Vulnerable

When I was 17, someone tried to abduct me. It's a story people close to me know pretty well. I was working in a restaurant located in an office building, and went down to the parking garage about 9:30 PM when I got off work. I went to the wrong level, and as I was trying to get my bearings, a man jumped out of his car and ran towards me. As soon as I could react (and it took a few seconds), I ran towards the road. He chased me for a bit, but eventually ducked back and took off in his car. I don't know what you think, but something tells me he wasn't trying to say hello. If I hadn't ran or had waited a second or two longer, I would certainly have been raped, and, possibly, killed. I've mostly pushed the event out of my head, but every now and again I think about other girls... has he tried to attack someone else? Has he been successful?

About two years later, a classmate from high school disappeared in San Francisco. She's never been found. She was close to her family, so just hauling off and disappearing is unlikely. The general consensus is that she's long dead. I don't think we'll ever know.

In general, I like being a woman, but I dislike how vulnerable a woman is in today's world. It hits me everytime I want to go for a run on a local trail, but my husband isn't home. Is it really safe to run through a public trail in the woods by myself? Probably not.

What about going to the mall at night? Walking between my car and the building is always a bit tense, because I have to be on alert. Same with the grocery store, the gas station, and basically anywhere else one would need to go.

Maybe I'm a bit paranoid. Fair enough, it's a character-flaw I've been informed of on more than one occasion. But it's not as if I don't have good reason to be paranoid. To me, random violent crime against women is not an abstract concept, it's an experience I've had firsthand.

Being relatively young and attractive enough to rate stares from the occasional stranger, I often feel as if I'm being violated just by a look. It's something I've experienced both here in the US and abroad (particuarly in Mexico, where my quasi-blond hair draws intense stares from groups of men that seem like just a hop, skip and a jump from gang rape).

So why even mention all of this? I don't know, I just think it's a disheartening truth of the modern world. Women can do all sorts of things: become cops, attorneys, maybe even the President, but the truth is we're still susceptible to violent attacks, particularly those of a sexual nature.

I was recently reminded of the murder of a female resident of French St. Martin that occurred a couple of years back. She was brutally murdered and sexually assaulted, her body dumped and mutilated. I don't think her killers were ever found. The weird thing was I completely remembered her from my 2005 trip with our group of friends. We sat near her at a beach bar one afternoon, browsed in the shop where she was a clerk, and saw her on the beach all week. Not sure why she stuck in my head, but she did. I used to think how carefree and lovely it would be to move to an island as a woman, but that made me re-think things. One misstep, one instance of getting involved with the wrong guy or turning down the wrong man's advances, and that could be it.

I guess those sorts of stories always stick with me, because I'm reminded of how close I came to being a headline.