This story in the Tennessean has really shaken me. I can’t say that we didn’t hear about this. We may have. But what we get told about isn’t always comprehensive. My co-worker had a dude come into the office when she was in there by herself and get within arm’s reach of her while she was at her computer before she noticed him and raised a ruckus and scared him off and there was no alert sent out. The police even told her they had video of him entering offices at the Med Center. Their thought was that he was reaching into women’s purses, taking their credit cards out, writing the number down, and putting the credit card back. My co-worker thought he was trying to get into her purse.
But there was no warning sent out campus-wide. There’s a rumor that one of the downstairs offices was broken into. Again, nothing.
Anyway, the point is that the parking garage this woman was raped in is the parking garage I’ve been avoiding, if at all possible, parking in for the past 14 years. It’s poorly lit. I’ve had men come out of the stairwell and just hover, watching me. I had a guy follow me halfway home from that parking garage. I guess that dude must have been an employee.
I don’t know any women who work on our end of campus who park there unless there are no other spots.
It’s one of those things you think Traffic and Parking must notice, but, if it fills up with students, maybe it’s just not that easy to see that female employees are avoiding it.
I keep thinking–should we tell someone that we don’t feel safe parking there? More than that–that we all know it’s not safe to park there? That it wasn’t before this happened and that it’s not now? Should we have stood on the sidewalk out front and told female students it wasn’t safe? Should we be telling them that now?
There are better designed parking garages on campus–better lit, better set up so that you don’t feel easily isolated in it. I wonder why we can’t get a re-designed parking garage, then.
I don’t know. I guess this is fairly incoherent. I just hate that a bunch of us know something is wrong and yet, it continues to be wrong and people are getting hurt.
Tiny Cat Pants 
wow. the university’s course of action was to change her parking space? I can’t even…
Two questions I had reading that – Which specific garage are they talking about? Do people *still* have to be taken over to General for rape kits? I thought Vanderbilt was doing these now, too, instead of sending everybody over there. Surely she was closer to our emergency department.
Terrace Place. I was wondering about going to Meherry too. There might be hospitals down 21st that are as close if not closer than Vanderbilt – but not by much. and surely where they went was not closer than Vanderbilt.
If they took her to Meherry, it was because of the rape kit situation, which means that, apparently, we are still at one motherfucking hospital in the county that does them. What the fuck? I thought Vanderbilt was, at least, doing Vanderbilt-affiliated victims.
I’ve emailed Tony Gonzalez to see if he knows. I’ll let you know what he says.
Okay, as best I can tell, Vandy is still doing rape kits in the ER for Vandy people. But I think there’s no guarantee that, if you call an ambulance, the ambulance is going to take you to Vandy when they KNOW you can get treated at General.