A woman’s unexamined life may be the riskiest one

The recent, sudden deaths of four young women with ties to my hometown reminded me of my belief that if fathers designed them, daughters would be built less like National Football League cheerleaders and more like NFL linebackers. No matter how equal women become in this world they will always be unequally vulnerable to its violence.

To be a physician and a father is to be reminded of that fact every day, to hate and fear it, and to wish desperately to protect our daughters against it. The breathless media hyping of news about violence perpetrated against women, especially random acts of violence by strangers, makes us feel all the more helpless and afraid for the safety of the women we love.

Despite my parental paranoia about such random violence, however, the simple truth is that what harms our daughters is most often close to home, perpetrated either by people they know or risks they impose on themselves. In fact, if we sent every evil male stranger intent on harming American women off to Guantanamo, our daughters would be injured, sickened, and killed at almost the same rate as they are now. If we really want to protect them we need to look for solutions within our daughters and the men they know, not around dark corners for the boogey men they don’t.

This truth is best illustrated by looking at the data about what kills and injures American females, both children and women. Annually, more than 200,000 are killed by cigarettes, 40,000-plus by breast cancer, almost 20,000 in car crashes, and another 6,000-plus by their own hands in successful suicides. Cervical cancer kills about as many American women as are murdered (about 4,000 every year).

Injury from car crashes is the most common cause of death of young women in America, and of all women up to the age of 50. Suicide is second in both of those age categories.

Most intentional violence visited on women also comes from the home, not from the mean streets, in the form of so-called Intimate Partner Violence. Of the roughly 4,000 American women murdered each year, about half are murdered by a man they knew and may have loved – husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends and ex-boyfriends, would-be boyfriends, etc. There are almost 1.5 million rapes or other physical assaults perpetrated against our daughters in America each year by intimate partners, many times more than are perpetrated by strangers.

All of that means the enemy for women is primarily within – within their homes, within their relationships, within their personal health habits, within their minds, within their bodies, and within their cars. It means protecting our daughters requires teaching them to avoid the bad streets of their own personal lives, as well as the bad streets of our cities.

It means that a young woman carrying Mace in her purse beside her cigarettes is playing the wrong odds. Keeping women safe means getting them to kick cigarettes out of their mouths, kick cell phones out of their cars, kick alcohol out of their systems before they drive, kick abusive boyfriends and spouses out of their lives, and kicking up their compliance with preventive health measures such as pap smears, vaccinations, and mammograms. These steps would be more effective than building them like linebackers or arming them to the earrings.

I don’t live in fear that a thousand-pound moose will join me in the front seat of my car on a late night drive home from the hospital, or that some angry and besotted behemoth in the emergency department who threatens to rip my “(expletive deleted) head off” actually will. No, of all the fearful things I know about as a physician, I live in personal fear of only one; a late night call telling me something bad has happened to one of our daughters. As a physician, I have made such calls, and even the transient thought of getting one is a brief stare into the abyss that overwhelms me with paralyzing grief.

Our best hope as parents to never get such a call, and have our daughters live longer than we do, is to teach them what really jeopardizes their health and safety, and have them look without blinking at the fact that an American woman’s most dangerous enemy is often found in the home – or in the mirror.

Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.