Women: STAY AT HOME

There is an old curse, may you live in interesting times. We do, although it can be easy to miss the magnitude of the tectonic shifts beneath us because we are living through them not observing them at distance.

The murder of Sarah Everard shook people across the world and served as a lightning rod for sorrow and frustration in women, who felt the injustice of Sarah’s story and their own daily precarity. Sarah has erased the headlines about institutional racism at the heart of the English monarchy sparked by the treatment of Meghan Markle, a different debate but emblematically similar one, coalescing people around tacitly accepted inequality and the need for change.

The luxury of living without fear

I listened to the women I know talk about Sarah Everard and share their own experiences. It was bleak. Some had been followed, many objectified by whistles on a daily basis, all had experienced fear. I knew this to be reality of course but it is too easy for me to ignore it. I am a man and I wander through the world without fear. It is a luxury I take for granted.

It is grotesque that women are excluded from being in the world alone after dark. Yet, it is accepted, diminished and ignored. Like so many societal injustices, we tolerate it and in doing so allow it to become entrenched and ‘normal’.

Baroness Jones, a Green Party peer caustically suggested a 6pm curfew for men. I would 100% vote for that— it would be fairer than what we have now. Imagine a world where women could go a’ sauntering in the silvery moonlight, high-fiving one another and just enjoying themselves. I’d like that for my wife, my daughters, my friends.

The myth of inevitability

As a child I was taught that the world is imperfect and avoiding danger is an individual responsibility. As a superficial principle, this has kept me safe. It is the principle you will have seen trotted out by obdurate men and twitter trolls, frothing about how the world is.

The problem with this principle is that it removes our agency to make change.

Some things are imperfect and inevitable and some things are not. The (curiously masculine) inability or refusal to distinguish between the two is one of the key barriers to progress.

At the risk of drawing blithe parallels…

• If I leave the house in winter, it may be perilously cold outside. I should prepare. We do not have the ability to change the seasons — being cold is imperfect and inevitable. We must accept that and adapt to it.
• If a woman leaves her house at night, she should not face abuse, rape or murder. We have the ability to prevent these things — abuse, rape and murder is imperfect but it is NOT inevitable. We should not accept it or adapt to it.

To normalise and to victim-shame is to condone. Action is required of us and we must be bold enough to take it — but what action?

The red herring of men vs women

This risk of making this a debate about gender, us vs them, is that it does not address the root cause of the problem.

Yes, men should acknowledge, listen, learn, understand, take action, hold to account and be allies. I entirely agree. The interventions we take now are crucial and the onus is on men to change, not women. Visit Reclaim the Night for much better advocacy and ideas than I can articulate.

But are men the problem?

Well yes and no. Men are, generally speaking, the perpetrators and as such should be held to account. Men must educate themselves and take action now. But not all men are rapists and murderers. Is it simply choice that separates the two? Or is it a raft of social, economic and cultural failures that separates them?

I would argue that the majority of rapists and murderers have themselves suffered from a lack of love, of guidance, of education. They are mostly broken people, products of a turbulent society, riven with inequality, neurotically unstable, devoid of values and social contract, casualties of culture that has been hijacked.

But I would say that, I always say that.

If we want systemic change, we must not rely on the system. Politicians will not provide this. For it’s relative merits, capitalism will not put people first. We must forge a new vision, built upon shared values. We must realise that change is possible and that it requires a wrestling of power from the powerful. This is necessary to address all forms of inequality.

I know how abstract that sounds. I don’t really have the answer, but like others I know, I feel that something is fundamentally wrong.

We live in interesting times. As the foundations of our institutions teeter and our perceptions, dogma and culture reverberate, we have three options; refuse to change, opt out of society or participate in the creation of something new. We must take individual action and think collectively about the bigger picture — that is the only route to lasting, person-centred change.