Happy International Women’s Day! — now remember your place as a woman

Monday [8th March 2021] was International Women’s Day. A day for commemorating women’s cultural, political and socioeconomic achievements. A day to celebrate women’s progress against all odds. A day to recognise everything women are worthy of.

The week since has been anything but a celebration of women.

On Monday evening, Meghan and Harry’s “bombshell” interview with Oprah aired in the UK. I watched the programme with my family and was shocked by some of the stories told (‘They had what about his skin colour?!’), overjoyed by the news of the baby girl due (please, please name her Diana) and ultimately, overwhelmingly happy that Meghan finally had the opportunity to tell the world the truth, to let the general public know that — surprise, surprise — the mixed-race American woman who married into the Royal Family was completely unfairly demonised by the British tabloid media.

Of course, I knew that not everyone would be happy about the interview or have complete sympathy for Meghan and Harry. However I was still shocked when, the next day the primary source of speculation on social media was — of all things — Meghan’s (incredibly brave) disclosure that during her pregnancy, she was experiencing suicidal feelings. I’m not going to get into the debate over who’s place it is to say whether or not an individual actually is suicidal because it’s been thoroughly exhausted on social media. (PSA — unless you’re the individual yourself, it’s not your place.) Comparisons have been correctly drawn between the responses to Caroline Flack’s tragic suicide just over a year ago, proving that the fact that this admission was one of the aspects of the interview that was the most intensely contested is indicative of a pretty depressing reality; your cries for help won’t be listened to until you’re gone — at which point people will wonder why you didn’t speak up sooner.

While this ‘episode’ was already a pretty dark moment for humanity, by midweek it simply became a precursor for what was to come.

On March 3rd, Sarah Everard was walking home from a friend’s house in Clapham, South London. She never made it to her front door.

Wednesday brought the news that human remains had been discovered in Kent — by Thursday, Sarah was confirmed dead.

Words cannot begin to describe the absolute horror I — and many others — felt upon reading the news. Because all Sarah did was walk home on her own at night. Because almost every single woman has done the exact same before, and will continue to do the exact same tomorrow, the day after and in the weeks to come.

Let’s start with my own lived experience; I go to school in a big town, I take the train every day and walk from the train station to school and back through the town centre. I have personally been very lucky not to have experienced anything worse than having been yelled at incoherently by drunk men on a Friday night or stared at in a way that made me feel slightly uncomfortable. My education in how to keep myself safe, however, began when I was eleven years old and needed to stay at school late, meaning that I would have to walk to the station after it was already dark.

Always walk down the streets that are brightly lit. Always stay where there are other people. Roll your skirt down the moment you leave the school gates — just make sure you’re showing less of your legs.

Every girl and woman is likely to have had a variation of this ‘pep talk’ at some point in their lives — or has had to reach this unnerving conclusion themselves. And the tragedy of what happened to Sarah is that she did these things. She took the precautions every girl and woman knows to take. Her friends were waiting for her to text them to say that she got home safely, to know that she was safe.

So what are women meant to do when they’ve already done everything they can to protect themselves? The next step has been to go online. It feels as though we are beginning to respond to issues by going, ‘okay, let’s figure out how to stop this from ever happening again.’ A brilliant point that has been reiterated countless times is that women’s safety should not solely be a women’s issue. In fact, when we’ve already been doing everything imaginable to keep ourselves safe and what happened to Sarah is still an ongoing threat, it’s blatantly obvious that the problem doesn’t lie with us (especially given the recent YouGov poll that found that 97% of young women have been sexually harassed).

I’ve seen countless infographics reposted detailing exactly what men can do to make women feel safer and it’s been sad to realise how much they resound with me but encouraging at the same time to see this kind of information circulating.

The issue is, they’re only being posted by women.

I’ve talked in the past about individuals’ inability to empathise (and consequently raise awareness for) issues that don’t affect them personally. I’m sure it was very easy for many to look away from Black Lives Matter last summer — it’s unlikely, but entirely possible that you just don’t interact with people of colour. This time around, it’s a little different. Everyone has a mother. Most people will have sisters, aunts, nieces, girlfriends, friends who are girls. It would be virtually impossible for someone to not have some kind of relationship with a woman in their life. Which is what makes the overwhelming silence from men on social media all the more unsettling. And I know I’ve said my bit in my past about performative activism and the superficial nature of posting about issues online but the priorities of an individual are also made plain to the world when they will repost their football team or favourite artist but maintain an uncomfortable silence around these issues.

Even worse has been the automatic ‘not all men’ (which is distinctly reminiscent of ‘All Lives Matter’) response, or the replies to Twitter threads for women’s experiences with sexual harassment to remind us that men are also sexually harassed by women.

Let’s set the record straight then: we know not all men are rapists. But a lot of men need to have sexually harassed someone for 97% of women to say that they have been sexually harassed. We know that women can commit sexual assault. But the overwhelming majority of cases involve men committing sexual assault and women are inherently more vulnerable.

What do we want? For now, empathy. This isn’t an issue that’s going to be resolved overnight. But for now, the men in our lives need to stand up and do their bit, because we’ve been doing everything we can to keep ourselves safe and quite frankly, it’s exhausting.

So whether you go on to share an infographic on social media, have a conversation with your female friends about how to make them feel more safe or educate yourself on the statistics, I hope anyone reading this who feels that they could do more to make a difference does so. This issue’s not going away tomorrow, or the day after. But your solidarity is going to help me and the other women you interact with feel that little bit safer.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far! Something useful I saw on Instagram today: you can set up an ‘Emergency SOS’ function in your iPhone settings so that when you press your lock button 5 times in a row your phone will make a siren noise, count down to three, call emergency services and text your emergency contacts. It sucks that this is something that could be necessary but please always keep yourselves safe!

My favourite infographics from the past few days:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CMRxqpvr5k-/ (@janinavictoria on Instagram)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CMQO0fbjt8N/ (@georgie.clarke on Instagram)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CMSVfFoqoAq/ (The Guardian)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CKPskTTBhGW/ (@impact on Instagram)