A woman walking alone in the dark. Need more be said.

6am is already rush hour. Lots of people trying to get to work then.

Hey Pearl:

It's sad to see someone stooping so low so as to generate a thread of comments. Claiming it was the woman's fault for walking in the dark. Really?

I urge everyone else to please ignore Pearl's comment. It's not worth even this effort I'm making in reply.

Get Real.

I do not believe that "pearl" meant it was the woman's fault.
However, if I was walking in the dark even down ECR, I would be carrying a large bat and hope that would alert would be attackers that I was not to be trifled with.

Incidents like this connect directly, though perhaps not obviously, to issues of freedom in our secular society. Islamist states, most obviously Saudi Arabia, require every woman to be completely covered in public and never to be alone with a man other than her husband. This is clearly because men in such cultures are uncomfortable with the desires aroused in them by the sight of women (e.g. the desire to grab breasts or buttocks) and, rather than changing their own behavior, impose limits on women's freedom to eliminate the "problem"--a problem which we see as the men's problem, not the women's.

I remember a song from decades ago, whose refrain went "Standing on the corner, watching all the girls go by." In our tradition, this is acceptable, and the progress we've made since it was on the hit parade is that wolf whistles and salacious comments are no longer acceptable at all. Restraint is the price we heterosexual males have to pay for a steady diet of eye candy, everywhere we go. But the basic difference is we don't blame women for the feelings we get from looking at them! And acting on those feelings is at best offensive and at worst (as in the incident reported here) criminal assault.