1. Call a friend on the phone while walking home alone.
And if they don’t pick up, many times I just hold my phone up my ear and pretend there is another person on the phone by mumbling “uh huh” and “okay” every once in awhile.
2. Cross the street when approaching a large group of people of the opposite sex.
Whether I’m walking back from Bellomy, across campus, or in downtown Portland to my car, I try to cross the street before it looks super obvious that I am avoiding the group. But why do I feel like I have to be subtle about it?
3. Watch my drink all night.
I carry it around everywhere I go, like it's permanently glued to my hand. Although I’ve strayed from this rule a few times, I think about it in terms of risk and benefit. Is taking the risk of leaving my drink while I go to the bathroom worth it? Or does the benefit of knowing I’m safe outweigh the minor inconvenience of carrying my drink all of 20 feet to the bathroom?
4. Walk with my keys in my hand way in advance.
Whether I am walking down the hall to my door or walking down the street to my dorm, I have my keys balled up in my fist.
5. Put headphones in but not listen to music so I can ignore what other people say.
This is one of the tendencies that I don’t myself understand why I do it. Why do I chose to actively ignore comments but while pretending I just don’t hear them? Why would I rather have the person think I don’t hear their comments? Isn’t that just teaching them that they can say whatever they want without consequence?
6. Similarly, turn my music down or all the way off to be more aware of my surroundings.
In the same way I don't want people to think I’m hearing their comments, I also want to be more aware of my surroundings while also looking like I’m preoccupied.
7. Ask a friend to walk me home.
Whether I’m walking back the two blocks from my friend’s house to my own or from the movie theater to the car, I usually ask someone to come with me.
8. Text friends to let them know I made it home safely.
I have been on both sides of this interaction many times. If my friend has decided to leave a party early, I tell them to text me when they get home; if they don’t text back within 10 minutes, I send them a text confirming that they made it home.
9. Share my location with a friend to make sure they know where I am.
For the most part, I think the use of technology poses many threats to personal privacy and safety. But this is one of the features of the new technology that I actually think is very useful, especially the option that sets a time limit for how long you share your location.
10. Aggressively avoid eye contact with anyone walking past who you didn’t know.
This is one of the things I do that is actually pretty counterintuitive. If I was afraid of someone attacking me, wouldn't I want to stare them down as they walk past me and make sure they know that I know their face? Do you really think that if an attacker sees you look at them, they’ll say “well she looked at me, I think I’ll attack her now because she saw me.”
For some reason, many women, myself included, think that pretending you don’t see someone will lower your chances of getting attacked by them when in reality, attackers are cowards and want to prey on people who don’t see it coming. In a self-defense class, I took this summer, my teacher told us that if we ever felt like we were being followed, to take out our phones and start recording while yelling “I see you and I’m taking a video!”
Let them know you see them and will have no problem picking them out in a lineup.
These are all precautions that I should not have to take. In a perfect world, the only thing I would have to worry about while walking home would be the walking part, literally just about whether I was capable to put one foot in front of the other.
But we don't live in a perfect world and I will continue to do these things without fail until we live in a society where young women can feel completely safe doing the same mundane tasks that men can do without apprehension, like simply walking down the street.
