Lock up your daughters!

[dolorous_ett]

I feel deeply sorry for poor Lucie Blackman and her family. Nobody deserves to have that happen to them.

I also agree that when you're away from home you should take sensible precautions over your personal safety and be sensitive to local sensibilties.

But am I alone in finding this article, with its strong implications that women are too fragile to be let out alone in Foreign Parts, patronising, scaremongering and annoying?

And why the emphasis on women? Men need to be careful too. When I lived overseas a few of my foreign friends got involved in very nasty fights. With one exception they were all male.

Comments

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

You forgot midges :)

And I agree, dumb article, though not nearly so bad as the scaremongering that goes on in the US (we don't really have a gap year culture here, as the general mindset is that any time not spent working or in school is wasted, and all too many American women would find the idea of traveling to a foreign country alone simply unthinkable).

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

(we don't really have a gap year culture here, as the general mindset is that any time not spent working or in school is wasted, and all too many American women would find the idea of traveling to a foreign country alone simply unthinkable).

That is a pity.

I'm curious about the American women finding the idea of traveling abroad unthinkable - is that because the US is such a big country that you can get to all kinds of places without needing a passport, or is it another kind of mindset?

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

I'm curious about the American women finding the idea of traveling abroad unthinkable - is that because the US is such a big country that you can get to all kinds of places without needing a passport, or is it another kind of mindset?

Well, there's a lot of fear-mongering here about women doing stuff alone, in general; and at the same time, a lot of Americans believe that traveling outside of the US is a) scary; and b) only for the very rich. (I have a friend who went to Italy -- his first time out of the country -- when he was thirty-something, and was pleasantly surprised to learn that airline tickets to Europe were not in the many-thousands-of-dollars range. So I suspect a lot of people write foreign travel off as beyond their means without actually taking the time to figure out how to make it within their means. In recent years, there's also been a lot of media-fueled paranoia about whether it's safe to travel abroad as an American -- and I'm talking about traveling to places like France here, not the Middle East. It's silly, but if you've never been outside of the US before, you have no way of knowing it's silly.)

The distances involved are obviously a contributing factor, but after all, Australians travel all over the place, and they live in a big, isolated country too. Some of the financial obstacles are real, however, especially for younger people -- many recent college graduates are paying off huge amounts of student loan debt, and since we don't have working holiday visa arrangements with other countries, there's no legal way to go to Australia and pick up casual work the way a lot of British kids do.

So, in short, a complicated issue, but I'm inclined to think it's more about culture than anything else.

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

Fascinating... who'd have thought attitudes could be so different in two places with a common language?

Mind you, I suspect that my understanding of the US has been heavily coloured by the people who I've met over here and who are - by the sound of it - far from typical.

It's sad, really, to think that the outside world worries Americans. I'd always assumed that a lot of people just weren't interested.

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

Mind you, I suspect that my understanding of the US has been heavily coloured by the people who I've met over here and who are - by the sound of it - far from typical.

Heh, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a "typical" American -- we are a country of many cultures, and people's attitudes toward travel depend hugely on class, education, and what part of the country they're from.