This is an article from the January 17th, 1999 issue of The San Jose Mercury News. Written by Lisa M. Krieger it is re-printed with permission. Please don't let this be something you wish you had acted on.
Odds are that President Clinton won't formally condemn the murder of Christina Williams, as he did the murder of gay student Matthew Shepard.
It's unlikely that national leaders like the Rev. Jesse Jackson or Rep. Maxine Waters will attend Christina's funeral, although both paid tribute at the services of slain African-American James Byrd, Jr.
Whenever a specific group of people is targeted for murder - because of race, religion, sexual orientation or national origin - Americans respond with appropriate outrage.
Christina died because she was a girl.
Look at the faces on the missing children posters or milk boxes or post office walls. Most are female; almost all are between the ages of 5 and 15. There's Michaela Garecht. Amber Garcia. Ilene Misheloff. Nikki Campbell.
When Jeremy Strohmeyer picked a victim, it was 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson. Richard Allen Davis snatched Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old who loved drama and the color purple. Lisa Norrell, whose murder remains unsolved, was a 15-year-old who rescued kittens and puppies.
With each death, a grieving community gathers in a tableau that has, in recent years, become almost routine: Mother sobbing. Father stoic. Stunned friends in fancy dresses and black patent-leather shoes, carrying flowers and toys. Parents vowing to protect our youth.
Then it happens again.
This is no coincidence. Here is a secret, known to anyone who has ever been a girl: The sweet compliments, the whistles, the gentle offers of a ride home - they all start when you turn 12 or 13 and then quit, almost as suddenly, by the time you're a savvy 17 or 18. Men who indecently expose themselves target girls and young teens, not 25-year-old women old enough to beware.
Through their eyes
Here is another secret: To the average girl, the sudden attention doesn't
seem all that scary. If an older man stops to ask directions, he must
think you're really smart. Maybe the guy at the bus stop likes your
personality.
It's even a little exhilarating to discover, at only 13, that you're capable of turning heads. Budding breasts and widening hips are still a novelty, not a liability.
The average girl assumes the world is as bright, optimistic and cheerful as she is. Dark streets are just a shortcut home. Woods are places to explore, looking for bugs or pretending to be an Indian princess. Fields are where you go to play - not end up, like Christina, decomposed in dirt.
Hitting, screaming, running - these are learned behaviors, things that come only with experience. Playing, climbing, giggling, oversleeping, spilling milk, cutting small hearts out of pink construction paper - these are inate.
For all the lip service given to "girl power" of the moody Alanis Morissette or the vampy Spice Girls, the recent murders remind girls that they still live in an unsafe world. No matter how rare, they send a message - to the teen track star who trains at dusk, the college student who goes home rather than spending late nights at the chemistry lab - that they may pay for their risks with their lives.
Looking out for them
Dead girls and bereaved parents don't have formal advocacy groups with big
budgets like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People or the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation to win the
continued attention of presidents, religious leaders, and congressional
officials.
But we can all be guardians, surrogate parents when their real parents can't be there.
When a girl is walking alone in a potentially dangerous place, caring men can offer use of a car phone. Women can offer a ride home or kindly lecture girls they see hitchhiking. Watch, carefully, much as you might if it were your own daughter. Alert police if something looks suspicious. If a man is hassling a girl, don't be afraid to ask if she needs help.
If someone had stopped and helped Lisa Norrell, murdered while walking home alone to Pittsburg from a quinceanera rehearsal in Antioch, she would still be alive today. So would 17-year-old Pennisula High School senior Danielle Clark, who disappeared late one night in March 1990 when her car stalled on the Bay Bridge.
Raising healthy girls is a labor-intensive operation, psychologist Mary Bray Pipher reminds us in her provocative book "The Shelter of Each Other."
Girls need time and space, attention, affection, guidance and conversation. They need sheltered place where they can be safe as they grow and learn what they need to know to survive. They need a community where everyone knows names, where there are adults, other than parents, to listen to them. As a society, we need to tell them that we value their lives so much that nothing, if we can help it, will ever hurt them.
Healthy risks
Encourage girls to take healthy risks: sports, travel, running fo school
office, taking the lead in the school play. Urge them to avoid unhealthy
risks: drinking, smoking, exploring empty city streets or hanging out with
reckless friends. Offer them help in evaluating risks - and predicting the
consequences.
Offer to watch each other's children. Befriend your children's friends. Create a recreation center, a cafe for poetry readings, a place to teach self-defense and assertiveness skills. Keep schools open at night. Coach a girls ball team. Move families out of offices and private patios and back onto the front yard in lawn chairs.
Until girls are old enough to protect themselves, we have to do it for them.