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Scrolling through my social media feed this morning, I came across a picture of a jagged, dagger-like implement mounted on a plastic ring. It was being recommended as the perfect product for female runners. It is, of course, bright pink. The idea – according to Fisher Defensive, the company behind the Go Guarded self-defence ring – is that “it is a convenient, comfortable, effective way for women to defend themselves if the unthinkable should happen when they are out running, hiking, or walking”.
Convenient? That a product intended as a weapon to fight off sexual assault can be described as “convenient and comfortable” crystallises just how blasé we have become about the idea that constant vigilance is a routine part of a woman’s reality. In 2016, it is quite normal to come across products like this. Rape alarms. Pepper spray substitutes. Anti-rape underwear. Anti-rohypnol nail polish. Anything to remind me to step up, open my wallet and pay the price for “safety” as a woman in a man’s world.
The idea that I need reminding to take extra precautions to try to protect myself is laughable. Women do this every day, in hundreds of tiny ways. For most of us, it is automatic. When you’ve been shouted at, grabbed and made to feel afraid for your safety by men in the street a hundred times, responses such as crossing the street, doubling back, avoiding darker routes, clenching your fists, walking faster, and countless others, happen instinctively. It still doesn’t stop us from being harassed, assaulted and raped.
Fisher Defensive Go Guarded self-defence ring.
The reality of how heavily the threat of sexual violence hangs over women’s daily lives was laid bare today in new data from ActionAid UK . A poll of 2,200 people revealed that 57% of British women have experienced some form of harassment and just under one in six (16%) have been groped in the past month alone.
These are shocking statistics. But even more dispiriting is the finding that over 70% of all British women and 88% of those aged 18-24 have taken steps in their everyday lives to guard against harassment. Sexual violence doesn’t only impact women’s lives in the moment of an assault or an incident of harassment. It affects us every day, influencing our behaviour, our travel plans and our peace of mind.
The poll listed 10 different strategies women use to try to avoid harassment, from avoiding parks or public transport to taking a chaperone or even failing to attend work, school or college all together. A quarter of the women polled had changed their travel route and 28% had prepared to use an everyday object, such as keys or an umbrella, as a weapon.
What is worse is that society encourages women to do these things. It regularly reinforces the message that it is women’s responsibility to keep themselves safe, not men’s responsibility not to harass or assault them. We see it in newspaper articles that emphasise a rape victim’s clothing or behaviour, implying the attack might never have happened if only she had taken more precautions. We see it in celebrity “warnings” to young women to avoid rape by not drinking, not wearing the wrong thing, not being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because, the assumption goes, rape is a shadowy, inevitable force out there waiting for silly women who walk into its path, not the deliberate act of an individual criminal. We see it in police campaigns that tell women to avoid “becoming a victim of rape” by doing things that are legal, instead of telling men not to become rapists by breaking the law.
This International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, we must confront the idea that it is acceptable, normal even, to live in a world where women disrupt their lives to avoid sexual harassment and violence on a daily basis. We must recognise the absurdity and horror of a woman posting a review on the Amazon page for the “self defence ring” that reads: “I still have a small knife in my runner’s pocket, but I like the extra time that Go Guarded buys me before pulling out my knife.”
It is 2016. While we are repeatedly told to stop making a fuss because women are equal now, we are buying backup self-defence weapons to give us time to reach our regular ones. The disparity between the notion that the problem is solved and the toll it takes on women and girls is absurd. So, this International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, take a step in the opposite direction. Disrupt a norm. Listen to a woman in your life about her experiences of harassment. Talk to your son about sexual consent. Discuss sexual violence with men. And, above all, recognise that this is a reality women live with day in, day out, and it is one that won’t be fixed with a bright-pink ring.
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