In response to your article ‘Women’s Safety’…
I just read the article on women’s safety and birdwatching. I only started birdwatching this year and am so excited to get up and go on weekends that I’m often out very early. Up until a few weeks ago, I thought nothing of this, in fact I was planning to go out at night time birdwatching, to try and find some owls, once it got a bit warmer. But then, a few weeks ago, I saw a man ‘exposing himself’. Luckily, he was on the other side of a river from me, but it was only by luck that he was, because that’s the side I normally walk down. It has stuck in my mind, and now when I go out down that route I worry that I won’t be so lucky.
Hannah Moore
I read Ruth Miller’s piece in BW with interest this month and realised that her ‘precautions’ also ring true for me, a male birder. However, far from a retort belittling the plight of female birders, I wanted to add to the story. I am a sufferer of anxiety and depression stemming from systematic bullying in school. Most of this was as a result of me being very open about my love of birds and wildlife and because I was different, I was made to suf suffer for it.
I often find myself gathering not just information about the wildlife around me when out, but also scanning for groups of people and who they might be, possible reactions etc. I avoid eye contact where possible, will always let others past, rather than be followed, and it all stems from a subconscious anxiety.
If this is how female birders feel while they are out, then this is truly horrendous and we as a community need to act to make everyone feel safe.
Ruth mentions the easy ways we can put people at ease and it rings true for me also. Let’s be an all-inclusive hobby, let’s look out for each other and ultimately, let’s all love birding and birds no matter your sex, race, religion or mental well-being.
James Cutting
I am a relative newcomer to your magazine and to birdwatching and have been pleased to see the inclusion of female perspectives in each issue. I am writing, as the article by Ruth Miller, while a gentle and considered exhortation to safety, jarred considerably in her use (in her introductory paragraphs) of the descriptive of “an innocent girl walking home after visiting a friend”. This seemed to feed into the unhelpful and typically media-driven underlying narrative of only good and child-like females can be victims and worthy of concern.
The calling of an adult female a ‘girl’ was simply wrong on so many levels. It removes the agency that women have in being fully female even when adult, and so to imply women need to be protected or parented as a child might.
To further add to that, a descriptive of ‘innocent’ added to the narrative of victim blaming. When might I, as a female, be innocent or guilty, and guilty of what? Wanting
to walk home without being harassed or assaulted is a right that society offers all men but, by inference, only ‘innocent’ women.
As the typical reader is, I imagine, aged 40 and above, the protective language of innocent girls might call to the keeping safe agenda of any victim rather than the calls to arms needed to see this issue as a societal and, dare I say, male behaviour issue. I felt it was a lazy misrepresentation of the lived experience of women who would feel no need to describe themselves as either girls nor innocent in claiming their space on the streets and birdwatching arenas.
Alison Lyall
Short-lived joy