(The following was originally posted to “Women Make Waves” in Autumn 2014.  Once again, sorry about the formatting.)

The best piece of safety advice I received as a child was, “It’s okay to hit, kick and scream if a stranger is trying to take you away.”  The best piece of safety advice I’ve received as an adult is, “It’s better to be rude than dead.”*  Both of them are essentially saying the same thing- if you feel that you’re under threat, don’t worry too much about being sweet, likeable, or well-behaved.  Put like that, it sounds obvious, but people- and women especially- are put under a lot of pressure to be polite at all times.  We’re told to smile sweetly at people who get on our nerves.  We’re told that swearing is unladylike.  We’re told that getting angry only makes us seem shrewish and bitchy.  The same people who warn us never to walk home alone at night are perfectly happy to tell us to make friends with total creeps.
Take my former housemate, who, on our very first conversation, made sure to ask me if I had a boyfriend, then, after I said no, asked, “So when are you going to show me your room?”  When I mentioned this conversation to my mother, she said, “Aw, why don’t you invite him in?  That’s how you make friends!”  I didn’t invite him in, no matter how often he hung around my door looking hopeful.  Once he’d got into my room, it might have been nearly impossible to get him out.
Or the two men who ran into some of my friends at midnight, and tried to convince them to come with them into a dark subway because there was a really cool nightclub on the other side of the road.  (My friends could see across the road, and there wasn’t.)  They said that they had to get home, but the men explained to them how simple it was to get to the nightclub through the subway, and that my friends didn’t need to worry because they could trust them.  For some strange reason, my friends didn’t take them up on their offer.
Or the man who, upon visiting our flat, told me and my flatmate, “Yeah, I met up with a friend of mine earlier today.  I almost said, ‘Hey, I’m going to see these two girls later on.  You should come- one for me and one for you.’  But then I thought ‘No,’ cause you’re mates, ain’t you?”  We weren’t even that- we’d met him exactly once before.  When I deleted him from Facebook a week later, he sent me a message demanding to know why.  Three hours later, when I hadn’t replied, he sent another saying, “So there’s no reason, then?”  He then sent several whiny messages to my flatmate asking why I’d deleted him, and spent the next four months or so telling all our mutual friends that I was a total bitch who forced my opinions on people.
The criticism you often hear in these situations is, “Well, if you hadn’t been so uptight, you could have made a new friend.”  But, even working on the assumption that a man who lies to tempt a woman into a dark subway is remotely interested in friendship, why would you want to be friends with somebody like that, anyway?  If you humour him instead of running away screaming, the absolute best-case scenario is that you have to put up with him for the foreseeable future, and nobody wants that.  Besides, the worst-case scenario just doesn’t bear thinking about.
The creepier somebody is, the more likely they are to try and take advantage of your better instincts.  Your instinct to be polite.  Your instinct to give people the benefit of the doubt.  Your instinct to build people up instead of knocking them down.  These are good instincts to have, and you should never lose them.  But your safety is always, always more important than some creepy stranger’s ego.
* A Google search tells me that “It’s better to be rude than dead” originates from Gavin De Becker’s The Gift of Fear. The other piece of advice comes from a child safety pamphlet whose name I’ve forgotten. If you recognise it, tell me what it is.