Public space as space for action

Exploring the right amount of panic has revealed the ways in which women are significantly, habitually, restricting their activities, limiting their freedom, in exchange for a sense of safety. We have looked at the evidence that women may be more scared of crime in public space than men, but challenged the idea that this fear is unjustified. Instead it’s been shown that gender roles mean we may not be getting the whole story of men’s fear, that crime statistics may mean we’re not getting the whole story of women’s victimisation, and that the shadow of sexual assault may mean we’re not measuring the same things anyway. It’s also been suggested that the ways in which women’s fear of crime alters our behaviour may actually form part of the reason that we experience less crime than men, or at least the types of crime commonly counted in crime surveys. This kind of change is what is meant by ‘safety work’.

To try to understand more about how and why we learn to do it, Chapter Three looked at the ways in which the message of ‘stranger danger’ is particularly gendered and at the meanings which underpin it; mainly that women are responsible for preventing sexual violence at the same time as lacking the common sense needed to do just that. It found that these messages are embedded for many in experiences of intrusive, harassing and abusive men in childhood and adolescence, as well as through the ways that such experiences are responded to by others. Women are taught that we are the thing that causes – and so the thing that can stop – sexual violence, at the same time as being taught to doubt ourselves. The lessons about women’s responsibility for preventing sexual violence mixes with gender stereotypes about how to be a blameless woman: polite, compliant, silent. When many young women do speak up, they are treated as though they are mistaken, lying or accountable. Faced with such limitations, the only course of action is to change ourselves.

Chapter Four looked in detail at what these changes are.