I dream of the day when I no longer have to be afraid.
As someone who is always glued to her news feed, it’s not a surprise for me to see people sharing notes on unfortunate incidents that have happened to other people who use public transportation.
Before college, public transportation for me was taking a cab from Point A to Point B and paying the amount in the meter. When I entered college, it was a different story. Since I don’t live near campus, and upon my parents’ insistence that I do not stay in a dormitory, I devote around three hours a day to getting to and from school.
When relatives knew what I was about to go into, I was immediately bombarded with tips on what I should be doing while commuting. I understood that their advice was to keep me safe, but to be quite honest, there was a point wherein I thought these were mere hyperboles of day-to-day situations. I was wrong. There was one instance when someone purposely opened a pocket in my backpack, and while I was fortunate enough not to lose anything, I do all I can to prevent it from happening again.
Added to this paranoia is the “disadvantage” of being a woman who uses public transportation. While it is scary enough watching out for people who want to steal your things, it is more nerve-wracking to always have that thought at the back of your head: Someone is bound to harass, or even worse, rape you. Certainly, no one would forget the startling news from India heard around the world in 2012, when an Indian woman was gang-raped inside a bus by six men including the driver. Hitting closer to home, a woman who was coming home from a job interview was nearly abducted by men as she stepped off a bus just last August. In society today, the knee-jerk response is to come up with ways to not have your body be appealing for people to hurt you. This breaks my heart, because instead of telling people not to physically or verbally harm others, we tell ourselves to do what we can to not to be harmed by other people.
No one deserves to spend most of his or her daily travels with a fear of being harmed, having fruits of hard work being taken away in an instant, or seeing a close friend or relative die because of people with ill intentions.
Whether or not it’s an overreaction, using public transportation and reading about these incidents have made me more wary of the people I encounter each day. I am not going to lie: There are moments where I find myself glancing back to check when I hear footsteps behind me while walking home. Safety in the public sphere is not something that should be attained by someone by virtue of how one dresses or acts. Whether or not one chooses to wear tiny shorts or a tailored polo, or whether one uses gadgets in public or not, safety should be rightfully provided for all. Present day methods such as police deployment, set-up of checkpoints across cities and closed-circuit television cameras all contribute to safety, but all these combined simply aren’t enough to ensure everyone is safe.
While it is so easy to focus on the negatives, what these fears allowed me to do, however, was help me toughen up because I learned how the world worked. The day in which this fear will be alleviated will undoubtedly take a little bit longer to come. For now, it’s another dance with (commuter) destiny.
