COLUMN: The myth of student-targets

From Nadia Dowshen's, "Urban Guerrilla," Fall '99 From Nadia Dowshen's, "Urban Guerrilla," Fall '99The attack on a female student in Steinberg-Dietrich Hall last semester disturbed me as much as anyone else. But the response, the "Am I A Target?" safety campaign and making students wear their IDs at night, was just as upsetting. Wearing slogans and demanding new safety measures only creates a greater rift between Penn and the West Philadelphia community. We cannot ignore this problem and then try to fix it with band aid solutions when a random incident occurs. Would supporters who tried so vehemently to get students to wear stickers, wear those stickers themselves anywhere off campus? Of course not. It would not only be insulting to the community, it would look stupid. After all, neighborhood residents do not see us as targets. Penn students are no more the targets of violence than anyone else. If anything, we are even less likely to be targeted because we are not, for the most part, "urban youth." The University's current policies and student paranoia do little to help -- and sometimes seem to damage -- efforts to create a safe community at Penn and beyond. The problem of violence among urban youth is our problem, too. As long as children live in poverty, sub-standard housing conditions, have little opportunities for education and jobs and have easy access to guns, violence will continue. We cannot build walls around the University to keep these problems from affecting us, too. It is in the best interest of our staff, administrators and students to work with the surrounding community to improve the quality of life for all of its residents. Increasing the amount and quality of available resources for education -- and creating more job opportunities -- will make communities healthier, more productive and safer places for members of the Penn and West Philadelphia communities. Some efforts to work with the community have been successful. The Center for Community Partnerships, Civic House, Academically-Based Community Service Courses and other programs are currently working with West Philadelphia residents to solve health, environmental and economic problems, just to name a few. But beyond these mutually beneficial collaborations, we must be critical of Penn's policies, which have historically excluded the community and even destroyed an entire neighborhood, the "Bottoms," while clearing space for the University City Science Center in the late 1960s. We must also question our perceptions of violence and safety in the surrounding community. Do we really make our community safer by using PennEscort, thus keeping people off the streets at night? Also, many Penn students arrive on campus expecting to see an "urban ghetto" and so they never see West Philadelphia as anything other than a violent and savage place. Young people in West Philadelphia are no more violent than young people any where else. In fact, one study showed that the rates of violent incidents are the same among urban and suburban youth. It is just that children in poor urban communities have easier access to weapons and may not have the educational or economic opportunities to help them avoid using weapons. When acts of violence occur on or near campus, I hope that students will think twice before wearing stickers and calling for the administration to spend more money on high-tech security measures. Instead, I hope that students will call for the administration to start cooperating with the community on all levels. As future leaders, we must remember that if we are not part of the solution we are part of the problem. And as events on our campus sometimes demonstrate, violence is not just the problem of poor urban communities.