The week of June 17 was a particularly busy one for local thugs. Three days in a row that week, women in the Allston-Brighton area were assaulted. One of the women was a nurse at St. Elizabeth's Hospital who was kidnapped from the hospital parking lot. The police reaction? Mary Evans, a police spokeswoman, suggested that women should be accompanied to their cars at night by a man. Did it ever occur to her that a lot of women might not have a man available to walk them to their cars at night or, further, that supplying one's own male escort ought not to be a prerequisite for holding down a job? I've always thought that one of the major reasons why women bother acquire marketable skills and enter the work force is to achieve independence. If we wanted to escorted by a man every time we left home we'd all be living in Saudi Arabia.
In talking with women about job conditions, the issue with of simple physical safety is near the top of everyone's list of concerns. Women can handle infighting at the office – it's the street fighting that causes problems. Yet for the government and for employers, the safety of female employees seems, at best, an afterthought. More attention is spent on thwarting the theft of IBM typewriters than preventing rape in the ladies' room. Sara, the women whose story I reported above, says that after her assault her boss sent around a memo stating that a security guard would be available to escort women employees to their cars. But the first time she requested such an escort the security guard in her building seemed to have no idea what she was talking about and said that, in any event, no one was available.
Naturally, in a reasonable society, one would expect to be safe in one's home as well as strolling the streets of one's neighborhood. Clearly this is now not the case for many women. But in choosing how and where to live, women have at least some control over the safety of their homes; they have little or no control over the conditions at and along the way to the workplace. Even in an unreasonable society, such as we now live in, women ought to be able to work in safety.
In an effort to attract woman travelers, some hotels have designated special women's floors, where security is especially tight. In parking garages, certain floors with permanent guards ought to be similarly reserved for women. Policemen ought to patrol the major routes to train stations. Employers ought to have the safety of employees somewhere at the tops of their lists when designing workplaces, allocating parking places, and establishing employee schedules.
Fear ought not to be a standard part of every woman's work day.
