This is likely not a problem for people who live in the suburbs, but for urban area dwellers, securing fire escape windows is serious business. Unfortunately, when you go to source protective gates for your windows, this is standard:
It's unfathomable to me why anyone would cover a window with all this metal, much less "show" a home for sale with iron bars on the windows, but many do. When we first viewed our home, it had both security gates and child gates. Literally every window was obscured by iron bars of some kind. How inviting! (Not.)