Sarah Everard: are women ever safe from men?
March 10, Clapham (PA)
I was walking down the street in broad daylight with a friend. We had been swimming. Our hair was still damp and we smelled of chlorine. We were nine. These are obviously the exact circumstances in which I wanted to see my first penis. Clearly, we were asking for it.
“Wouldn’t you love to play with this?” he said as he held the bizarre lump of flesh in his purple leather gloved hand (I will never forget those gloves). We laughed at him – despite neither of us finding it funny. Somehow we instinctively knew this was our best option. We ran off. But he kept following us. We found some men working on the road nearby. Their hi-vis jackets were the closest we could see to anyone “in uniform” and so we told them what had happened and asked them to help. Thankfully, they chased him off.
This was not the last time I was flashed. It wasn’t even the last time before I hit puberty. I also had men grab at my body, peer in while I was using the toilet, the changing rooms and the showers, follow me home catcalling and many other less obvious daily occurances; less frightening but no less influential to the way I carry myself through the world.
Late last night, a male Metropolitan Police officer was arrested as part of the ongoing investigation into the disappearance of Sarah Everard. This individual man is innocent until proven guilty of course. But it brought home to many women a truth we live with every single day: We know that it’s “not all men” but we absolutely don’t know which men it is.
I tweeted as such and the response has been overwhelming. It has spoken to a truth that women grow up knowing and that men have no idea of. It speaks to the keys we grip between our fingers when we hear footsteps behind us. It speaks to the text we send our friends the second we get safely through our front doors (and the worry we have until we receive that text from them). It speaks to our intrinsic knowledge of where the streets with good lighting are.
During the various lockdowns, we have all been taking more walks as an essential way of getting exercise and fresh air. We need to get out of the four walls that have captured us for so much of the rest of the time. I see men on the street looking at me coming towards them and calculating about where everyone else on the road is. No one wants to get too close. Men were fearing for their safety on the street. I wonder how many of them know that women have always been doing this? Always had that awareness. That prickling of the hairs on our neck the second there is someone behind us.
According to the responses to my tweet, men are often shocked when they realise how often women (and girls) have to think about these things. All too often, that shock turns to defensiveness. That is – after all – where the “not all men” trope comes from. But that shock is – of itself – born of male privilege. You don’t know because it is not essential to your bodily integrity to have to know.
Two women are killed a week in the UK as a result of domestic violence. It is an epidemic of violence of immense proportions. It has been exacerbated by lockdown but it will long outlast the Covid crisis. And yet funding is cut and services run down and women are told not to go out alone. That didn’t help me and my nine-year-old friend. Perhaps it’s not on the victims to have to change their behaviour?
Men, next time a woman tells you about this kind of fear – believe her. Even if you know in your heart it would never be you, please also know, that she doesn’t know that. And that it is not only OK, but a good thing for her to act like that until she is sure of you.
Not all men are rapists, but given 80 per cent of all women have been victims of some form of harrassment, maybe, just maybe, you might want to understand why we’d like you to walk on the other side of the road.
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