A Study in Empathy: The Reality of a Late-Night Car Accident from a Woman's Perspective
Last Sunday was my birthday, and I spent it driving the 12 hours back to Minnesota after visiting my fiancé, friends, and family in Kentucky. I’d gotten a later than usual start, it was pouring rain, and I was driving on I-35, listening to the radio to keep myself awake. This was the fifth time since July that I’d driven that 12-hour route through Iowa, and I know all the landmarks by heart. I was about to pass the last city before I hit the Minnesota border, the city I always look for because it means I’m less than an hour and a half from the end.
Then, the car slammed into something. I catapulted into the seatbelt. I screamed, and all I could hear was fracturing glass and metal, the crunch of bones breaking. Something bumped under the wheels. I’d been going 70 mph, and suddenly I was crawling along the road. I pressed on the accelerator. Nothing. Every light on my dashboard lit up. I used the momentum left to just barely clear the line onto the shoulder.
Everything was happening so fast that my brain couldn’t process the image of the deer jumping in front of my headlights until my car had come to a stop on the side of the road. And then I had a panic attack.
This was taken several days after the accident, when I drove back to Iowa to collect my belongings. The deer completely destroyed the front driver’s side of my car, and the shattering glass I heard was the headlight.
Obviously, I’ve been thinking about this accident a lot since it happened. It was traumatic, and I feel lucky to be alive and physically unscathed. However, what sticks out in my memory more than the accident itself is the aftermath and responding officer.
It took what felt like an eternity from placing the 911 call to the state patrol officer showing up. And the whole time, with my flashers on to ensure I didn’t get hit in the darkness, all I could do was hope that another car didn’t pull off. Hope that a man who could easily overpower me didn’t see me all alone on the side of the road and decide to take advantage. If you’re a woman, you know the statistics: 1 out of every 6 women will be victim to an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime.
It’s deeply disturbing to me that my first thought upon seeing the state patrol officer’s car pull up behind me was, I wonder if it’s a real cop. Not, thank God this officer is here to rescue me from the side of the road. Not, I feel so much safer now. Instead, all I could think of was Intensity by Dean Koontz, a thriller in which at one point a woman flags down a cop, only to discover that the abductor/serial killer is the sheriff.
Then, upon seeing that the officer was a young male, all I could think was, I hope he’s one of the good ones. Not like the officers in New York who kidnapped and raped a woman last October.
This is reality for women: I couldn’t even feel safe for a moment because of my position as a young women, alone, without transportation, late at night. This is the effect of the culture we grow up in, the culture of Brock Turner and Brett Kavanaugh, where sexual assaults are swept under the rug because it might ruin a man’s life, without care for the woman’s life that it did ruin. A culture where women are taught to always be on guard—watching our drinks, watching what we wear, watching who we speak to and how, watching the clock to make sure we aren’t walking outside after dark. It’s a culture of fear.
This is the reality for many women like me: I am always afraid.
And most men do not understand, or even try to empathize, with this reality.
The officer took me into his patrol car to complete the police report. I composed myself while he typed and asked me the methodical questions. During the panic attack, I’d been sobbing, and I was sure he could tell from my red face and sniffling. I was shaking from the shock. He had yet to ask me if I was hurt.
After he finished the police report, he told me I could wait for the tow truck man back in my car. He continued, “He lives right down the road, so he shouldn’t be long.”
I was speechless. He knew I was hours from home. That it was dark, nearly midnight. That I was a young woman traveling by myself. That I had just experienced a traumatic accident. How could he so completely lack the empathy to understand why I wouldn’t want to be left alone on the side of the road?
When I didn’t respond after several seconds, the officer offered, “Or you could wait in here until he arrives.”
“I would be more comfortable waiting with you,” I said. “If you don’t mind, sorry.” It’s ingrained in me that my issues, any problems of safety or necessity related to my gender, are just inconveniences to everyone else. Apology is a reflex.
We waited in largely uncomfortable silence until the tow truck man arrived. Now, I don’t know the man who operates this towing service personally. But from appearances, he was exactly the type to abduct you and keep you in a locked corn silo. Gruff, he spoke more in grunts than anything else. He was tall, towering over me. He had a scraggly beard and unkempt hair.
Once again, the officer tried to excuse himself. “Well, [the tow truck man] could drive you to wherever you’d like to wait for someone to pick you up.”
And once again, I was shocked by the utter lack of empathy. The sheer ignorance he had of what it must feel like to be a small, defenseless woman after a traumatic event, with a police officer, who should be making me feel safe, instead trying to pawn me off on a strange man I have no reason to trust.
I told the officer I would prefer if he drove me. On the road, he began to list places where I could wait:
• The rest stop: Perfect, an abandoned area dominated by male truckers who could easily assault/kidnap me and drive off into the night without any witnesses.
• The casino: Even better, a loud building filled with drunk people. That sounds like a great place to wait with my multiple bags of belongings after a traumatic car accident.
• A gas station: This guy has to be joking. He expects me to stand with bags of belongings and wait for possibly over an hour in a gas station, which just so happens to be where the creepiest men (in my experience) hang out and feel entitled to talk to you? I mean, I guess at least the gas station is well-lit and has cameras.
Luckily, I’d stopped at this exit before, and I knew there were multiple hotels that would have open lobbies with spots to charge my cell phone (which was about to die, and I’d mentioned that to him several times). I asked him to take me to whichever hotel was nicest, and he dropped me off at the entrance to the Holiday Inn. He left without even waiting for me to walk inside.
This is only a single experience with one man, but this lack of understanding about the fears involved with simply being a woman goes far beyond this specific experience and this specific man.
At a previous job, I remember an older man staring at me while I was working. He came up to me and made an inappropriate comment about how he wished he could stand there and stare at me all day. It made me sick to my stomach. One of my male coworkers told me to take it as a compliment. That coworker lacked empathy: from my perspective, that older man’s inappropriate comment could have easily led to him cornering me in the parking lot, to me becoming the 1 of 6.
In the aftermath of the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, there has been a lot of discussion about “how hard it is to be a man right now.” But here’s the reality: women live in fear of actual death and sexual assault every day of our lives. And until men feel they will be held responsible for their actions, whether they are fifteen or fifty, women will continue to live in fear every. day. of. our. lives.
After my accident, I should have been focusing on checking myself for injuries, getting important documents out of my car, and dealing with the panic attack. Instead, I could only worry that I would become the next statistic that night, the next woman in the wrong place at the wrong time, the rationalization for all my fears.