Along with the many adages of typical college advice friends and family will shove down the throats of every incoming college freshman comes the “don’t walk home alone” category. We’ve all heard this speech followed by the “walk in groups” advice, like it’s step two in the typical-college-advice manual that evidently every adult gets a copy of. Some students are even given mini pepper spray bottles. My friend’s mom found out they can come in a bubblegum pink color and this accurately describes my irritation with the whole conversation: this advice is particularly stressed toward girls alone.

We’re told, as girls, again and again that walking alone at night is just not an option and that we are putting ourselves at risk by doing so. As it turns out, the riskiest situations girls more often find themselves in are in a friend’s bedroom at a party, red solo cup in hand, with the influenced mindset that it’s safer to stay there, even though they don’t feel comfortable at all. When girls are urged to not be outside alone after dark, the next solution is to spend the night wherever they are, whether it be a friend’s house, or the house of a guy they just met.

The Bureau of Justice statistics says that between 2005 and 2010, 78 percent of sexual violence involved an offender who was known to the victim. So while we often see the campus streets as threats to our safety, sometimes the real threat can be staying in a situation you don’t feel comfortable in, even if it’s with people you know.

And this doesn’t solely pertain to any particular space; if you don’t feel comfortable in any situation (another dorm, a fraternity house or a bar) you shouldn’t feel stuck there because it is late at night and you are nervous about getting home.

I have walked back from bars late at night alone because I didn’t want to follow my friends to a random apartment I have never been to before, and I will do it again. Sadly, bad things happen to women all the time on college campuses, so it makes sense that when I walk home alone and tell my mom about it, she throws a conniption, speaking in typical rhetoric about how dumb I am for putting myself in such dangerous situations.

However, bad things will continue to happen whether it is daytime, or nighttime, or if I am alone or if I am with a friend. Not only do risk education methods make young woman feel the pressure of preventing their own rapes or other harm, they’re also clearly not effective.

Our campus and Green Street is bustling with students late into the night during the week. For this reason, I do feel mostly safe walking home alone in situations where I know it is the better option and I want others to feel this way too. If someone won’t walk you home from wherever you are, don’t be terrified of making that trip yourself.

We are trying to focus today’s assault training on changing a system that normalizes sexual violence and misogynistic attitudes, and I agree with this approach. Campaigns like “It’s On Us,” educate students to intervene when they see a potentially bad situation in progress.

Young women should be able to feel safe, not because there is no one out there trying to hurt us, because there is and there may always be, but because there are other people inhabiting the streets with us that we can call allies. And I can feel that sense of community when I walk these campus streets at night. I feel that sense of alliance when I see other girls walking home alone, but also right along with me.

After around 2 a.m. things start to die down and the streets become very empty. And, yes, admittedly I will start to see every passerby as a potential threat, and every squirrel that shakes a branch does make my heart pound a little faster for a moment, but I still basically refuse to listen to the attitudes people have about women in the streets alone because I don’t want to perpetuate the fear.

As Alix Spiegel puts it on “Invisibilia,” an NPR podcast, “If you have a lot of fear, fewer bad things are likely to happen, but it’s very probable that your life is more painful to you. So is it better to be fearful or fearless? Which side of the continuum do you choose?”

I know where I am, and if you see me out this year know that I have your back (along with most of the student population) and together we can hold our heads a little higher because pink cans of pepper spray shouldn’t exist, at least not in that shade of pink.

And when the weather fails us as it does many months of the year in Champaign, or you are in anyway unable to walk home, know we do also have amazing resources at this school like Safe Rides where they will come and pick you up at any time of the night to bring you home.

It comes down to doing the best you can do for yourself in any given situation. Realizing you don’t have to stay in an uncomfortable situation overnight could be even more important for your safety than the things you hear from your mom and her typical-college-advice manual.

Leah is a junior in media. 

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