Horror in the Suburbs

This fall a 13 year old girl was raped by a man in his 20s. Apparently he had been hanging around the middle school for about a month. A week before the rape, the girl had stayed after school to watch her friends play basketball, and on her way to the bathroom the man approached her. She kicked him and ran away, but did not report the incident to her parents, friends, or school officials because she didn't want people to worry.
Both of the girl's parents work, so she usually walks home from school and spends the afternoon alone. The afternoon of the rape she did not lock the door behind her because she was in a hurry to go the bathroom, so it was easy for the attacker to follow her inside.
Two other girls knew about this and decided to keep it a secret. When the victim wrote her friend a note about how she was planning to kill herself, the girls told their parents, who then contacted the victim's parents. Over winter break the family moved to another apartment complex and all three girls had to give police reports and visit therapists.


This is so horrifying because people move to the suburbs specifically so that they will be able to protect their families from these kinds of incidents. Yet in order to afford to live in this community, parents must work full time, leaving their children home alone for several hours every afternoon. No one is really safe and even in the nicest communities, there are dangerous people. They can easily follow you home without you knowing it, it is easy to forget to lock the door, and you might assume that schools are a safe place with enough people around to notice something out of the ordinary.
Furthermore, this girl did not report this rape in part because she did not want to cause more problems for her parents. In the past few years they have had financial problems, job changes, and they have moved several times, so she thought that her rape to just add to the list of things they had to worry about. The fact that three 13-year-old girls tried to deal with this without the help of any adults also shows that the suburban attempt to protect innocence failed.