Fearless in the city
Some women still party as if invulnerable
NEW YORK -- It's midnight at Pravda, a trendy Manhattan bar where graduate students from nearby New York University are jammed into leather booths. A group chants, ''Another vodka! Another vodka!" A young woman named Jovana is in the corner, kissing a young man she met hours earlier.
Days after the brutal rape and murder of a 24-year-old graduate student from Boston who had been drinking at a bar two blocks away, the scene is notable for an absence of fear.
''It happens here," Barbara Klen, a 24-year-old NYU student, said of the slaying. ''It happens everywhere. What can I do about it?"
Such carefree attitudes are more than the usual bravado of young adults, some sociologists say, and instead reflect false feelings of safety that are unique to the generation of women that grew up watching ''Sex and the City," chatting with strangers on the Internet, and relying on cellular telephones as lifelines.
''I think it gives them a false sense of security, because they feel that they have total control and they don't have to be concerned about their safety," said Jack Levin, professor of criminology and sociology and director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University.
For those women, popular culture has depicted strong, sexually independent women who negotiated an urban life that, while full of romantic intrigue, was presented as essentially safe, Levin and other specialists say. Many young women were children when high-profile sex crimes such as New York's so-called preppie murder and the brutal rape of a Central Park jogger occurred in the late 1980s; many weren't even born when the movie ''Looking For Mr. Goodbar," about a young woman who is murdered after drinking at a New York bar, came out in 1977.
Since then, anonymous Internet chat has helped create a greater sense of safety when interacting with strangers, even when women are away from the computer, the specialists say. And cellphones have bolstered a feeling that help is always a call away, potentially emboldening some to take risks they otherwise would not.
Other researchers have spotted another trend: binge drinking. David Rosenbloom, director of the Youth Alcohol Prevention Center at Boston University, said studies by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism indicated the number of girls between the ages of 12 and 20 who engaged in binge drinking jumped 10 percent between 1991 and 2003.
''This is going on in the United States; it's going on in England and several other European countries," he said.
In Boston, hundreds of young women have ended up at hospitals in recent years, too drunk to walk or take care of themselves, another researcher says.
''It is amazing how many young women become so severely intoxicated in bars throughout Boston on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights that the emergency department is the only place where it is safe for them to be watched and monitored until they are sober enough to walk straight," said Dr. Denise Rollinson, an assistant professor of medicine at Tufts-New England Medical Center, which is in the heart of the city's club scene.
Visits to nightclubs in New York and Boston this week found many young women slurring words, making out with men they hardly knew, and, in one case, sobbing alone in a back alley, shoeless, after a night of drinking. Seven of 12 women at the clubs interviewed by the Globe said they didn't think they would ever be victims of violent crime and felt no need to change their behavior to avert becoming one.
At The Rack, a popular nightspot near Faneuil Hall, 25-year-old Alina Brezitskaya sucked down the last of her ''Grateful Dead," a concoction of five different liquors, before saying she never worries about her safety.
''I just go out and get drunk," Brezitskaya said. Her friend leaned over and added, ''I'm sorry, we're kind of drunk. We're celebrating Spring Break."
In New York, only one of the women interviewed by the Globe said news of Imette St. Guillen's death had prompted her to be more aware of her vulnerability when she goes out drinking. Stefanie Bassett, a 25-year-old resident of the West Village in New York, said she was ''a little freaked out" and has begun taking steps such as checking taxicabs for valid licenses before taking rides.
Bassett already had reason to be vigilant. Three years ago, she left a friend alone in a bar, thinking she had met ''an awesome guy," but the friend was later drugged and raped. ''She remembered getting into a car," Bassett recalled. ''She remembered going to Queens, and she remembered a shed."
Seated next to Bassett Monday night at The Falls, the SoHo bar where St. Guillen was last seen alive Feb. 25, Bassett's friend Kiri Jewell sipped a glass of shiraz and pondered her own vulnerability.
''There's no point living in fear," the 25-year-old said after a few moments. ''The probability that something's going to happen is very slim."
Down the street at Pravda, 23-year-old Jovana Babovic later learned the man she had been canoodling with was married and just wanted to be a ''boyfriend for the night." Taking it all in stride, she and her friends drank until the bar closed at 2 a.m. and then set off for home together.
''I was a little bit buzzed, whatever, fine, I admit it," she said when contacted the next day. ''But it was just a fun thing."
Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com. 