Women, if you want to be safe, stay at home. Except that you are more likely to be killed at home by someone who claims they love you, so don’t stay at home. Make sure you don’t have a boyfriend because he’s the most likely person to kill you, but don’t go out without your boyfriend because you need someone to protect you. Don’t show too much skin, or laugh too loud but come on love, give us a smile. Carry your keys in between your knuckles. Make sure you run far enough to burn all those calories but don’t do it in public and for goodness sake, don’t run in shorts, that’s just asking for trouble. Public transport is dangerous, but so are taxis and walking and driving on your own and did I mention that staying at home is really risky? Confused? I am too.
Like many women in Melbourne, I’m scared to live in a world where we walk home at night and wonder if it might be the last time – but I’m not as scared of this as I am knowing that society seems perfectly content to make that our problem as women. Women’s safety is a men’s issue, and its high time that we employ this.
Jill Meagre and Eurydice Dixon are names that we should not know, and yet we do. These women represent every woman’s fear; the fear that we rightfully feel when we dash along an unlit street or through an empty park. The fear I felt when I debated whether I should take a different route home than through the park. These women tell us that what happened to them, could happen to anyone. It could happen to me.
Sexual violence and homicide might be the extreme end point of it, but the spectrum they sit on stretches right back to "harmless" casual sexism, the rape jokes that proliferate and the attitude expressed towards women on a daily basis by groups of men who have been socialised to view themselves as superior. These toxic behaviours don’t manifest one day out of nowhere. They are cultivated over decades; and this cultivation needs to be stopped. No matter the circumstances, no matter the situation, we need to challenge the concept of male sense of entitlement about using violence.
According to a 2010 National Survey, 90% of perpetrators of sexual violence against women are men. When men are victims of sexual assault, 93% reported their abuser was a man. Yes, It’s true that women also assault men, but even when victims of all genders are combined, men perpetrate 78% of reported assaults. These statistics are merely because men aren’t taught to see themselves as part of a group with a culture. I’m obviously not saying all men are violent. I’m saying that it's something about their culture. A culture where men’s violence is normalised and celebrated in the locker room with hi fives and jokes about how “she wanted it”. And so we must challenge our systems and ourselves to confront the prevalence of normalised, sexualised violence experienced by many women.
This brings me to my next argument. Men should take responsibility for sexual assault, not women. Don’t let another woman robbed of her life be turned into a cautionary tale just because the people who have the power to change things think it is easier to keep women afraid than it is to make men accountable. A man is assaulted at night and we discuss lock out laws and drunk violence. A woman is assaulted at night and we tell her to stop walking alone. The men in parliament keep asking “why was she not being safe?”, “why was she alone in the dark?” instead of asking “why was he?” or “why did he?”. And so, we get told to practise “safekeeping routines”, where I call my own mother when I need to walk a block in the dark, or when I feel eyes at the back of my head on a bus.
Many women, like me, have been taught from a young age that they are responsible for avoiding the violence that men perpetrate against us. At best, this makes safety "advice" redundant. Even if some women are able to effectively harness "safety" strategies, this is not effective as a prevention tool. At best, it could be thought of as victimisation avoidance.Teaching women to enact safety strategies relies on the inevitable possibility that there is a willing perpetrator out there whom we need to avoid. While safety strategies may allow individuals to avoid or deflect a perpetrator, this may simply displace harm onto a more vulnerable target. Ultimately, the focus on safekeeping routines are problematic in that they shift responsibility for men's violence back on to women. Distracting us from the difficult and long-term conversations and deep-seated cultural, social, and structural changes that need to happen to truly prevent this violence from occurring in the first place.
In the wake of Melbourne’s loss of Eurydice Dixon, Officer David Clayton speaks what many of the population believe: Only those who suffer from mental conditions or domestically violent upbringings turn into ‘rapists’.
The link between mental health and sexual assault constructs the all too familiar catch cries; “rape is not a crime, it is a disorder” or “rapists are mentally ill and suffered rough childhoods”. Eurydice’s rapist and murderer had autism, so this doesn’t hold him accountable right?.
Research into these claims convey that only 9.3% of sexual assaulters suffer from these alleged conditions. That means that more than 90% are men just raping women. Mental health assessments claim that it is “downright negligent and harmful” to substantiate psychiatric problems to justify this behaviour.
And while only a small number of men would do something as heinous as killing a woman, regardless of their upbringing or mental health, all men have a duty to challenge attitudes towards women and to push for women’s safety.
Vic; keep ignoring the real problem, but I can’t help but wonder how many more lives have to be taken to change men’s attitudes and their responsibility? People in power need to stop victim-blaming by telling women they need to change their behaviour Tell men to change theirs. Tell men to talk to their friends and peers, tell parents to talk to their sons, teach boys from early childhood about consent, respect and equality. Ensure boys don’t grow into men who believe women’s bodies are theirs for the taking. Nonviolence against women starts with respect.
Parents, instead of telling our girls not to walk through parks, maybe we should be telling our boys not to rape them. Let’s stop telling women to stay safe. Let’s tell men not to assault us. Let’s change don’t get raped to don’t rape. It isn’t up to women to modify our behaviour in order to prevent violence from being enacted against us, it’s up to society to work together to dismantle misogyny and the particular kind of male rage that informs these acts of aggression.
In the words of Margaret Atwood, who wrote her dystopian feminist tale almost 30 years ago captured this imbalance that we still experience 30 years on: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
Freedom from sexual assault and violence is a right, not a privilege. When I walk home, with the two paths in front of me: my usual route through the park, or the main road that can add an extra 10 minutes; my safety would be a privilege. And whilst Domestic Violence Victoria chief executive Fiona McCormack said attitudes towards women were changing, more needs to be done. Because women don't need to change their behaviour. Men do.
Next time you are confronted with your own two paths, through a park or a longer route via the main road; what will you do? For what it’s worth, I will walk through the park alone: a small act of resistance in honour of all the women who should have made it home safely.