fanning wrote:gringito wrote:expatPERU.com
Jesus...teamoperu...Baltimore, Texas and Toronto.
Your geography teacher should have a serious word with you.

Don't you get his point ?
Surely he tries to say that not only in Peru bad things happen. And in the places he mentions even you would probably feel safe in public. So if you feel safe in those places, why not feel safe in Peru also. I do anyway.. Offcourse not some neighborhoods that I wouldn't visit anyways.
I agree with the suggestion of what the point was. If one sees danger lurking behind every corner then it’s fair to say it’s a dangerous world no matter where the corner is because these types of events happen just about everywhere - even in places the average person would feel safe. I’m not surprised to see that San Isidro can also be a locale for danger, but pointing out an event that happened on May Day, a day known for protest and riots, seems to be a bit of a stretch to make San Isidro out to be a dangerous place. These things happen after major sporting events as well, but I wouldn’t judge an area based on football hooligans doing their thing or because a bunch of people take to the streets, flip over cars, and generally get rambunctious after their team wins the Stanley Cup/World Series/etc.. I once lived in a college town with a successful (American) football team and when they won, drunken fratboys would drag their furniture into the streets and set it on fire. Didn’t make sense to me, but never left me with the impression that it was a dangerous place because some weekends during the season there’d be flaming sofas in the streets.
In another thread an article was quoted as saying “being statistically safe is not the same as feeling safe,” which suggests that danger/safety has as much, if not more, to do with personal subjective feelings as it does to more objective, impersonal crime statistics. If this is so, the person who feels danger is lurking more often than not, or more than the average person does, is likely to feel that way whether in Peru, or a lilly white suburb constantly surrounded by personal bodyguards. Others tend to recognize the world is not Utopian, but tend not to focus so much on the dangers of living as to just go about living life without fear. Caution and common sense, yes, fear, no. One might never leave the house if they were afraid of the very real possibility of being involved in a car accident or being hit by a bus because these things do happen. They also could be the victim of a household accident (statistically more likely, no more how safe they feel in their home) and decide to never shower for fear of slipping and cracking their head open.
Danger can be self defined. Someone who tends to feel danger more often than not is not going to be assuaged by someone telling them not to worry because of statistics or because it’s pointed out that these types of events are common all over the world, even in places that are generally considered to be safe. Someone who tends to go about their life, aware of dangers, but not letting it rule how they live their lives, are not going to be convinced to drastically change their behavior or opinion to reflect that bad things happen and are just a part of the world and being alive. If feeling safe is more based on emotion than statistics telling someone who feels unsafe not to worry means as much as a small child being told not be afraid of monsters under the bed. Makes sense to the parent, but the child may still feel a very real sense of danger and logic very rarely trumps emotion.