Rape and pillage

Rape, burglaries, assaults, attempted assaults and muggings, in other words rape and pillage is running rife and did run rife during this past weekend and into the week. Yet we continue to walk alone at night and make ourselves targets for the disgusting creatures that pace, waiting like patient lions for an innocent student just desperate to finish an assignment or visit a friend. A week ago I posted a blog entitled “Denied the pleasure of solitude in nature” where I ranted and raved like an ignorant fool demanding to know why I have to give up the pleasures of nature because I might be raped or the like. But after reading about the incident that occurred when a girl walked from her digs to one of the computer labs in the dead of night and got raped on the way back, I could not help but think, “What an idiot, of course that was going to happen!”. Except that I had done exactly the same thing and my hypocrisy brought me back to the cold reality that we desperately want to believe that things like this won’t happen to us, but they do because there is an asshole out there that is just as desperate to prove you wrong. Another friend of mine missed her lecture yesterday because she was up all night playing rescue to her friend who had been mugged and beaten right outside her bedroom window and she had not heard a single ting. Another incident concerns to drama students who were rehearsing in the drama department and were mugged by three individuals. My concern is why are students up at all hours, walking the streets to work in computer labs and rehearsing in departments? Is it our typical, lazy condition to leave everything to the last minute or is a different kind of desperation driving us? Or is it neither and just the very sad fact that the institutions i.e. the police, education institutions and the government, that are meant to protect us are failing miserably?