Sweet Sixteen

The question of women’s safety has reared its head again. How long will it stay in the news? How long will it be a priority? This week in Boston, Amy Lord, a 2011 college graduate who lived in South Boston was kidnapped and forced to travel to five different automated tellers to withdraw money. When the kidnapper was finished with her, she was stabbed to death and left in the Stony Brook Reservation in the Hyde Park section of Boston. The Boston Globe reports, “In South Boston, fear remained pervasive. At gyms, women asked for self-defense classes, and men volunteered to walk them home. Police said they had added extra patrols, planned to hand out whistles to women Friday afternoon, and announced that they would host self-defense classes.” While it is important for us to reflect in the aftermath of such violence, one wonders what would it have taken to prevent such a terrible crime. Yesterday the papers reported on a discarded plan that would have allowed people using ATM’s to type in a special code that would have slowed down the transaction and alerted the police to trouble while still completing the cash withdrawal. Apparently this is not a new idea and the technology has been around for years. Why hasn’t it happened? Banks have resisted because of cost. How do you measure the cost of a woman’s life? One of their customers was dragged to five different ATM’s and stabbed to death.