I’ve had situations where things felt dicy and I was walking alone. This is cheesy but I saw it on some talk show when I was a kid and it’s worked every time. Instead of speeding up, I slowed down and let the guy pass me. I didn’t stare the guy down, but I made sure to look at him in a neutral/bored way, nodding slightly.
What the woman on that talk show said was that if you were a young woman on the street alone, it was important to look aware of your surroundings, and confident that whatever was going on was pretty much no big deal to you. Predators—muggers and rapists—are looking for people who look scared and vulnerable. If you don’t look scared, one of two things happen—they ignore you—you don’t even show up on their radar because they are specifically looking for timid easy targets.
Or they may pause and think there’s a damned good reason you don’t look scared. And that reason could be a gun or a black belt—who knows? But he’s not going to bother finding out.
I have no idea if I was ever in danger in any of those situations, but I walked home from the 16th and Mission Station to 14th and Guerrero (next to Valencia Gardens Projects) in San Francisco five nights a week for a few years and got into very little trouble.
Once a very stupid friend of mine thought it would be funny to grab me from behind and say “Gimme all your money, bitch!” I was scared out of my wits, but I turned around and looked at him. When I looked at his face he said “When did you see me coming behind you? Damn I can never surprise you!” He had NO idea that I just about died of terror for a second or two. And he KNEW me. I figured my face of confidence and boredom was pretty darned convincing.