Horrifying moment: Australian tourist is ‘scared’ by stranger: ‘He didn’t bat an eyelid’

As thousands of Australian travelers go home and say goodbye to another European summer, one young woman must pick a “terrible” moment from the beautiful memories she made abroad. And only then did she realize how great the danger she was in.

18-year-old Christina Denny from Sydney was enjoying a night out in Rome on June 10 when she decided to meet up with friends in the early hours of the morning. But as she walked through the empty streets, she had the overwhelming feeling that someone was following her.

“It was a really big night and I wasn’t even home yet,” she told Yahoo News Australia.

“I was just near home. And then one of my friends said, ‘I’m at a pizza place down the street,’ so I said let’s just meet there,” she remembers.

But a shadowy figure continued to pursue them. “I walked towards the train station and he followed me for a while…it took at least 15 minutes.”

Then she did something really brave.

Australian confronts man in hair-raising video

After turning around to let the stranger know that she was aware of his presence, she began filming him and repeatedly screaming “No” and asking him to leave her alone, even speaking broken Italian to him spoke. However, the man continued to advance toward her and Denny said her fight-or-flight response kicked in.

“So my thought was, if I look like I’m attacking him, then he’s going to back down,” she said.

“I turned to look at him… but the man didn’t flinch at all. I realized I was in close proximity to this guy. I told him to get away from me.”

A passerby gratefully intervened and the man backed away after a Canadian tourist asked Denny if she needed help. Only then did Denny stop filming the incident.

“You just think nothing will happen to me, but I didn’t realize how scared I was. I was really scared,” she told Yahoo.

Rome is the “most dangerous” city in Europe

In the European Union’s report on urban safety, Rome was at the top of the list of the most dangerous cities in Europe last year. Only 38 percent of residents felt safe in the city at night.

While the overall sense of safety is much higher in Australia, with 85 percent of women and 94 percent of men reportedly feeling safe walking alone in their area after dark, there is still a problem, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics Discrepancy between women and men – with residential streets being particularly worrying.

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