No wonder women are living in fear
I CAN’T stop thinking about Sarah Everard. At 16, I was given a rape alarm. Like all women, I can’t walk home at night without working out escape routes, pretending to talk to someone on my mobile phone or looking behind me. After meeting female friends, we say, ‘Text me when you get back’, without thinking about what this means because the underlying threat of male violence has been ingrained in us from a young age. men can go out drinking with friends until the early hours and not remember how they got home, never concerned they might not make it. Women never feel completely safe, no matter how old we are, what we wear, where we go or what time of day it is. on the ten-minute walk home from the Tube station one evening, I was catcalled by a group of men. As much as I wanted to shout back, I knew it was safer to bite my tongue. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve crossed the street or moved to a busier Tube carriage to avoid men who were making me feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t just happen at night. While out running on a sunny day, a man tried to block my path. Luckily, there were lots of people around. men don’t murder women out of the blue — there are red flags of previous behaviour rooted in misogyny that we need to recognise and act upon. That’s why women must always report incidents to the police, no matter how small, because they could form part of a bigger picture. But we can’t create change on our own. It enrages me there is so much focus on how women should protect themselves from violent men and not on how to reduce the epidemic of male violence. There are posters in ladies’ toilets telling us: ‘Don’t be a statistic.’ Are there posters in the men’s toilets saying: ‘Don’t be a rapist’? I am not villainising all men. I just want good men to understand that our fear is real and to be proactive in finding ways to make us feel safer. men need to have conversations with their male friends about violence against women and call out sexism when they encounter it. Every woman has a friend who has been harassed by a man, but men don’t seem to know anyone who has threatened a woman, which doesn’t seem possible. If men are staying silent when their friends degrade women, they are part of the problem. We never question a man’s decision to walk alone in the dark or ask what he was wearing. Women have a right to feel safe on our streets and we should not have to change our behaviour. I applaud friends who say they will carry on as normal and not live in fear after what happened to Sarah, but I am simply too scared to do this. I have to accept the risk is there, as unfair as it is. I will continue to be hyper-vigilant and suspicious of any man I see when I am simply walking in London. Sarah could have been any one of us.
ALICE BUDDEN, London E14.