Support truly
independent journalism
Our mission is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting that holds power to account and exposes the truth.
Whether $5 or $50, every contribution counts.
Support us to deliver journalism without an agenda.
Louise Thomas
Editor
Message me when you get home, OK?” The line is phrased like a question but delivered like an instruction; I am not expected nor allowed to decline.
I shift uncomfortably while weighing up my options. I don’t know the woman in front of me particularly well, you see; she’s more acquaintance than friend. So I swap my real, unfiltered response for the less confrontational: “Oh, I always forget to do that!” – throwing in a zany “I’m such a scatterbrain!” shrug for good measure – “So it’s just easier if you don’t expect to hear from me. I don’t want you to worry!”
Sometimes, this tactic works. Tonight, it doesn’t.
Her face clouds over as she leans in and grips my upper arm just a little too tightly. “Now, Helen, you know that’s not safe! Promise you’ll drop me a line when you get back?” – again, very much not a question – “Or just share your location so I can see you’ve made it home.”
The logic that I won’t be “safe” walking the 15 minutes from the pub to my house – a walk I have completed hundreds if not thousands of times unscathed – but that I should voluntarily hand out my live location to a near stranger doesn’t quite add up. Neither does the idea that seeing I’ve made it home equals seeing I’ve made it home safely. Who’s to say I haven’t been chloroformed in the interim and dragged through the front door against my will?
But I say neither of these things – I intuit this will do little to placate her – and refrain from launching into the feminist diatribe that has, in the past, made more than one person back away slowly while looking frantically for the exit sign. I simply don’t have the energy today.
Instead, I lie, with a cheery “Sure, will do!” – though I know full well I absolutely will not.
I don’t know when this new “safety” measure became so entrenched in women’s nightly rituals, as hardwired as saying “goodnight” and “we must do this again soon!” to all and sundry upon leaving a venue. It must be a relatively modern phenomenon, though – no one was using it when staggering home from student nightclubs in the Noughties, nor when parting ways to catch night buses across London in my twenties. It’s really only in the last five years that I’ve noticed “let me know when you get home” go from fringe request to ubiquitous demand.
There’s little that gets my hackles up in quite the same way. For starters, I’d wager a kidney that this woman, and the countless others who have gone before her, will forget our conversation the instant I leave the room. She will not notice whether or not I message, making the entire exercise obsolete. And, in the unlikely event that she does, what exactly is she going to do about it: follow me home? Call the police? Send in a SWAT team? The correct answer is “absolutely nothing” – which, again, renders the check-in superfluous.
Then there’s the fact that my independence, hard-won and fiercely protected, is being called into question. I love being able to live alone, take myself travelling, walk the long way round if I fancy. I love, most of all, having the freedom to be spontaneous. How did agreeing to being tracked and monitored become obligatory? Why must I trade autonomy for self-reporting my whereabouts like a prisoner on parole?
I know that, on the surface, it’s not a big deal. I know that this woman has the best intentions. I know that I’m possibly being a selfish brat by refusing to smile and acquiesce and send the silly little message that seems to make everyone feel so much better. But here’s the issue that sticks in my craw, that makes me want to snarl obscenities and stamp my feet every time a well-meaning friend tells me that sending a message is a mandatory part of being a responsible woman: I have never, not once, heard a man being told the same thing. And therein lies the sexist rub.
How did agreeing to being tracked and monitored become obligatory?
There is an impression, one that has grown exponentially in the wake of the tragic murders of Ashling Murphy, Sabina Nessa, Zara Aleena and Sarah Everard by men they didn’t know, that women are not safe by themselves. People read these attention-grabbing headlines and make sweeping assumptions: we are at risk from strangers, anytime, anywhere. Life is now an endless catalogue of warning signs and prohibitions: Don’t walk through the park. Don’t run after dark. Don’t go home alone. Don’t fall prey to the unlicensed minicab driver. Don’t attempt the final stretch to your front door without rape alarm, pepper spray and keys in hand. And, of course, don’t go to bed without first letting your friends know that you “got home safe”.
This attitude is understandable, and I have a huge amount of sympathy for it. These stories are horrifyingly powerful. They scare us; they stay with us; they quicken our step and set our heart rates soaring. They tell us that we need to practice constant vigilance, to put systems and strategies in place to avoid being the subject of our own dreaded candlelit vigils. After all: when we can’t even trust the police to keep us safe, who can we trust?
But, as natural as these reactions are, they simply aren’t based in fact. The statistics are clear: it is men, not women, who are more at risk of being attacked by a stranger on their way home from a night out. A far greater proportion of police-recorded violent offences against women are committed by an intimate partner – 43 per cent for female victims, compared to 23 per cent for males – according to Office for National Statistics data for 2022. Men are twice as likely as women to have been attacked by a total stranger (20 and 9 per cent respectively), while 24 per cent of violent crimes perpetrated against women are done by an acquaintance. That male friend of a friend offering to walk you home to keep you “safe” is statistically more likely to be a danger than the random guy you pass on the street.
The same pattern rings true for sexual violence: only around 10 per cent of rapes and sexual assaults against women are committed by strangers. Half of rapes are carried out by a partner or ex-partner, while five in six are carried out by someone the woman already knows.
Even when looking at the most extreme worst-case scenario, men accounted for the vast majority (71 per cent) of the 590 murder victims in 2023. Women are also more likely to be killed by someone they know than men; of the 100 domestic homicide victims in the year ending March 2023, 70 were women.
Why am I throwing all these deeply depressing statistics around? Simply to shine a light on the fact that, if we’re asking anyone to send a message to say they’ve got home safely, it really should be men. Anything else is ignoring reality; anything else is instilling in women an irrational fear that is completely unwarranted the overwhelming majority of the time. Violence against women and girls is a huge and serious issue that cannot be ignored – but more often than not it is the men already in our lives that do us harm. In much the same way that a plane crash will dominate headlines while vehicle collisions go largely unreported, the stories of Ashling and Sabina and Zara and Sarah were front page news because they were uncommon – not because they happen all the time.
It is why I can’t just smile, nod and comply when someone insists that I share my location. By doing so, I’m unthinkingly engaging in the same kind of toxic patriarchal narratives that suggest men are strong and capable and able to move freely through the world, while women are fragile and weak and should be wrapped up in pastel-coloured cotton wool and told to stay home for our own good.
Sarah Everard’s life would not have been saved had she promised to WhatsApp her friends
More darkly still, these same narratives seek to tell us it’s our fault when bad things happen to us: if only she hadn’t been drunk/worn that dress/walked through the park/gone running alone/refused to send a message saying she’d “got home safe”.
Sarah Everard’s life would not have been saved had she promised to WhatsApp her friends. Sabina Nessa would not still be alive had she done live-location sharing. To suggest otherwise is to do those blameless women – and their loved ones – a gross disservice.
There are many things to be scared of in this life and we are, whatever our sex or gender, constantly forced to make decisions that balance risk and reward. I’m not suggesting that anyone goes out of their way to court danger, or that we shouldn’t look out for our friends. But I do think that those risk assessments should be proportional and based in the reality of the world in which we live. I do think that we have little to no control over most of the worst things that might befall us. And I do think that needlessly living in fear is no way to live.
If it makes you feel better to ask the women you know to message when they’ve got home safely, by all means, be my guest. But be sure to share the love and request the men in your life do the same – or prepare to experience my unfiltered feminist diatribe first hand...
