OUR VIEW: Even in low-crime Logan, dangers are real

We know that most Utah State students do not wake up from a deep sleep in a panic after realizing the front door was left unlocked. We know this because we, or our roommates, are the culprits. Though we know the choice to leave our valuables vulnerable to sticky fingers is idiocy and walking home alone at midnight is not ideal, we do it anyways. The naiveté that is adapted from living in a low-crime city such as Logan has our subconscious telling us, “I should lock the door, but I know nothing bad will happen if I don’t lock it.”

    Wrong. We know thefts happen daily, but it’s rarely anything catastrophic. Rape and murder are unheard of and it’s become hard to fathom these atrocities as regular events outside of our quiet city. The truth is more rapes, per capita, occur in Utah than do in New York and California. The number of rapes per capita in Utah is also greater than that of the entire U.S. According to the Utah Law Enforcement Agency, 905 forcible rapes were reported in 2009, but only about one in 10 sexual attacks is reported to police.

    Rape prevention organizations are all over the state. BYU initiated Rape Agression Defense (RAD) which is an organization that helps students to prevent attacks from sexual predators. This group was started after a BYU student was brutally beaten and raped in 2006 while walking home at night. Statistics from USU’s Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention state 46 percent of forcible rapes happen in the individual’s place of residence and 36 percent happen in vehicles. So, our question is – how much lower would the rape statistics be if every Utah resident locked their doors religiously?

    Every year, USU Women and Gender Studies hosts the Clothesline Project, which is a display of T-shirts decorated with words and images that tell the traumatic stories of domestic violence victims. Wandering through the T-shirts triggers the sickening reality of what happens when individuals are unprepared and unprotected from sexual predators. Our hope is that this year male and female students of all ages will take time to view these T-shirts and learn from the stories of these victims so that we may prepare ourselves. Females are not the only rape victims and it is often perceived that “nice” girls are rarely raped.

    We do not discredit the entire USU population for being unprepared. There are girls who keep pepper spray or a rape whistle on their key chain and many who lock their doors around the clock, even when they are home. Keep in mind that restraining orders are still filed and people in Cache Valley go to prison regularly for sexual violence. Sexual predators are among us, no matter how comforting it may be that our overall crime statistics are relatively low.