Rape

It's been about two years, and like I mentioned already, this was a street rape where a total stranger grabbed me and pulled me in an alley.

So since that time, I can feel in my body when I'm in the streets or in the halls or a building or anything, a tension across the back of my shoulders.

I'm always super aware there might be someone back there who's going to grab that.

It's like you feel tense.

You actually feel tense.

Yeah, I really feel tense, and I feel very tense when I see men, particularly black men, on the street because the man who raped me was black.

And I resent that a lot because I never had a racial problem before.

I still live in a biracial neighborhood.

I've always chosen to.

I just like that part of the city anyway.

But I do have this thing in my head to deal with that.

And then I take a lot of precautions, and I resent like hell the fact that I have to think about doing that.

And carrying weapons and all that stuff.

I never thought about that three years ago, and now I do.

But the part that pisses me the most is I don't want to live like a soldier.

I'm a civilian, and we have to.

This is what's really bad, and I would like for women to get, women generally, to be enraged about just that.

No, I'm really, I'm very, very angry.

This just happened to me like I was telling you about a month ago.

And I'm angry.

I'm angry too.

I'm so angry that I feel like I would kill.

You're angry at that man, but you're not angry at him in general.

No, I'm not angry at anybody in particular.

I'm not angry at him either.

Just the whole situation? I couldn't be angry with him in a sense.

The whole situation is the fact that this stuff even happens.

I think that's inexcusable.

I think it's inexcusable that this stuff even has to happen.

On the other hand, I know that while I was being raped and for a long time afterwards, I never felt angry.

I didn't feel anything.

I was just glad to be alive.

That was my reaction.

But later on, like after I heard so many other women talk about their experiences, I mean I feel much more in touch with that kind of primitive sort of anger that would make me feel like, boy, if this ever happens to me again, I just want to blow his brains out.

Just remembering what it feels like to not know if this guy is another Richard Speck.

I didn't know what he was going to try to do to us after he raped us.

And you just never know if you're going to come out of this alive.

And that's what's so ironic to me about the attitude on the part of psychiatrists and the police who say, why that can enjoy it? Oh boy.

They just think that rape is just a simple screw.

Yeah.

You know, people had sex.

Someone was dominant.

Someone was passive.

Sex was had.

And the word rape is something that they just don't understand or relate to very much or take very seriously.

Well, yeah.

This man in my class, he said, he honestly said, well, don't most women want to be raped? Oh my God.

Well, really, you can't see her in that.

I can't even comment that men really, you know, innocently think that.

Well, I mean, what can you say? Innocently expect.

Yeah.

See, you can't get mad at every single individual guy who comes up with a stupid remark like that because that myth has been so deep in society for so long.

Everybody has things that they believe about the opposite sex or, you know, some other kind of person.

Do they? I'm not sure I do.

I wouldn't have thought I did either until recently.

When, you know, talk about consciousness raising.

A lot of these things, things you always took for granted or sort of believed, you know, that you have to come to terms with.

Like what? Well, okay, getting into the thing like male sexuality is a good example of it because for years as a little girl, I believe that you had to watch out for seducers, which is really ironic.

That, you know, the smooth talker who was only interested in one thing and that kind of stuff and that the world was full of guys like that.

Well, it isn't.

There's hardly any of those kind of guys around.

Oh, yeah.

I'm gonna post on this.

Oh, yeah.

I would say they're probably out there.

I don't meet smooth talkers.

I don't know.

I do.

That brings us to the whole notion of like women's space on the street, anywhere.

It's like constantly being violated.

I mean, rape is not just a literal physical act of putting the penis in your vagina.

People putting their hands on you.

Right.

Exactly.

I'm not making comments at you, catcalling.

It's like they presume.

The arrogance of that is just...

I'm much more paranoid of things happening to me on that level than of actually being physically attacked, raped.

Or just meeting someone who's, you know, I'd like to get to know you, you know, I'd like to make it with you immediately.

Well, you mean just having the drag of having to deal with that kind of stuff.

To cope with them on that level, you know, and feeling like, oh, I'm not a friendly person because I'm not...

Oh, boy.

What you're talking about, things that bother you, no longer bother me in the slightest.

They used to.

I don't know if, you know, being raped caused a big change in me, but I can deal with men or anyone, anyone who's going to be hostile or something, and in a social framework, you know, with no qualms at all now.

I mean, those situations just don't intimidate me.

Usually my feeling is that I'm never severe enough.

Like, the other night this guy came by and he said, what's a beautiful thing like you doing out on the night of the man? Thing, right? And I just went, huh! He was just stunned that he would say that.

And my ideal response would just be to go, before he even got the last word out of his mouth, is to shove his teeth right down his throat.

That's what I mean.

That's the way they are going to learn.

That is just so swift.

I mean, I just, like, why should I waste my energy to stop and tell him that that is offensive? No, no, I never do that.

I never do that.

I just want to beat him up.

I have a friend who's raising two little girls.

She was going through all these conflicts, like her kids and her two girls get attacked on the playground by these bands of little boys.

See, she has taught them not to fight back.

She's, like, conflicted about their acting out aggression and stuff.

And that, like, brought back to me all the times when I was a little girl.

Boys would throw snowballs at me.

They'd pick up my dress.

They'd steal my marbles, chase me home from school.

Then when I got older they would ride on their bikes with their pea shooters and shoot peas at our legs.

And I thought, you know, this is like unmitigated aggression.

But my mother and all the mothers I've ever heard of would say to their daughters, it's because they like you.

Oh my God.

Right.

And it sets up this kind of thing that gets real confusing.

Adolescents, when you go through this kind of game playing stuff with boys, like, well, maybe yes or no, you're not sure, you know, because it's your burden in society as the woman to say no and set the limits.

So boys never know, well, are those real limits or does she want me to or not? I think that a lot of confusion gets in there.

It may be that a lot of women who get raped never get beyond the place where they blame themselves and feel like it all happened in some sort of karmic way, well, I deserve this.

Like when I was working the rape line, like a lot of women called and just expressed this kind of sense that, well, I got into that car, well, I let that person into my house, you know, and like, well, I must have deserved it.

And I can just say, what kind of a society is it where you have to expect that if you go to the grocery store at 11 at night or you come home from a movie the way I did and walk into my entryway that I deserve this? I wonder if a lot of it is like not really even knowing whether you wanted it or not.

I mean, maybe it's...

That's a confusing thing again.

That's one of those things you don't want to think about.

Oh, it's so stupid.

You don't want to have sex or not.

But see, now that's the whole thing because I can have any number of fantasies that are a little bit off the wall.

But they're my fantasies.

And you're doing them.

I am creating those fantasies.

And if they are fantasies in which I am being taken or overwhelmed, that is not what happened to me with a gun at my head.

There is no coincidence between my fantasies and the real actual act of rape.

I don't believe that there is a woman who can want to be raped in what we know as what rape really is.

I can't either.

I can't believe anybody would want that.

The thing about did I want to be raped or not that so many women go through, the fact is that they want sexual satisfaction.

They haven't had it in their lives.

Very few people really do.

I mean, there's a lot of sexual activity and very few people who are truly satisfied with their sex lives.

And having discussed this kind of thing with a lot of women in recent months, you know, it debunks a whole lot of that stuff for me.

And I know I'm not a freak.

I know, you know, I'm a normal woman.

I want sexual satisfaction.

Who doesn't? All human beings want that, male and female.

And part of this ridiculous woman on a pedestal thing, a woman being a piece of merchandise and a statue on a pedestal and a guardian of public morality all at the same time.

I want to be on a pedestal.

That's a great contradiction, isn't it? You see, the thing between being on a pedestal and wanting sexual satisfaction, maybe that has something to do with it.

Yes, it is.

No, I want to be on a pedestal, man.

Listen, my father didn't love me when I was a little girl.

I want to be on a pedestal.

Okay, now let's define what we mean by being on a pedestal.

Okay, respect.

I want respect.

Okay, that's not, okay, I make a big difference between that and being a statue.

Being this lovely example.

Right, it means being on a pedestal.

You can't be somebody else's idea of you is, you know, like something that someone else is doing.

That's the thing, maybe, is the thing about men thinking that women want to be raped.

Men know that women have sexual feelings, right? They know that they don't, that they're not telling their feelings, right? So many, so many.

They're not being out kind about what they do want.

That's the only way I can understand when men say that kind of stuff.

And they know.

I guess they don't talk to women.

That's the problem is men and women don't talk to each other in this society.

You know, that's what the problem is, man.

Men and women do not talk to each other in this society.

Men and women do not love each other.

They think they do.

They need each other.

But as a sex, women don't really like men, basically, I don't feel, and vice versa.

They don't like women either.

Well, there's, you know, there's a battle of sex that's been going on for a long time.

And now with, you know, feminism on the increase, thank God, some of the stuff is polarized a little more strongly about the battle of the sexes.

But that's making it worse.

Well, it's making it worse and making it better.

I mean, we just have to go through it.

No, I mean, I think there's other ways to do it.

Well, I think there are, but how do you do it? Women shouldn't talk to people.

Be hostile, is that what you're saying? Be hostile, somebody deserves it.

I think all men do.

I don't, I hate men.

Why do you think men in the class are more hostile than we in the class? Because they're the ones in power.

They're aggressive.

They define everything.

This is how it is, right? They have total control over their...

But they don't.

Not anymore.

Listen, I understand what you're saying.

But they're going to try to exert control.

Sure, they do it all the time.

But God's a perfect example of control.

If a woman stands up and says, I have control of my own life, the immediate male reaction...

Don't say it, just do it.

And, no you don't, I have control here.

Oh, I heard that.

I heard that from innumerable men.

The trick is not to care what they think.

Right, but you have to go through a process where you're at least in touch with the fact that it's important.

Now, I really feel...

As women, our power is on the rise.

That's all there is to it.

It really is.

And my God, look what's happened to men.

Look at the crummy kind of beings they're becoming.

They're just so pathological.

I mean, how many women do you know who are supporting their husbands? The guys are drunk.

What gets me is that women are so much into a thing of supporting men.

Emotionally.

There's nothing wrong with that, is there? It's like the man is more important than you.

And you listen to him, you talk about all his problems, and help him, you know, and like put all this energy into what he's doing.

Into his career.

You can't live your own life and do that too.

So don't do it.

Right, so don't do it.

But it's a trap, it's a real trap.

Because you can get a lot of satisfaction out of caring for someone.

Looking after their so -called needs and things.

There's something very safe about that kind of social role.

I think that one reason, it's very easy to say, Carol, don't do it to a lot of women.

But a lot of women don't know any of their alternatives right now.

Women do not have at this time.

Yeah, it's safe.

If you can assert yourself, your own self, then you're going out on a limb.

But if you disappoint someone else in what they do, if they succeed, fine, you feel good.

If they fail, you get to comfort them.

And you never take any risks.

And you don't take any risks and you don't get any out of it.

You've just got to find out the place where you can't bear it anymore.

You get to a point where you simply can't stand to live that way.

It's your line of line resistance.

And you have to change your life and your situation.

And I think, you know, I've certainly gotten to that point myself.

And I've done it.

But I'm lucky because socially I can handle anything.

You know, I can go on TV shows and discuss this stuff.

And I am not going to feel the slightest bit inferior to any guy.

Well, it's the way I am.

I wasn't always that way.

I mean, I have acquired that moxie through mostly from talking to women and going through the experiences related to a whole lot of the challenges, having to do with the rape.

So that's interesting.

That says something, doesn't it? The more the oppression gets piled on, I mean, the more people will rise up.

It's just that this patriarchal system has gotten so perverted that it isn't working.

And so it's impossible.

And so we go in and walk away from everybody.

I'm from sexism, really.

I mean, it's no better for the men.

That doesn't negate my right and need as a woman to have a separate movement, separate organizations, separate social clubs, places where women will be together.

I hope you think I wasn't buying that.

Okay, I just wanted to make sure I could say that.

Because I feel that that's one thing that will force men into getting that stuff straightened out among themselves.

Yeah, they'll have to work out their own issues.

They won't have that woman sitting there and listening to all their problems.

They're going to have to turn to other men.

Right.

So you don't have to do this.

It might be a dangerous thing to say this, but like the guy who jumped me, as far as he himself is concerned, I'm not particularly angry at him.

I am, I am, but I'm far angrier at these slobs who wear black robes and sit on judges' benches.

Because the actual, you know, a goofy guy, your stereotype, you know, working class klutz who goes around raping women on the street, is just a kind of poor slob who is sicked on you by a system that condones this.

God knows how many women this guy had raped, been picked up for, released.

In other words, they're saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is the formality you go through and you go out and do it again.

This is what the male establishment really, and I don't think it's a cliche to call them that in this instance.

It's telling them, go out and do it again.

Okay, we don't know.

I went to court with this woman who, from Spanish -speaking, she had been raped.

And the police officer on that case was talking to me about why so few rape convictions happen.

And he said then, and he said, oh, because too many women have cried rape.

Now that's a myth.

That is really a myth.

Bullshit.

Well, that's what his attitude is.

He said, I had a woman come in and she claims that she was raped and she picked the guy out of a lineup.

She identified his picture in the mug, shot the duck.

And this guy says, now I just don't believe that she's got the right man.

The cops are down there? He says, given the West Side Gang structure, he said, I don't see how that guy could have been at that place.

So here you have the police officers making their prejudicial little judgments.

Here's what more can a woman do besides identifying her out of a lineup and picking a picture up.

What she's supposed to do, you know.

She needs to know about the West Side Gang structure.

Yeah, right.

And so here he is saying he just doesn't believe her.

It's just very clear to me that at the police station and at the state's attorney's office, these men who are responsible for bringing charges and indicting that the rapists are not doing it because they simply have so much, so many myths in their own heads that they just don't believe it.

And in this case, this guy said, he admitted that he had an intercourse with her.

He just said, but she consented.

And he got up on the stand and he was so believable.

And I thought, this man, the defendant, had a rape conviction in California.

Now that rape conviction was not admissible in court.

Now it just so happens in this case that this woman was a virgin.

Oh, God.

She was impregnated during the rape in a devout Catholic and had to have an abortion.

You know what that's going to do to her head? Yeah, right.

Even if she hadn't been a virgin, et cetera, et cetera, say she'd been a mother of two children and she wasn't married.

You know damn well that that's the first thing the defense attorney is going to bring out in court.

The only point I'm making there is just that if you want to have any kind of sexuality, what business is it of anybody else, particularly the court? But in fact, it is crucial business to them because unless you were white, married, totally respectful, if you are black, if you have any kind of sexual life and you're not married, you can forget it.

I was raped four times, five times by this man and beat up to boot.

And you know what they're going to get him on? Battery.

I was kidnapped.

I was tortured.

Did you come home from the rape? Oh, that's what they always do.

Because they say they don't have a good enough case.

I have witnesses, people who heard me scream, all kinds of stuff.

And they're not, number one, I don't know what their problem is, but it's the legal system itself apparently that works against it.

It's set up that way.

Well see, they think that rape is not a winnable charge.

So they would always rather either reduce it to a misdemeanor or change it to assault, which is theoretically easier to prove.

And it's like it's true, if you cannot prove immediate out of crime in force, you don't have any chance.

That's right.

The fact that I was raped four times before means I'm a whore.

Right.

My boyfriend, which is about as crazy.

Because women are commodities, they're merchandise, so you use merchandise.

You had a presentation you went to? You just kept coming back and waiting for me.

I kept letting him in.

But you...

I was afraid that he was going to kill me.

Uh -huh.

If I told anybody about this, I was afraid he was going to kill me.

That's the state of mind I was in.

I was frightened to death.

It's not that far off, you know, because...

It's not.

I mean, it's one woman that we've been to court with.

After she got a conviction, she was gang raped by four men.

She took that case to court and we won the case.

It was really wonderful.

Since that time, her house has been burned down, her boyfriend has been shot.

All I'm saying is that when you do go to court on these things, like this woman who just lost a case from the Spanish community, all his friends know that she tried to get one of their buddies.

Yeah.

He has threatened to take out vengeance on her family.

So there are all these factors that militate against a woman's going forward.

Right.

And standing up for herself.

Right.

And since her chances are that she's going to lose the case, that guy's right back out on the street in her neighborhood.

Doing it again.

This dragged on for a whole year.

She was in and out of court.

In and out of court.

Had to tell her story over and over again.

But by the end of that case, she was a wreck.

That's right.

You know, and I just...

I felt like if I had been advising her from the start, I would have told her don't go through with it.

You don't have a chance.

The police told her on a Friday that she could wait three days before she went to the hospital.

They didn't say, look, if you want to have a chance in this case, you have got to go to the hospital right now.

But even then, three days later, she had such bad bruises on her neck and her arms and her breast that they were written down in the medical report.

Mm -hmm.

The judge receives the medical report, glances at it, and throws it out.

Says there's no way, he said, a woman who is 21 years old can be raped.

Oh, okay.

There's no way.

No way.

Up in Chicago, he said.

Well, in fact, she'd grown up in Mexico.

Ignorant.

But nonetheless, I mean...

No, it's just absurd.

I mean, okay, these are the kind of people we have as judges.

Right.

Now, what kind of...

Yeah.

I mean, they're political appointees.

I mean, they, you know, it just ain't like in the movies.

They indulge themselves in all their sexist things.

Sexist.

Yeah.

They just have a ball, man.

The one study on rape that's been done by Amir shows that rapists do not differ from normal men except on one point, which is the tendency to act out violence.

Yeah.

That doesn't mean they're crazy.

No.

But see, everybody says, oh, rapists are crazy.

Well, they're not any crazier than anybody else.

Except for the one I got.

Well, now that may be an assumption.

No, but he was crazy.

Well, that's really what we're talking about.

Crazy bad rap and sane men rape.

I mean, this is what we're saying.

Mm -hmm.

And a hell of a lot of sane men who are going to mug an 80 -year -old man on the street with a wallet...

The fact that no rape does not make a man crazy.

It's going to rape.

You know.

Right.

It's going to pounce on anybody vulnerable.

It'll make it right.

And women are vulnerable.

The reason I say he's crazy is because this guy does stupid things.

He does very stupid things.

Like, he asks for a jury trial, and what he should do is plead guilty and get a lesser sentence.

Oh, a jury trial is...

Aren't they often asked for a jury trial? They do.

Because they get more...

Jury trials, yeah.

Because those defense lawyers, you know, the guy's defense attorney, he's very skillful.

He's going to make damn sure that he selects a jury of people with the right kind of social prejudices who believe that rape is socially sanctioned.

I mean, they don't believe they believe that, but he knows that they believe that, and those are the people he's going to let be on the jury.

And these criminal lawyers are making a bundle, and...

Oh, it's so utterly corrupt.

I don't know.

You know what they do? They take a glass of water and move it around.

Say, now put your finger in this glass of water.

See, you can't do it.

So how could a man rape a woman who doesn't want to be raped? But you're not a glass of water.

That's all that's good.

With a gun in your head, you think I'm going to move around with a knife at my throat? Or it doesn't even take a weapon.

If a woman knows...

It's bigger than you are, and you don't know how to do it.

Right.

You don't know what's...

Right.

You don't know what's going to happen to you, and so you submit.

You scare them.

Right.

That's just...

You know, and they know that.

They know it's not reasonable.

They just do it to be pricks.

I mean, the thing is, it's so distressing.

Life is, you know, life is the safest thing around.

Everybody has hostilities.

Everybody has unhappiness.

They might as well take it out on someone.

And if women are going to be obvious victims in society, I mean, oh, it's just...

So much of this stuff is programmed into people from childhood.

The victims and the assailants.

And it's just really disgusting.

That's why I can have some sympathy for the poor Slav rapist, as opposed to state's attorneys and people like that, who aren't, you know, just aren't doing doodly -squat.

Right.

It's a system that...

The system or a whole set of social -cultural norms that contributes to this behavior.

Individuals aren't...

You can say, in the eyes of the law, one whole is individually responsible for their behavior.

Not really.

It doesn't work out that way.

But you still want the rapists to be convicted, right? Oh, yeah.

I want them to be shot.

How does that fit in? I mean, if it's society's fault, right? Then, I mean, do you have any conflicts about, you know, like...

Well, I have conflicts in my case.

I mean, I let the guy go.

We found him.

He was like, I guess, like, forget, maybe he was 17.

I felt sorry for him, you know.

My friend who was with me, she felt sorry for him, you know.

And I think that...

How did you feel sorry for him? Well, he was black.

I felt bad about, you know, I knew what kind of treatment for him.

You know that this is a racist society.

You know that black people are getting fucked over in the courts.

You know that a white man is going to, most of the time, walk out of there.

The more we sit here and talk this way, you know, I'm making a decision that I'm going to suspend a lot of my activities.

And I'm going to get myself a good self -defense course before I do, you know, any more activist stuff to help other women regarding the health problem and all that.

You know, why don't I get my own thing together better? And I think the best thing I can do is get a really good self -defense course under my belt, so to speak.

And I have that.

Then I will have more self -confidence and savvy and whatever I need so that I can, you know, relate, I believe it or not, a more relaxed level to the environment.

I would just say that we know of a person in Hyde Park who was a black belt in karate who got killed.

Oh, one of the weapons.

Yeah, he disarmed one man with a gun, but there were two or three of them, and somebody else had a gun and he didn't know about that.

Yeah, he wasn't using his head the right way.

But the point is the average punk that I'm going to have to worry about nowadays on the street probably doesn't have a gun.

He's probably just an opportunist.

He sees a woman who's like 5 '2", walking around alone, and he goes, oh boy, rape time, you know.

And, you know, and there's I think a hell of a lot more guys like that around for me to worry about than a bunch of guys with guns.

I really dig what you're saying, Laverne, about what it does to your head.

It makes you more aggressive.

It makes you more alert.

I will feel better.

I will feel better.

When I was raped, I was like the man followed me into my lobby of my apartment building, and I was trying to get the key and the door to the, you know, the lock, and he came in behind us.

I was with another friend who lived in the apartment above me and pulled out a gun.

Well, at that point, at that close range, I mean, your immediate kind of reaction is simply paralysis, because you don't want to make any fast moves.

And I know like one of the first things the police asked me after I'd been raped, see this man fell asleep on top of me with a gun in my head, and I turned the gun out of his hands, and well, you know, he was on drugs or something.

He was like really out of it.

And I had an opportunity to take the gun out of his hands, which I did.

So I explained this to the police, and they said, you mean you had the gun in your hand and you didn't shoot him? Well, you haven't had police training either.

I mean, you know, someone who's been through all that is, you know, going to forget how it was not to be conditioned to use a gun.

I took the gun out of his hand and put it under the mattress.

I just lay there.

Now, if I had any kind of self -defense, and more importantly, if I had been in a place where I really cared about myself and was angry and in touch with the way I was feeling at that point, which I wasn't, I could have really beaten him up.

But I didn't.

I just lay there.

I want to be able to express my own strength where I'm being attacked.

See, this whole thing about pacifism, you're not a pacifist when you don't have any power to wield anyway.

Yeah.

Most of the oriental martial art things are about using a person's force against them.

Yeah, right.

I can dig that, but I also think it's impractical to expect a lot of women to do that.

And I think that if we're going to be effective in preventing rape, in terms of precautions, when I'm alone walking on the street, for one thing I hear a whistle.

And another thing that I've started doing is when I know I'm being followed, I turn around and look to see who it is, what they look like.

I do that too now.

Across the street? Yeah.

And that's the next point.

The thing is you can't wait until the man is close enough to you to have a gun on you to find out what his intentions are.

And so my recommendations would be that you change your direction three times.

And if at that point that man is still following you, you have every right at that point to blow your whistle and take out whatever weapon you have, like tear gas or anything else, and spray it.

I'm not recommending that women carry knives or guns because both of those things, unless you're an expert in using them, they can be turned against you very quickly.

You have to be super willing to use them as well as able to use them too.

Sure.

You have many things.

Right.

And I don't think that if I were surprised, you know, I'm not sure I could do that.

One thing you can do is carry a long flashlight with gas in it.

You can get any kind of things that aren't going to really hurt someone.

That's fighting them with the same bullshit they're putting on you.

And that's what I don't want to do.

But I don't want to have to do hand -to -hand combat with anybody.

I don't want to let them get in that close.

And I'll do some things to warn them beforehand, like I'll change direction.

But if that person is still coming after me the third time I've crossed the street or I've changed direction, at that point I don't need to know anymore.

Then people say, oh, well, what if he's completely innocent? Well, I think men have to learn that they're going to have to change the way they walk the streets if they are innocent, that they don't come up close to you, that they don't get it, they don't come into your lobby while you're trying to get in the inside door.

They wait outside.

Because they've got to understand that women are going to be on the offensive now.

What about what you were saying about the way that you were raped, which was like in your hallway until you came in? Okay, let me tell you what happened.

This man walked by us going in the opposite direction.

We saw him a long time before he came in the door after us.

Now, if I had had this concept in my head and I'd seen a guy walking around at this time of night, first of all, I wouldn't have gotten out of my car then.

I would have sat and waited.

That's the thing I'm talking about in terms of consciousness.

I don't mean like...

Well, I think that's happening to us automatically.

I think some of that is just, you know, we're kind of doing it, you know, because of what's happened to us.

True, but everybody should have the kind of consciousness where when they walk out on the street, the reality of Chicago is that you could be killed at any time walking out on the street.

It's the easiest thing to get away with.

So you've got to be aware of that.

I think most women take the Osbridge approach, which is very understandable.

You don't want to admit to yourself that your life is endangered.

Inside your home, outside on the street, when you go to a washroom in a public building, or in a park...

Or you just try not to pay attention to anything.

Right.

It's so enormous, and the threats to you are so enormous that you just want to try and push back your mind and say, Well, if I thought about that all the time, I wouldn't live here.

But not...

See, it seems to me there's a third way of approaching it, which is to say, realistically, my life is really in danger from random violence.

It really is, and I've got to take some steps to like counteract that, to take care of myself.

And I think that...

Yeah, women like have to learn how to love themselves.

That's what I think.

I mean, to really care for yourself more than you care for anybody else.

Thank you.

Thank you.