ABSTRACT

Throughout American history, the great majority of women have experienced crime not as perpetrators but as victims. The decline of violent crime during the 1990s drew considerable attention, but the 1996 rate was still nearly double that of 1970, and-more than 40 percent of these crimes were committed against women. The assumption that any woman walking alone at night was simply asking for trouble encouraged some women to study self-defense, while others organized rallies around the militant slogan: "Take Back the Night." https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203949610/869015b0-77e4-47fa-bc94-91dbdd774f8f/content/fig151_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Yet for every woman who learned karate or joined a protest march, hundreds more accepted the double locks and the dependence on male escorts that went with trying to stay out of danger. Meanwhile, the fact that African-American women were victimized more frequently than white women highlighted the fact that women's vulnerability was influenced not only by their gender but also by their color, their class, and their neighborhood.