Wherever we are brought up, we always feel a lot safer with the familiar than the strange. Most people when they go on holiday tend to be more cautious than in their home town in terms of protecting their belongings and going out in the dark. I have always be cautious at home or away, have always been safe and fortunately had nothing serious happen to me, except from the incidents below. I probably shouldn’t be here today and am lucky to be alive….
Abroad….Alice springs, Australia
My friend and I went backpacking in 2000 round Australia. We spend two weeks in Alice springs. One night we got pretty drunk and realised that we had drunk our taxi money and didn’t have enough to get us home. We approached a taxi driver and asked if they would take us as far as they could for the contents of our purses and we would walk the rest.
The taxi driver was a woman and she said that there is no way she would let two young girls walk past the river bridge because there are men who wait under the bridge to attack women. She would take us all the way home.
As we drove past the bridge my stomach churned as I saw exactly what she said, men waiting in the shadows. I am so grateful to that woman that night. I hate to dwell on what could have happened and wonder if I had of got any other taxi driver if they would have done the same thing.
Home…Birmingham, UK
I lived in Birmingham, UK a couple of times. The main time was between 1996 and 1999 when I was at Uni. I mainly lived in Erdington, moved to Kings Heath and then moved back to Erdington.
I moved into a flat on my own and the electric meter used a pre payment card, an actual piece of card that you put in it. It was my first experience with a card and needless to say I bent it and it became unusable. I had to go get a replacement from a local shop, 15 minutes walk up a busy road I had used frequently.
A short way up the road, a guy, large, black, smoking pot, came up to me. He asked me where I was going, what I was doing, did I live round here etc. I was polite, but evasive, and when we got to the top of the road by the shop I said something along the lines of “nice to meet you, I am going in the shop now, bye”.
After sorting out the card, I went to walk out the shop and froze. I could see the wall outside and a pair of knees belonging to someone sitting down against the wall, they belonged to the man who followed me. I felt very uneasy. I only had two pounds in my purse. I called a taxi, explained a man was following me and asked if they could pick me up and take me as close to my home as they could for the two pounds. They said no. I started to panic. Just as I wondered what the hell to do next, a girl came running into the shop screaming. The man had tried to grab her.
The shop owner called the police and the man ran off. After taking our details, I asked the police to take me home. They said no. I argued that the man who followed me and attacked the girl could be anywhere waiting and that I was not going to walk back down that road and that I couldn’t get a taxi. They reluctantly gave me a lift.
A couple of days later the police came round to interview me. After I described the incident in detail, they said that they were amazed and that my middle name was lucky. The man was currently in a mental institution and had been let out on a 10 minute unsupervised break. The fact that I had walked with him for 15 minutes was amazing because he usually KILLED his victims, young, white women within FIVE MINUTES of meeting them.
My heart goes out to any victims of this man, I am just very grateful I am alive.
I could write a whole discourse on the paranoia / reasons that people feel unsafe in certain situations, especially women in comparison to men in certain situations. People seem to really prepare themselves for difficult situations abroad, but not so much at home, I think that we all have to take the same precautions at home that we do when we go to a foreign place.
What do you think? Do you feel safer in your home country? Do you take the same precautions at home as you would abroad?
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