I fought off my male attacker – but I did not dare tell anyone
ONE of the sadder duties of being a parent is teaching your precious girl about how to leave the house on her own and survive. You have to instruct her how to navigate her way around the grubby street furniture of daily life called ‘strange men’.
After dark, walk only in lighted streets, you tell her, or in the middle of the road.
Hold your keys like knuckledusters, carry mace, or a rape alarm. Whatever you do, don’t make eye contact.
The precautionary playbook is passed from mother to daughter.
After all, last week a man of 20 was marched by his own mother to the cop shop after punching the lights out of an 18-year-old woman outside a nightclub in Essex.
What had she done? According to witnesses, she confronted him for calling other girls ‘fat c***s’.
And outside a bar in Paris last week, a man ‘made dirty noises, comments, and whistled’ at a 22-year-old woman in a red dress called Marie Laguerre.
Most women instinctively know that to respond to approaches is to put yourself in danger.
Not Laguerre. She must have made a snap decision that for once, she was not putting up with the unwanted attention directed at her sex in general, all the time.
‘Ta gueule!’ (‘Shut up!’), this Rosa Parks from Paris muttered. But her harasser didn’t jog on. He picked up a heavy ashtray and threw it at her. Then he hit her hard in the face.
I’m not going to go into the gender dynamic of these two assaults because they hardly need spelling out. Men (please forgive the generalisation – I mean ‘some men’) feel entitled to proposition or assault random women in the street.
They also feel entitled to feel ‘disrespected’ as men when the woman rejects their approach, offer of sex, drink or whatever.
These two cases of women being assaulted in the street are so shocking and depressing they convince me of one thing. It’s right to record such behaviour as either hate crime or hate incidents (depending on whether the behaviour is criminal), as Nottinghamshire police have been doing, in a controversial pilot scheme that has uncovered so much of this that it seems likely to go nationwide.
The pilot has led tons and tons of women to come forward, reporting indecent exposure, groping, upskirt photography, abuse, and worse. A researcher on the study concluded that we live in a culture where it’s acceptable to intimidate women on the street, to go up to a woman and touch her backside, comment on her body and ‘put her in fear of an assault’. This is not on, needless to say. In France, new laws that outlaw ‘annoying, following and threatening’ a woman are also coming in.
I applaud this. Women should call out assaults for what they are, by reporting them.
I was attacked viciously when I was walking home from the Tube, at about six on a dark winter’s evening. I was 16.
A man in white jeans jumped on me from behind, put his hand over my mouth, and bundled me over a low wall – but I managed to struggle free, and ran home.
IDIDN’T tell my mother as I was frightened she wouldn’t let me go out after dark wearing tight trousers or short skirts ever again if I did. If I had reported it, if I’d known this was a crime, rather than just men behaving badly, he might have been caught.
I don’t want my daughter – or yours – out on the streets where she can be the victim of such an ‘incident’ just because she’s a woman, perpetrated by a man who thinks he has a right to do it just because she’s a woman.
I know that complaining about everyday harassment is regarded as a bit humourless, but it’s the universal female experience, and there’s nothing remotely funny about that.
Sorry, feel a bit strongly about this one.
AS THE clocks tick down, secret impact studies from 30 local councils are putting up red flags when it comes to social care and the availability of food and medicines – and even predicting ‘social unrest’ after Brexit. The guv’nor of the B of E warns of falling output and house prices. You may snort ‘Project Fear!’ but remember: the UK almost fell apart when KFC ran out of chicken for a few days. Imagine the chaos if frantic millennials can’t get their daily avocados in Tesco.