Safer Home Security

I am a woman in her early twenties who moved to an urban area a month ago. I don’t have a car and use public transportation to commute and walk to and from the train station and, also, the grocery store. I cannot help from coming home from work after dark sometimes, but I do all my grocery shopping during the day.

Yesterday, as I was walking home with my groceries in the early afternoon, two young men attacked me, threw me to the ground, and took my purse. I won’t go over the inconvenience of everything that was lost. My greater concern is the serious blow that they dealt to my feeling of security.

The keys to the front door of the apartment complex and to my own apartment were in my purse. My apartment manager says that he will change my locks, but I think that the lock should be changed on the front door of the building as well. My first question is, how can I make sure that this happens? I am especially concerned because, during the short span of my tenancy, this manager has displayed an amazing aptitude for smoking pot and engaging me in long, awkward conversations in the hall, and very little desire to do any actual work. Also, when I was mugged, he said, "Wow, I heard someone screaming for help downstairs. If I knew it was you, I would have been down there, like, f—ing that." Um, thank you?

Also! I am now just constantly afraid because even though I always accepted, in the abstract, that cities are relatively dangerous places for young women to walk around by themselves, I couldn’t really conceive of some stranger not caring if he hurt me. And nearly every day, and sometimes three times a day, some man will call out to me while I’m walking, and there’s this one particular fifty-ish Hispanic man who hangs around a liquor store near the train station (he might work there, I have no idea) and, it would seem, only knows the word "be-yoot-ful" in English. Then there are the black guys who slow down in there cars or hang around the street outside my complex. These men are everywhere, and they scare me, and I just ignore them, don’t even look at them, when they talk to me, but now I guess I have to admit that not making eye-contact with strangers is not the comprehensive self-defense strategy I once thought it to be.

I feel like I don’t even want to leave my apartment anymore, or work at the end of the day, and I couldn’t sleep last night for how upset I was, and I’ve been crying all day because I don’t know what to do. I am scared and I don’t know a soul in this city and I can’t afford to move, so I guess my main question is if anyone has lived in a city for a long time or knows much about preventing or avoiding theft or being approached by strange men, please let me know.

Thank you.

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