Perilous times: Walking Alone at Night

In class we are starting a unit on "Perilous Times" in United States history and recently I came about an article that talked about Americans' fear of walking alone at night. Read the article here. It said that nearly 4 in 10 americans are afraid of walking alone, at night, within a mile of their home. Personally I think that this is a very high number but according to the article, 48% of people were afraid in 1982. Were the 80s more "perilous" than 2010?

The article states that as crime rates go down, so does the number of people afraid to walk alone at night however the crime rate has fallen much steeper than the fear rate. Even though the crime rate is the lowest in recent history, the fear of walking alone rate has not followed it al the way down. Personally I think that this means that no matter how little crime there is, there will always be a certain percentage of people that will be afraid.

Another idea of "Perilous Times" is that maybe times are more perilous for a certain gender. Check out this table from the same article:

The percentage of women who are more afraid of walking alone at night is more than double that of men. However, I could definitely be wrong, saying that times could be more perilous for a certain gender. Women are generally smaller and not as physically strong as men so I can see how a larger number of women would be scared of walking alone at night. What do you think?

Good News!

So you may or may not have read my blog post "Slavery in Modern Day America", but today in the news I saw an article saying that in the past few days, 69 child prostitutes have been rescued and 99 pimps were arrested. Read it here. It's nice to see that child prostitution is is slowly being tackled. But now the question is, what will happen with the 69 kids?

North, South, East, or Race: Teen Pregnancy

 SIDE NOTE: I'm sorry this blog post is long. But as Mark Twain once said, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

In class this week we had a guest speak to us who just so happened to be a New Trier graduate. He talked about his work as a teacher in Arkansas and mentioned how the teenage pregnancy rate is extremely high in the area. In a recent ABC News article, they said that the southern states contain the highest pregnancy rates in the country. (Read the article here). The article cites socioeconomic factors, sexual activity, contraceptive use, and social norms as some of the causes of the disparities of the teenage pregnancy rate in the country. One of the reasons that was discussed in class was the idea of the cycle: the cycle of teenage moms having children who become teenage moms, whose kids then go on to become teenage moms. Places then becomes full of 32-year-old grandparents. Another cause of a high teenage pregnancy rates is that the South is generally known to primarily preach abstinence as the primary way of contraception.
One factor that the ABC article didn't talk about was the differing rates of teenage pregnancy among different races and they regions that high teenage pregnancy rates are highest. These graphs are from a National Center for Health Statistics document. (Read it here. Its really interesting!)

Overall Teenage Pregnancy Rate

Pregnancy Rate Among the White Population



Pregnancy Rate Among African Americans

Pregnancy Rate Among the Hispanic Population




 The document also says that the Hispanic population has by far the most teen pregnancies. Because there are many Hispanic people living in the South, maybe that is the reason why the south has the highest teenage pregnancy rate. It makes sense that the states with a higher Hispanic population have a higher teen pregnancy rate.  But why do certain regions have higher rates?

A lot of southern states have high teenage pregnancy rates but as seen in the graph for African Americans, a lot of the states are in the northern Midwest.  The states with the biggest rates for each race are:

Arkansas had the highest pregnancy rate among non-Hispanic white teenagers (67 per 1,000). The states known to have the highest pregnancy rates among black teenagers were New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota (132–149 per 1,000). The highest pregnancy rate among Hispanic women aged 15–19 was found in Alabama (228 per 1,000).

What's interesting about all of the graphs is that the highest pregnancy rate states are all in the same region. You don't see the dark blue very spread out in any of the graphs. The dark blue states are pretty close to all touching each other. Personally I conclude that it is because of the cycle discussed before. Once the cycle is started, its hard to stop. Just a few people who have become pregnant as teenagers can start it and if their kids have kids when they are teen, the population of teenage pregnancies spirals, getting larger and larger.

There could be many answers to this question. What do you think?