When will women catch a break?

Being a woman, I have always heard and heeded the stories about how dangerous it can be to go out. I’m not even old enough to drink legally and I know the rules. 

Number one: never leave your drink unattended and make sure you are paying attention to it at all times.

Number two: don’t accept drinks from anyone.

Number three: if you leave your drink unattended, you don’t drink it when you come back, you pour it out. 

And possibly most important is number four: never leave your friend behind or leave them in any type of potentially dangerous situation.

These are the rules that women have to worry about whenever they go out. We can’t just decide to actually take it easy and not worry because if we aren’t worried about those things we might be told that we should have been more careful when something goes wrong. 

Women don’t get to have a fun night out with no worries because even when we take care of ourselves and follow all of these rules there’s always something else. 

Women have thought of all these rules to keep ourselves and our friends safe, but it turns out no matter how hard we try to be safe people are trying just as hard to make it dangerous. If you aren’t a woman, you may not have heard but there is a new way that people have been getting roofied. 

Instead of trying to get women to drink something that has been tampered with, people are now being roofied by injections. 

An increasing amount of women have been reporting not remembering their nights after not drinking much at all and then finding a puncture mark somewhere on their body in the morning. 

Now, I would like to know what the people who say that women are just too careless and that’s how they get roofied, have to say about injections. 

Is the next rule for women that we can’t get too close to anyone in a crowd just in case someone uses that closeness to give a quick injection and pass it off as bumping them? The people giving roofies to women aren’t obvious when they put it in drinks and they aren’t going to be any more obvious when they give an injection. 

They aren’t going to chase down a woman, arm in the air with the needle like some horror movie. The way that these things happen isn’t obvious and that is what makes it so terrifying. 

Someone’s free will or consciousness can be taken from them so easily and we’re told to just be careful. 

How about instead of pinning the whole situation on the people who are at risk we start to do something about keeping it from happening? 

Awareness isn’t enough anymore. 

We can be aware of all these awful things but that hasn’t helped anything. The numbers of people who choose to do these awful things haven’t gotten any smaller. 

Even while we try to be as vigilant as possible, the number of people who get roofied hasn’t gone down that much and now that we’ve tried so hard to keep ourselves and others safe and aware, bad people just found another way to hurt people. 

When will we stop only bringing awareness and start bringing about some change or consequences? It’s time to stop expecting women to be hyper vigilant when we want to relax and start teaching men to act like men, not perverted little boys.