Thirty years after I was taught about male violence, nothing has changed for my daughters
It must have been around 1991 that a police officer visited our school and stood on the main stage in the hall. She was a lady police officer, which struck us as mildly outlandish and also signalled the nature of what was to come. A year or so earlier, a male officer had come to our single-sex high school to talk about bullying and civic responsibility. This was different. As we sat, cross-legged and sniggering, it was clear that she was here to talk to us, woman-to-woman.
For many of us, news of the disappearance and death of Sarah Everard earlier this month triggered public horror and a private reckoning with our decades-deep conditioning about personal safety. In the event of being attacked, said the WPC that day, we were to stick our fingers in his eyeballs. We were to take the heel of one hand and ram it hard into his chin. We were to grab his nose and kick his shins. If all else failed, said this valiant woman staring down the embarrassed girls of year 11, we were to dig deep and vomit on him. That was it. Huge laugh. She’d lost the room.
When I look back on that scene, I’m struck by the tone of the laughter. It was sincere mirth at the absurdity of imagining one can vomit on demand. It was also a release from the tension in the hall. By the time girls get to high school they have, in all probability, already had a heads up on what’s coming down the pike. You don’t think about it for years, and then you do.
I mentioned it to a male friend last week as, once again, women tried to talk to men about this thing in our lives. I was nine and on holiday with my parents in Portugal when a man came up to us on the street and, to put it politely, offered to buy me for sex. It wasn’t traumatising – we are obliged to report this fact, both to emphasise how universal these things are and lest anyone think we’re attention-seeking – but I didn’t forget it. And, of course, it was only the beginning. All very mild, nothing too upsetting, a bit of verbal abuse and some arse-grabs, plus a guy who, to my enduring amazement, started to take his clothes off after I interviewed him for this newspaper.
And then we have children and the problem shifts. I don’t know what advice personal safety officers give in high schools these days, but in elementary schools in New York, kids are much more sophisticated than we were about abuse. Through school, or through YouTube,
one of my six-year-olds has grabbed hold of the phrase “you don’t know my body” and uses it in enormously annoying ways every time I tell her to do something. “You’re tired, go to bed.” “You don’t know my body!”
It’s a superficial defence. With the threat level raised to paranoia this week, I circled back for another go at stranger danger. No one talks about cars and puppies any more, not least because no one lets their six-year-olds walk anywhere alone. The word I’ve heard parents use is “tricky”. You tell your kids to watch out for “tricky” adults. They understand this, having already, by first grade, encountered tricky kids they don’t trust. You tell them never ever to worry about making a noise if they feel unsafe.
And you try to get ahead of any potential manipulation. What do we know to be true if an adult says – about anything, ever – “Don’t tell your mum, she’ll be angry with you”? Dutifully and with a hint of an eye-roll, my children respond, “We know he is lying!” And then what do we do? “Tell our mum!” I ask about bathroom protocols. I jump on anything that looks like resistance to going somewhere with adults I don’t know. I try to check my anxiety so that I don’t turn them into excessive worriers. Parents of boys are having these conversations too, of course, but at some point it stops. Looking ahead, I feel a nuclear rage.
All the lessons, all the years, and here I am, exactly where I was 30 years ago, only now I’m anticipating having this chat with my daughters. Don’t take the shortcut. Stay in welllit areas. Tell your friends what time you’ll be home. Don’t hitchhike unless you want to get murdered and never take an unlicensed minicab. There is something else, something I don’t say, but that in weeks like these, many of us look at our children and consider, with horror and rage, important above all other things: be lucky.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist