four - The work of creating safety
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2023
Summary
Invisible work
As seen in the previous chapter, at its core the lesson girls receive about sexual violence is that it’s us, not them: either we’ve got it wrong or we’ve brought it on ourselves. The solution then – like the problem – is also us, and so we begin the process of making changes. This is the work of creating safety for women. Small alterations to what we do and how we are, that start young and, as Sophia says, just kind of continue.
When I was about 11 or 12 I lived in America and at that age we had a high school that was quite nearby so I was allowed to walk home from school. It was probably about a 15-minute walk, but on the way there’d be construction crews I had to pass. And almost every single day without fail I’d get a wolf whistle, I’d get a comment, I’d get an ‘oi’ or something. They were trying to interact with me, and I was a 13-year-old girl, I was uncomfortable and I just tried to follow my route. But then it started changing and I started realising that, ok right if I pass by that group of men they call me so I have to cross the street now and I have to walk on the other side of the street. But then of course on the other side of the street a couple of blocks away there’d be another group. So it made me change my behaviour which I started to realise, for me it was just a 13-year-old trying to get away from it, but now looking back on it I see there was something that was unpleasant enough for me to want to stay away from it. And that has kind of continued.
Though the extent to which we do it, and the range of strategies used, differ between women and across our own lives, safety work in any form is still rarely acknowledged, even by ourselves. For some women, part of the reason for this may lie in a resistance to the idea of women’s vulnerability; after all, it’s not only men who don’t like to be thought of as fearful. Charlie touches on this in describing what is for her a lived contradiction: being scared and not scared at the same time.
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- The Right Amount of PanicHow Women Trade Freedom for Safety, pp. 79 - 106Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2018