In the days after Sarah Everard's disappearance, women in Clapham told reporters that police officers were knocking on their doors warning them not to go out alone. The stage was set. From the very beginning, the messaging from those whose job it is to keep us safe was clear: this is on women.
Women should be more careful. You are responsible for avoiding your own rape or murder. Nobody was knocking on doors telling men and boys they should avoid going outside until the police had pinpointed which of them had done this. (And yes, statistics showed it was overwhelmingly likely to have been a male perpetrator.) Nobody was saying, 'Until we sort this out, maybe we should keep all the men in after dark, just to be safe. Just common sense, isn't it?' Because what we call common sense, in these cases, is anything but.
It is just further absorption of the messages we've already received from childhood. ‘Lock up your daughters,' they shout gleefully when a chubby, cute little boy toddles around next to the cherubic girls at playgroup. But do we ever stop to think about what that actually means? Some twenty years later, those little baby girls might get a knock on the door from the police telling them exactly that. Lock yourselves up. Keep yourselves safe, shut away, restrained. Because male violence is inevitable. There's nothing we can do about that. But we can police you instead.
This narrative was echoed online, where the following phrases trended on Twitter for days:
'She was just walking home' 'She did all the right things' '#NotAllMen
Women learn what the ‘right things' are very, very early. Once, I was doing a workshop with 13-14-year-old pupils in a lovely school in a little rural town with cobbled streets, and overpriced gift shops. Amid conversations about advertising and role-modelling, I asked the pupils to guess how their lives might be different if they were a different sex. I expected light-hearted answers about hobbies, perhaps, or clothing, which I could use to reflect on the sexism of advertising and gender roles. Instead, a girl tentatively raised her hand and said these exact words: 'You wouldn't have to be scared all the time.'
And, when I asked if other girls felt the same way, every single hand in the class was raised. They started to share their stories of leaving school early in the winter months to get home before dark, of switching schedules to be able to walk in pairs, of gripping their hockey sticks tightly in their hands in anticipation of potential attackers. They were thirteen years old. And already they had learned that they would be expected to protect themselves. Already they had adopted many of the coping mechanisms and safety measures adopted by generations of women before them.
Things women do to keep 'safe' on a daily basis:
• Carry keys between your fingers in case you need to use them as a weapon
• Cross the street to avoid large groups of men
• Take a longer route to avoid badly lit or wooded areas
• Change your commute or route to school to avoid an area in which you've previously been harassed
• Switch to exercising indoors or give up exercise altogether after outdoor harassment
• Record a man's voice on your answering machine to give the impression you don't live alone
• Wear a fake wedding ring
• Carry some kind of weapon, such as pepper spray, a knife or even aerosol deodorant
• Always let someone know where you are going
• Use an app to send your tracking location to a friend or partner
• Always text girl friends to let each other know you've got home safely
• Go to the bathroom in groups
• Dance in groups
• Watch your drink like a hawk and cover it with your hand
• Carry a whistle or rape alarm
• Check and double-check that the cab you're taking is licensed
• Change your clothing to avoid harassment
• Wear headphones, even with no music playing, to try to fend off unwanted advances
• Don't wear headphones so you'll be able to hear someone approaching from behind
• Wear flat shoes in case you need to run
• Wear your hair in a ponytail so you attract less unwanted attention
• Don't wear your hair in a ponytail in case it provides someone with an easy way to grab you
• Don't turn your back on boys in a school corridor
• Stand against the wall in the playground at break time
It can be a real shock for people to read that list. For women, it may be shocking to see so many of the things that are second nature to you written down together like this. Shocking to realise that you aren't alone: that other women are doing these things, too. Shocking to see the list in this context and to begin to recognise that this isn't just you being a bit 'paranoid' or nervy.
That it is the result of growing up in a world in which you've learned, through experience, to fear for your safety pretty much all the time; a world that has socialised you to believe that the person responsible for fixing this frankly outrageous reality is you. Shocking to discover that you have been living in a fairly constant state of hypervigilance for so long that you have ceased even to recognise it as anything out of the ordinary.
For most men, the list is often shocking for a different reason. The realisation that they have rarely, if ever, thought about taking these measures. The shock of learning that the women they love and care about in their lives do all this and more on a day-to day basis.
Extracted from Fix the System, Not the Women by Laura Bates (Simon & Schuster, £12.99).
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