Truths from Young Women

“Working on campus was terrible. My supervisor was a sexist and a racist. I felt too intimidated at the time to say anything, for fear of losing my job. He (the supervisor) would purposely ignore me. Whenever I asked him a question (job-related and on-the-job), he usually said something like, ‘I don’t know, you’ll have to figure that out on your own, won’t you?’ I depended on that job for a lot, so I kept my mouth shut.”-Anonymous

“Once, when I was out on a Saturday night, downtown, my boyfriends and I were walking up a hill to meet up with some friends. A lot of college kids were out last night. There were two very intoxicated girls walking down the hill towards us. They were holding each other up, stumbling, and laughing. Then, without even looking for traffic, a twenty something guy changes his direction. He walked right into the street, his eyes were locked onto the drunk girls. He walked up to them and started chatting them up, asking where they were going and asking where they lived. My boyfriend and I looked at each other horrified. I ran up to the girls and pretended to be really excited to see them, saying that it had been too long. I didn’t know them, but they were too drunk to notice. They got really excited. I asked them if they needed help home and they said they were almost there. After they walked off, the guy looked at me and said, ‘I was just talking to them.’ I stood there watching to make sure that he didn’t follow them, and they went on laughing and having a good time.”- Anonymous

“I was walking home from work the other night, and I noticed two large raccoons in a front yard about twenty feet away from me. I kept my eyes on them because I didn’t trust them. Another woman had walked up the sidewalk, and she was staring at me staring at the raccoons. When I finally looked up I noticed her and the scared look on her face. I said, “Oh, don’t worry, there were just some raccoons in that yard.” She gave a big sigh of relief and relaxed saying, ‘Thank God, I thought there was a man following you.’”-Anonymous