<p>Many young women quickly discover that they are more likely to be the victim of a sexual assault by another student than by a stranger. </p>
<p>If your D is not street savvy, you have ample time to teach her basic skills. How to take out money from an ATM. How and why to lock up her prescription medications. Why she needs to lock up her laptop even if she’s just taking a shower, and why she should never prop open the front door of her dorm for a friend who is coming “in three seconds”. Why she should not jog with ear buds listening to loud music. Why she should not get into a car with someone who has had “just a few drinks”.</p>
<p>I would not worry about a daughter who is street savvy in almost any city in the US. I would worry about a daughter who didn’t have good skills on virtually any campus. And I would be terrified about a mostly rural campus where the social life involves cars and drinking.</p>
<p>Everyone needs street smarts.
Common sense decisions that are second nature to keeping oneself safe in any situation.
Fathers cannot protect their daughters by making them afraid but by giving them the confidence they have the common sense to handle any situation.
D will need to know she can safely travel alone, go on business trips alone,move to a new city alone basically live her life with out irrational fear.
Dad needs support not paralyze his d with his fears of her being a victim of crime.</p>
I agree that everyone needs to learn how to reduce the risks of problems, but an attitude of “blaming the victim” is not the view I would want my kids to take. Crimes can and do happen to all kinds of people, as much as we might think we can avoid them if only we do all the “right” things.</p>
<p>And they need to understand that alcohol plays a big role in this problem.</p>
<p>There are differences among campuses, though, at least in terms of theft. My son was an undergraduate at a university where any object of value that was abandoned for even a few seconds would vanish. He then went to graduate school at another university, where people routinely left laptops, bicycles, and other expensive possessions unsecured, and nothing happened to them.</p>
<p>How do middle-class college students die? They don’t die in random, violent street crime. They die in accidents, usually alcohol-related ones. If your goal is to minimize risk to the child, you should prefer urban campuses to rural ones where students spend a lot of time in cars. Dozens to hundreds of middle-class students die in car accidents every year. Other kinds of alcohol-related accidents (falling down stairs or off balconies) are also relatively common. I bet every poster on the thread has known at least one, if not several, accidental deaths. On the other hand, being killed in a mugging or break-in at college is so rare as to be almost unheard of. I can’t think of a single incident off the top of my head, from any school.</p>
<p>(On the rare occasion when a middle-class college student is murdered, it’s by someone they know, and domestic violence is just as likely to occur in the woods as in the city.)</p>
<p>I think if a child doesn’t feel safe in an area it is a VERY good reason to cross it off the list. Our kids are small town kids, they don’t have any interest in going to a school in a large city, even without looking at those schools or the area that they are in. I don’t think they need to feel uncomfortable for 4 years just so mom and dad can wear the “right” sweatshirt. I would love for my kids to go to school in Washington, DC, but THEY don’t want to so we won’t consider those schools.</p>
I would agree that the child should feel relatively safe, but the parent has to be reasonable about including or not including schools based on the crime of an entire city. While H is opposed to one high-crime city, he is urging us to consider a school in Chicago. Consistency not being his strong suit ;).</p>
<p>I bet it’s less about consistency than perception. There are at least three “most dangerous corners” in Seattle, depending on who you talk to. They’re in entirely different neighborhoods and have entirely different populations. I live near one of these corners and pass it every single day, sometimes multiple times. I have never had a problem. I know people who won’t come here because of the problems. And yet-they’ll pass one of the other “most dangerous corners” to shop all the time. Perception. It works the same with entire cities.</p>
<p>“High crimes” in cities are often concentrated in certain neighborhoods. There’s a huge difference between the crime rate in Austin/Gresham and the crime rate in Lincoln Park, Streeterville or the Gold Coast. It’s silly just to condemn a whole city as being high crime.</p>
<p>And beware of people who conflate high crime neighborhoods with “people who don’t look like me” neighborhoods. There are lots of urban neighborhoods filled with hard-working, middle class professionals (teachers, nurses, etc.) which are quite safe even if the neighborhood doesn’t look like New Canaan CT or Winnetka, IL.</p>
<p>Steve- it’s not about wearing the right sweatshirt. And for sure your kids shouldn’t live anywhere if they don’t feel safe. But my kids have been offered jobs and fellowships and grad school and tremendous professional opportunities in their 20’s which they wouldn’t have felt comfortable accepting had they not learned to navigate city living during their college years. And ironically, the people we know who have been the victims of crime have been living in bucolic places at the time.</p>
<p>Bad things can happen anywhere. A terrible home invasion/triple murder in Middletown CT a few years ago in a town so idyllic nobody locked their doors. Had it happened in New Haven everyone would have blamed “the other”- but to have two white psychopaths target a picture perfect family in their own lovely home? A horrendous workplace multiple victim murder in Manchester CT a year later?</p>
<p>Random violence is a shocking and terrible thing and not limited to inner cities.</p>
<p>Why don’t you get the lists of crimes in all of the cities of schools being considered and show them to your DH? When Hanover was shocked with the senseless murder of two professors, you realize that these things can happen any where, but on the other hand, some places have pages of confrontational crimes within the blocks of where a college is and others do not. Where the school is located and where the students live is a better indicator than looking at city wide stats, by the way. What happens three miles down the road from a school is a whole other story, than three blocks.</p>
<p>It seems pretty clear the OP is talking about Philadelphia, so I will talk about Philadelphia, not some generic big city with a high crime rate.</p>
<p>I have lived in Philadelphia since 1983; my wife has been here since 1981; each of my children lived here for 18-19 years before leaving. All of the time before 1994 was spent living in various parts of the West Philadelphia neighborhood west and southwest of the Penn and Drexel campuses, near what used to be the Pharmacy School (and is now University of the Sciences in Philadelphia). Where our children went to high school was literally next door to LaSalle University. I am very familiar with the campuses of almost every other college in the city: Temple, St. Joe’s, Philadelphia University, UArts, Moore, Chestnut Hill, and I know people who are or have been students or faculty at almost all of them. My wife’s jobs regularly took her to every bad neighborhood in the city. None of us has ever been a victim of any kind of street violence here, not even a mugging. </p>
<p>College students are not victims of random street violence in Philadelphia. They may have a wallet or purse stolen (though that is not something that happens frequently). Having a bike stolen (or part of it) is common enough that people don’t use good bikes unless they have a place to put them inside at all times. But serious injury at the hands of a stranger – getting cut, or shot, or raped – is very rare. When it happens, it’s big news, and there’s a massive hunt for the perpetrator. Sadly, that’s racist and classist – African-American kids in poor neighborhoods get hurt all the time without the police going all CSI – but it reflects the fact that the high crime rate is largely a factor of drug gangs fighting one another far from our college campuses, or the usual run of violence between people who know each other well, something that affects college students everywhere.</p>
<p>Worry about student-on-student crime. The person who may kill or maim your daughter is in her Chem class, unfortunately. Cities do raise the risk of street crime, but the absolute risk is still very small, and it is counterbalanced by a major reduction in the risk of driving accidents, drunken or not, since by and large students do not drive and party.</p>