The short moments when women are alone in public space, away from commitments at home or at work – the only moments many people have to themselves – are disrupted.
It’s not just the overt approaches from men making comments about what they’re wearing and asking where they are going or what they’re doing. It’s that women are routinely pulled out of their own thoughts in order to evaluate their environment. They are less free to think about the things they want to think about because of the extra effort they have to put in to feel safe.
This kind of safety work goes largely unnoticed by the women doing it and by the wider world.
The vast majority of this work is preemptive. It’s the subconscious attempt to evaluate what one of my participants called “the right amount of panic” – never quite knowing if a behaviour is an overreaction of if that reaction is actually the reason they avoided an encounter.
The trouble is, women are only ever able to count the times when such strategies don’t work – when they are harassed by a man, or assaulted. The work put into the successes – the number of times women’s actions prevent men from intruding – go unnoticed.
All this in turn keeps us underestimating the scale of the problems women face in everyday life. Estimates on the prevalence of sexual harassment in public are unable to account for all the times instances are blocked. And survivors of sexual assault are blamed for not preventing it when their safety work fails them.
