The murder at Yale could have happened anywhere 

When I heard that someone had been murdered at Yale, my mind had immediately placed blame on the notoriously bad neighborhood surrounding the college. To my surprise, Annie Le, graduate student at Yale University, wasn’t anywhere outside the college campus when she was murdered. In fact, she was in the lab where she worked. She and co-worker Raymond Clark had disagreed on the issue of the cleanliness of test mice cages.

It was another event of workplace violence. Another dream shot down. 

Le’s death is a blow to Yale’s safety reputation, but it has forced people to confront the once taboo workplace violence that disproportionally affects women. Le had been studying pharmacology. How many women are out there in the science field today? The number is definitely smaller than that of men.

Why is that? Little girls don’t dream of becoming physicists and little boys don’t dream of becoming nurses. It’s what society demands.
 
When we see that a male coworker has killed a female coworker in a Yale lab, we gasp in shock, mainly because it occurred at the prestigious Yale University. The fact that the victim was female or that the killer was male is not as shocking because the similar events have occurred so many times before, in real life and in movies, that the event seems almost predictable.

We are taught self-defense to avoid harassment from strangers, but no one teaches us how to avoid abuse from co-workers. No one wants to suspect their cubicle mate as a bully, and so we turn a blind eye to abuse at work. 

Le’s death could have been prevented. Clark’s behavior could have been stopped. It took a death at Yale University for society to see workplace violence and to begin to prevent it.