Brazilian student offers perspective on safety

    After experiencing the college-life in America for four years, I noticed some obvious distinctions between students’ safety in the United States and those in South America.
    Most American students do not know they are extremely lucky to live in a country where the political and civic system truly works. As a Brazilian, I have to admit that my student life in the U.S. is much easier than my scholar experiences back home.
    I do not mean to degrade the image of Brazil and its neighbors, but when you live in a country dominated by abusive government corruption, the doomed population of that developing country has little hope for the future.
    One of the consequences of government corruption is crimes. More specifically, crimes that frequently happen in or around schools and universities.
    Three years prior coming to the U.S., I went to law school in Brazil, where I witnessed drug dealers, sex offenders, robbers and sympathizers doing their best to slow the development of the country, which is a very frustrating sensation.
    Not that America is a perfect paradise without immoral events, but trust me, when I walk home or to class and see police cars around me, it is certainly a good, secure feeling.
    Another result of corruption is a fragile economy. This leads to a lack of funds to support a decent law enforcement department to ensure students and faculties are safe in their daily environment. In Brazil, I was lucky if I ever saw a police car cruising around campus.
    Now, I would like to give the reader an insight of what can happen to South American students with poor campus police protection. The limited police presence contributed to a tragedy in the city of Cordoba, Argentina, two years ago.  According to an article in the Pagina 12, a prestigious Argentinean newspaper, 36 female college students at Universidad de Cordoba and Universidad Catolica de Cordoba, were sexually violated in a two-year period. All of the young women lived near the university, at a student-village named Ciudad Universitaria. The most incredible fact about this bizarre event is that all of the girls were sexually abused by the same man, who did not suffer in jail. He committed suicide in 2004, before getting caught by the Argentinean police.
    If there was more police around the universities in Cordoba, dreadful events like those could be avoided.
    The universities in Latin America do not possess a security system with cameras, emergency boxes and night shuttles as does GCSU. South American schools have only a couple of sentinels, hired from private companies, taking care of many thousands of students.
    From that perspective, you can imagine the burden that municipal, state, and federal police have to face everyday. That is, if they are not also involved with the government corruption and organized crimes, which is not unusual. It is difficult to feel safe when even the police, who are supposed to protect people, have ties with bandits.
    The fortunate students at GCSU and many other safe American universities should be pleased with their security system. They should think twice before complaining about a few blown-out lights or other minor occurrences.
    If not, they should remember the precarious safety conditions in third world countries. Maybe they will value their security system more.

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Posted by Colonnade Archives on Nov 17 2006. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry