How we can do better
I quite often go for late-night walks around the area I live in during lockdown, either listening to music or calling friends and family. I never thought it was a privilege until the female friend I was talking to at the time called it so — she was concerned about my safety. Up until that point it never crossed my mind, I was right in the middle of London and during the summer evenings it was a complete ghost town. If anything that was where I felt the safest, away from the one-windowed flat I was able to catch my breath and take my time unpacking spiralling thoughts — I would spend hours sitting by myself reading a book or writing.
I never understood the full extent of the experiential differences between myself and women I knew, whether it was a girlfriend calling me scared because someone is following her home or housemates getting cat-called from significantly older men in a van. These were all isolated incidents that didn’t paint a bigger picture to me, I wasn’t cognisant of the everyday effect this had on someone’s psyche and decision making.
Weirdly it was the mundanity and straightforwardness of the chat I had with my friend that started to really put pieces in place for me. Threats to women weren’t isolated to bars and nights out but potentially every day walking down the streets, I just never realised.
The tragedy of what happened to Sarah Everard has given everyone our age a lot to think about, I know I can be doing more and this is a collation of contemplation for the past half-week or so.
Final Introductory Thoughts
In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been the one to write this article. Grounded is made up predominantly of incredibly talented female writers who would have a better personal understanding of the situation that I fundamentally am ignorant to, and it’s incredibly rich for a guy to be talking about my experiences and understanding of threats to women rather than championing one of our writers to take the leading role in discussing the topic.
The plan is to have an article written by one of our female writers to contrast this, coming out in the next couple of weeks.
I’m going to try to take the perspective of what changes a man can actively take (since that’s all I can really talk about) but hopefully some of it is more holistically applicable. I also want to clarify that if this implicitly sounds like men need to protect women that’s completely unintentional, this isn’t about a male saviour complex but just about being empathetic towards people who aren’t the same as you.
Seeing the Differences
The first thing to do is fundamentally understand that we don’t know what it’s like to be a woman and never truly will, but it’s important to listen and try to empathise. Talk to people. Sisters, mothers, cousins, friends — all of them will know more about what it’s like to be a woman than we do. My perspective was warped, I never really understood just how so many people felt threatened in situations that I wouldn’t have worried about for an instant.
It’s at that point that arguments like blaming what someone was wearing completely fall short (I kinda hope they already had).
Going beyond that you can start to see how there are societal issues, as simple as how media outlets distort the view of events. Being consistently aware of how marginalised groups are affected in ways you are not helps avoid apathy towards them, something that sadly happens far too often.
Reassessing the Past
It’s important to take a look back at the past and acknowledge when we were around something that happened and didn’t do more. We weren’t confident enough to confront the issue and tried our best to help while not doing much at all. I don’t mean this to tell you to ruminate on the past, fundamentally this is all about what you do now.
We think of the threat to women’s safety as this mysterious character, a distant monster we can’t even begin to imagine. It’s not, it’s probably people we know, like and trust.
I’m not trying to demonise your friend here, but it’s easy to think we are willing to tackle the problem when it’s just a name we hear about in the news. What really counts is your friend who drank a lot and was a bit too much that one night, where nothing really happened. That’s the dangerous part.
Maybe that friend is you, and that’s a difficult thing to come to terms with, but you need to.
What do you do here?
It’s incredibly awkward but you talk to the person about it. We’re far more likely to listen to our friends calling us out, and the onus is on us to hold people we care about accountable, in this situation men are far more likely to listen to men.
Then in the future, when you see someone put in an uncomfortable situation, empathise with them and actually try to help out. A friend was talking about someone pretending they knew them; a casus belli for them to leave whatever situation they’re in. This isn’t me saying that you’re a white knight protecting a vulnerable person, this isn’t about you or me, but if anyone is put under threat I’d like to imagine I would do something about it.
You could also go into a bigger conversation about the culture that normalises objectification, entitlement and slander towards women, talking about why people become predatory in the first place but that’s such a large topic it would need its own place. The quick thing I want to touch on and this whole point is to hold your friends to the same expectations you hold yourself to.
Making yourself seem like less of a threat
There are probably times we’ve unintentionally made someone feel unsafe, and being aware of that we have the capacity to do so is probably the most important change to make. However, there are actionable differences we can make when walking down the street.
Talking to women in your life would give you a much better answer than I can provide, but here’s some general advice from women that followed the tragic abduction in Clapham Common:
- Give some distance between yourself and them
- Don’t run up to people from behind
- Don’t stare at them
- Don’t make comments about them
- Stop your friends from doing any of the above
- If someone is seemingly in trouble, ask if they’re alright/need help
- Offer to walk with your friend if they’re going alone
Again, I want to emphasise that this isn’t a how-to guide, but if you wanted some modicum of advice on how to walk down the street here you are.
Destructive Conversation
There’s been a lot of rebuttal to the discussion around women’s safety in the form of mentioning that men are more likely to be assaulted and that the UK statistically do far better at this than other nations — similar points were raised in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and protests lasts summer. Friends I know put this exact point to me, even while acknowledging that there’s still a massive problem that needs to be solved.
These points come across sincerely but are actively detracting from the problem at hand, even if what they are saying is 100% true. The usual response is ‘why does that matter’, but that falls short of explaining why this is so important and usually leads to the person who originally made the remark galvanising their position as we ignore facts.
The short answer is because there’s an implicit level to what those statements are saying. When you say “things are getting better” what you’re actually saying is “but things are getting better, this isn’t such a big deal” or “men are way more likely to be assaulted” does to “but men are way more likely to be assaulted, we’ve all got s#!$ to deal with”. If you’ve said something like this, even if you didn’t mean it, this is what’s implied — and it acts to ignore the issue at hand.
When you make that point you have to be self-aware of exactly what are you actually trying to achieve? The only valid reason I can truly understand is to make yourself feel a bit better about the problems that exist, and ego shouldn’t come into this.
LPT — Always try to be aware of the implicit sentence that was left unsaid in people’s arguments, arseholes always fall back onto justifying their point by ignoring that part of what they said, making their argument seem objective.
Putting everything together
The general theme here is being empathetic and holding yourself and others to account. This applies to more than just making women feel safer but is something I would argue is incredibly important life advice. This feels like it hardly scratched the surface or gave points the real attention they deserve.
It’s horrible that events like this are the catalysts that spark true and immediate reflection, but hopefully real reflection and change will happen over the near future. Even if it doesn’t change how people around me act I’m going to try to be more aware of what I can do to help others and be a better person, change starts with you.
My sincerest condolences go out to the family and friends of Sarah Everard, it’s an absolutely unacceptable tragedy and I can’t even begin to imagine the pain they are going through.
