when the rally ended around eleven o'clock at night. (Did I mention she wanted to do this alone?) I told her I not making assumptions about the neighborhood, but rather the information I got was from the students themselves and I got at their school. If students tell me they are afraid, I believe them. Plus, while Seattle Public Schools thinks it is fine for kids to ride the bus to and from school, school hours aren't until 11:00 p.m.

I studied statistics in college. There are 400 kids at that high school and 180 days in the school year, which means there are 144,000 trips to and from school each year by the students. If ten kids a year are mugged, that means there is a 0.0069% chance of being mugged on any day walking to or from school. If ten students are mugged, that means 2.5% of the students would have been victims of a crime. If each of these kids has twenty unique friends, it means that 50% of the kids in the school know someone who got mugged.

The odds of my daughter getting mugged during rush hour in daylight were incredibly small, as she was only taking one trip. I suppose I could get all Nate Silver and fivethirtyeight.com on this and apply a distance from school factor to this (i.e., the longer the walk home, the greater the likelihood of getting mugged, or studying where the mugging occur and figure out how many students walk past that point, etc.), but I won't. The question is when and where to be afraid, and how much it should run your life.

There is a difference between specifically afraid and theoretically afraid. I lived in Chicago in my twenties. I didn't own a car and relied on public transit. I've lived in the big city where bad shit happened all of the time, but the odds of anything specifically happening to me were slim. Was I still theoretically afraid? Yes. All of the time? No. Could I afford a cab late at night when I didn't want to take a bus which decreased my need to be afraid? Yep. Did I pay attention and look under parked cars as I walked past to make sure a lunatic wasn't hiding underneath, ready to grab my ankles and pull me to my death? Yes.

I recently read an article (I wish I could remember where--damn middle age) about women being afraid for their personal safety in general. A counselor (or therapist or social worker) had a group of married couples. She asked everyone when they were last afraid. One man said twenty years earlier when he was in a war. Another said something like when he was in a car accident. The women all had events within the last week, if not that day. "I was afraid walking through a dark parking lot" was a common refrain.

I used to be unafraid when I was in high school, but I lived in a suburb. When I got to college, fear kicked in, not because I got a sixth sense, but because I was followed twice by men who should not have been following me. In both cases, I was with at least one other person, so my "safety in numbers" theory went out the window.

I think my daughter isn't afraid like I was in college, and she wants to go to college in New York City. Her high school has 1,800 kids, and one kid (male) got mugged last year and no kids got mugged this year. In two years, that is about 1.3 million trips to and from school in two years. The odds of getting mugged at her school are 1.3 million to one over two years.

I am not sure if I am glad my daughter isn't afraid, or if I wish she were. There is a big gap between being intrepid and being chicken shit. She says strange people have approached her on the street when she goes downtown for her youth groups meetings. She tosses them a scowl, and they back off. She has a great scowl, and I can see it being effective. Where is the line, though, where women can feel just as safe as men going about and about in strange places, or even in their own neighborhood?