Darkness is Unknown is Unsafe is you Scared?

While I was conducting some interviews I noticed a trend between the responses to my question, "do you ever feel unsafe?"

Photograph by me

Nearly every interviewee mentioned being alone and being in the dark as attributing factors to feeling unsafe. It must have to do with the dark impeding what you can see, what you can expect. Because of this trend I found, I thought it worthy of a few minutes of research. What I found was there were studies that focused on the connection between the fear of the dark that children had and the fear that is present in adults (varying from nervousness when walking down an alley to a paralyzing fear).

 ["We were shocked by how many people acknowledged they were afraid of the dark as adults," study author Colleen Carney, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology at Ryerson Unversity in Toronto, Canada, told HuffPost's Catherine Pearson.]

It is theorized that it begins as a fear of the unexpected- which makes total sense. I'd like to provide a why or at least a hypothetical why but I can't, I don't know why. Even more interesting than this, I found that there was a survey done by Chapman University that asked 1,500 nationwide about their fears and concerns and it turns out that among the top five personal fears, involving public speaking, being the victim of a mass/random shooting, safety on the internet, and becoming the victim of identity theft, walking alone at night was number one. (USA Today) Apparently, this fear is far more prevalent between women than it is among men, probably because of safety. In an article from the Washington Post, it said women fear walking at night specifically because they fear for their safety.

[This fear of violence is as profound as violence itself because it shapes -- and narrows -- the lives of women in so many small ways: We forgo a nighttime event because we don't want to travel home alone afterward. We forgo an evening jog because running at night is a luxury only men possess. We forgo a comment or an outfit or a friendship because it might imply an invitation we don't wish to convey.]

So why are men also afraid/nervous? We don't really hear of guys being afraid of being attacked at night, or the stuff that commonly bother women. But maybe it is being attacked, or maybe just seeming 'sketchy.' Or maybe it is media influence. Apparently, one of the predictors to such a fear is watching a lot of talk shows and true-crime shows. This is a cognitive phenomenon known as the availability heuristic where the likeness of something is not based on real data, instead on what they know or see.
Weird, am I right? Maybe this is just inevitable for many of us.