{"id":62196,"date":"2021-07-26T15:18:20","date_gmt":"2021-07-26T21:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/saitjournalism.ca\/?p=62196"},"modified":"2021-07-26T15:18:20","modified_gmt":"2021-07-26T21:18:20","slug":"why-women-in-calgary-do-not-feel-safe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/saitjournalism.ca\/thepress\/2021\/07\/26\/why-women-in-calgary-do-not-feel-safe\/","title":{"rendered":"Why women in Calgary do not feel safe"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Alexis Hallman and Tamara Bos talking about what all they can do in order to make women feel safe at their weekly meeting for women’s safety Photo by Shivangi Sharma\/SAIT.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/span>C<\/span>rime rates in Calgary have gone down, here is why women don\u2019t feel safe walking alone at night.<\/p>\n

C<\/span>algary downtown was considered as one of the safest and most fun places. You want to take a walk down Stephen Ave after dark now? Better carry a pepper spray with you.<\/p>\n

This despite the fact that crime rates in Calgary have been on the decline throughout the pandemic. By the end of 2020, violent crime rate had dropped 11 per cent from 2019, although it was six per cent higher than five-year average. Sexual assaults are also at their lowest level in four years reports the Calgary Police Service<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So why don\u2019t Calgary women feel safe walking the city\u2019s streets?<\/p>\n

Between late 2020 and now, several high- profile have made women second guess their decision to go out at night alone. One of the most frightening incidents took place on October 8, 2020, when three separate sexual assault cases were reported. The first assault took place in Bow Trail S.W at around 9 a.m. while a woman was jogging. A man yelled at her and sexually touched her. Later that same day around 3 p.m. a different woman was walking in the 900 block of North mount Drive N.W. when she was sexually touched by a strange man from behind and less than three hours later at around 5:50 p.m. a woman walking near 14th<\/sup> Avenue S.W. had a stranger grab her from behind and touch her in a sexual way.<\/p>\n

There have also been cases of men stalking women such as the case of Kaylee Nowosiad as talked about by CTV news on Friday, March 26, 2021, where she was walking to her car after completing her shift at a pub around 4 a.m., suddenly she noticed three men walking towards her. Naturally she was terrified but more so because she thought if something were to happen it would be hard for people to hear he scream. Even though Nowosiad was terrified she thought fast and grabbed a pen from her bag and had her keys ready in her other hand. She was able to run and drive away before something horrible happened.<\/p>\n

She ran to her car with car keys in one hand and a pen \u2014 potential self-defense weapons \u2014 in the other.<\/p>\n

While she made it to safety without a confrontation, not everyone is as lucky.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was just walking through 11th<\/sup> Ave in downtown in February and these two guys who were just standing on the side of the road and asked me what took me so long and when I kept walking one of them grabbed my grocery bag and pulled it, it was horrifying,\u201d said Alexis Hallman.<\/p>\n

Hallman, 19, lives downtown with her boyfriend and usually has closing shifts at her work.<\/p>\n

Hallman said she had no idea who these men were. She suspects that they were intoxicated as they could not walk straight, which was why she managed to just leave her bag there and run towards her house.<\/p>\n

As Hallman and Nowosiad\u2019s experiences illustrate, falling crime rates do not tell the whole story.<\/p>\n

In January, Calgary police were searching for a suspect they believed responsible for at least 15 groping attacks on women since November 2020. In each of these cases the women were walking alone when a strange man grabbed them in an inappropriate manner.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/calgary.ctvnews.ca\/calgary-police-concerned-after-multiple-incidents-of-sexual-assault-1.5276772<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIt is heartbreaking that the people in Calgary are hurting each other rather than coming together during such difficult time,\u201d said Brittany Moore, a police officer at Tsuut\u2019ina National Police Station.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was working with a women\u2019s shelter regarding some issues and I got a chance to look at their helpline call logs,\u201d said Moore. \u201cIn the last year they got nearly 10,000 calls,\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Moore, even though domestic violence cases have gone down, police officers like her see way too many incidents to not be concerned.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are more frustrated now than they ever have been, although that is no excuse for them to start hurting others but I feel it is what is motivating them,\u201d said Tamara Bos.<\/p>\n

Bos is a psychology student at the University of Calgary and has personally experienced physical as well as mental abuse in these last two years.<\/p>\n

After her father lost his job a few months after the pandemic started, says Bos, he began to be verbally abusive towards Bos\u2019s mother and herself.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had to be very careful around him because we did not know what would make him angry,\u201d said Bos.<\/p>\n

It was a heartbreaking time for Bos and her mother as they had never seen him like that. To Bos, he was a loving father and to her mother a hard-working and caring husband.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even though the crime rates in Calgary are going down, women are still feeling unsafe walking around. [ READ MORE ]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":691,"featured_media":62198,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_ef_editorial_meta_text_assignment-slug":"S2 Women in Calgary","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,212,13],"tags":[1532,1005,1676,1677,621],"class_list":{"0":"post-62196","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-city","8":"category-downtown","9":"category-news","10":"tag-covid-19","11":"tag-downtown","12":"tag-sexual-assault","13":"tag-unsfe","14":"tag-women"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/saitjournalism.ca\/thepress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/saitjournalism.ca\/thepress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/saitjournalism.ca\/thepress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saitjournalism.ca\/thepress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/691"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saitjournalism.ca\/thepress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62196"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/saitjournalism.ca\/thepress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62238,"href":"https:\/\/saitjournalism.ca\/thepress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62196\/revisions\/62238"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saitjournalism.ca\/thepress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/saitjournalism.ca\/thepress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saitjournalism.ca\/thepress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saitjournalism.ca\/thepress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}