Campus Safety

We live in a “tips and tricks” society, and this especially true in the media’s approach to personal safety and self-defense; magazines, newspapers and TV media, will often finish a story about an assault, with four or five safety tips, that the listener/viewer is lead to believe will keep them safe, if adopted. The two girls who were recently assaulted in South Boston believed that walking together as a pair, meant that they were safe from being attacked – this may be the case when trying to avoid being targeted by the lone sexual predator, who is looking for a single victim, however a pair of muggers may consider two people a better proposition, as there are two wallets/purses to take, rather than one. Something that is a deterrent to one violent criminal, may not be a deterrent to others. Tips and tricks may work or be applicable in one scenario, but have the opposite effect in others.

At this time of year we receive a lot of requests for private lessons from parents who want us to do a couple of hours self-defense training with their daughter who is about to go off to college/university. Although teenagers are growing up faster these days, their attitudes are often more childlike than they were when I was there age; this generation is relying far more on their parents to do things for them, and take responsibility for them than was the case when I was a teenager. This is not to say I or my peers wouldn’t have benefited from personal safety training before we went off to college, as we certainly would have, but rather that today’s generation has become so reliant on their parents, that they have rarely had to think about or consider the consequences of their actions and behaviors from a personal safety perspective. When this is coupled with a parent’s belief – taken from the way the media presents this subject - that personal safety and self-defense training is really just a collection of tips and tricks that can be communicated in a few hours, everybody’s expectations of what they can achieve in that short timeframe, starts to become highly unrealistic.

I understand that when parents have to consider a myriad of logistics that go into setting their child up on campus, personal safety can easily get forgotten, however when a woman is more likely to be sexually assaulted if she attends college/university than if she doesn’t, and there is an extremely high dropout rate of those who have been victimized (or who suffer lower grades as a consequence), this really shouldn’t be the case, even if looked at from a purely educational perspective. When the psychological and emotional trauma to the individual is considered, personal safety should perhaps be the first and number one concern of any parent as they help their daughter a particular college/university – the Clery Act requires Campus Police to make public their crime statistics. It is easy to believe that the statistics apply to others, and not to ourselves or people we know, however this is just a form of denial.

Personal safety is a mindset, not a collection of tips and tricks, and this mindset cannot be developed overnight. Any “tips and tricks” that are conveyed in this article, should not be seen as something in and of themselves, but as pointers that demonstrate how criminals, assailants and predatory individuals think, behave, and operate. If you feel that after reading some of these pointers you have ticked a box, and have covered some personal safety basis, you have fallen foul of the media’s approach to personal safety, and are a long way from developing an appropriate mindset; one which naturally considers and takes into account the safety consequences of your actions and behaviors. It may be that you don’t want to have to think in this way, or that you believe it’s not necessary to have this particular mindset. If this is the case, you are simply relying on being on the right side of the statistics; everything works until it doesn’t.

Many kids who go off to college for the first time, still act and behave as if they are living at home, where campus is just a larger extension of the house they live in, with fewer restrictions, and a greater sense of freedom. They naturally think everyone is like them, and because they wouldn’t do harmful things to others, others won’t do harmful things to them. Some of the most stolen items on campus are not laptops and electronic devices, but textbooks. Textbooks are unlikely to be stolen by criminals from off-campus, and much more likely to be stolen by fellow students. People steal/take what they believe is valuable, and to a student on a fixed and/or low income, textbooks are valuable. Some books required as course reading can range between $100 and $200 – you can buy electronic devices such as tablets and even laptops for less – however books are items we don’t traditionally consider as valuable i.e. when did you last hear of a burglar breaking into a house and foregoing the widescreen TV, in order to empty the bookshelves? A student may understand that they shouldn’t leave their laptop unattended in a public area, such as a common room or library, whilst not thinking that an unattended textbook is actually coveted/valued more. Who steals textbooks? Not career criminals, but fellow students. Not everybody has the same values or works to the same moral code as we do, even if we share the same environment and situation.

Personal safety on campus can be a hassle. Who wants to have to lock their dorm room door, and take their key, when they go and take a shower? It’s easier and more convenient to simply leave the door propped open. The first time this is done, there may be a sense of apprehension and doubt, as to whether this is a good idea, but by the end of term it’s become a habit with no consequence. That is until the day, when somebody entering the hall of residence, holds a door open for a stranger who now has free run of the building. This time there is a consequence, as that stranger is patrolling the corridors looking for unlocked or open doors. Not only do you lose your laptop, but perhaps because you didn’t back your work up to the cloud or an external device, that term’s work, and the papers you have due in, in the following weeks.

Going to college should be an exciting time, which will end with an academic qualification and some important life experiences. By not thinking about personal safety, and trusting that the statistics apply to others, the outcome may be very different. Personal safety is a mindset, not simply a collection of top tips. If you have concluded that not leaving textbooks unattended, and keeping doors locked is the be all and end all to security on campus, and the point of this article, then at least you have two new “tips” to adopt. However, the risks that young women attending university face, extend far beyond this. Personal safety is a mindset, and so by way of introduction to this mindset, we have created a free six module personal safety course (www.campussafety-seps.com) for women going to college, which can be accessed by clicking here.