Safe Streets for Women— why is that so hard?
In watching the events unfold following the death of Sarah Everard I had a moment of realisation that left me with this question — why is female safety something that we find so hard? I was watching the news that Sunday with my 16 year old daughter and I realised that through her short life I have been teaching her how to keep herself safe. Schooling her on where to walk, what to do if a car stops and tries to abduct her, what train to take or mostly just picking her up from wherever she is because then I know she is safe. Now as she starts to want to go out into the world, and with university only a year away, the advice has been more about how to protect herself on evenings out — never leave a club alone, always make sure one of you is the designated “sober” person, never leave your drink unattended, and it goes on. The lightbulb moment for me was realising that I’ve been doing this for myself and now her, all my life. Making those daily risk assessments when going anywhere — but why? why do we have to and why have we just accepted this as the cost of being a women in our society. I had never questioned this before. It made me extremely sad and depressed that even in the 21st century we still have to consider our daily — and it is daily — self protection.
Our Shared Experience
When I joined our regular get together with the women in my team that week, I was saddened by the shared experience we all had of having to consider our safety on this daily basis. Many of them started to share personal experiences of harassment. One of the team shared how she had only told her mother now, of an event that happened when she was a teenager walking home from school, where 2 men tried to bundle her and a friend into their car. They screamed and got away but she never told anyone this story. It reminded me of a similar experience I had when I was 14 walking home from a friends house when I was followed by 2 teenage boys to my back door where one of them grabbed me and pushed me to the ground. After the shock I screamed and they ran away but I also never told anyone. Another one of the team talked about a recent experience she had in the town where she lives where she was chased by a car through a number of streets until she was able to lose her pursuers. Something similar happened to my daughter outside her 6th form college. Everyone seems to have a story. Curb crawling isn’t even a crime in this country and is a daily occurrence with men, both young and old hanging around outside of schools and colleges to prey on young girls — this predatory behaviour just seems to, if not go completely unnoticed, then just not be acknowledge as being as dangerous and frightening as it is.
Daily Risk Assessment
As our conversation that morning continued as another member of the team shared a conversation she had had with her husband. They are both runners and she asked him if he ever considered where he is going to run from a safety perspective, when he leaves the house. She has to, and thinks carefully about where she will go even in daylight, before she runs. I also do the same. Behind our house is a Rugby training ground with woods and walks around it. I never run there or walk there alone because I just don’t feel safe. As women when we go out, especially if we are going out for an evening, we have to make a risk assessment of the danger — where are we going, who’s going to be there, how will we get home. Its become our norm.
Violence Against Women
The statistics on violence against women are unacceptable on any level. Reported cases of rape have fallen by 23% since 2018 with rape convictions at an all time low of just 2.2%. The CPS have been under fire recently for these appalling figures. As my two examples demonstrate, victims of these crimes often don’t tell anyone and statistics like these cannot give any of us confidence that women are being supported. Current laws and policing policy do not seem to be anywhere near adequate. I have to confess that until recently the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that has been going through Parliament had passed me by. But hearing now that the word “Women” doesn't even appear any where and that there is more focus on protecting statues then women seems yet again to show that we are invisible.
Over the last 10 years or more we have seen visible policing on our streets drop to almost nothing. I have lived in my street for 12 years and I can only ever remember once seeing police walking around our part of the town. A lack of police walking the beat as they used to do is not just a problem in suburban towns like mine, but of course a great problem in large cities like London, Manchester and Glasgow where gang related crime and knife crime seem out of control. We all need to feel safe on our streets and so policing and the legal system it would seem to me, need a complete update to deal with these types of crime.
Where do we go from here?
As Covid-19 has forced all of us to pause, it has perhaps not been surprising that large issues like female safety and racial injustice have surfaced. The Pandemic has brought the struggles in our lives in to sharp focus. It is easy to feel like the world truly has gone mad and that there is no hope. Last month at Microsoft where I work, we ran our first Microsoft Include Conference aimed at enabling a global conversation on Diversity and Inclusion. With the events here in the UK and the growth in hate crimes in the US, brought into sharp focus by the attack on 6 Asian women in Atlanta, the timing for such a conference is long overdue. We were very fortunate to welcome Michelle Obama to the conference to share her perspectives on what we are seeing. One of the many things she said that struck me was, that even in these difficult times we should not lose sight that we have come a long way. There is still much work to do but we must build on what we have.
“Women belong in all places where decisions are being made … It shouldn’t be that women are the exception.” Ruth Baden-Ginsburg
I was struck by this quote from Ruth Baden-Ginsburg the 2nd female Supreme Court Justice and the first Jewish women to hold the post. Women need to be where these decisions are made but they also need to be empowered and given a voice in these environments. Tokenism doesn’t work — real change comes from inclusion and that is hard. I am grateful to work for a company that acknowledges this, and sees the work that is needed both in our workplace and externally, to make lasting change. So we are starting by talking and listening — creating those safe places and the environment to try to help everyone feel ok about talking about these topics and together finding ways to change. All change starts with the individual first and grows from there.
technology also has a role to play in making this change a reality. Recently at Microsoft we worked to support the implementation of a new system for Intelligent Safeguarding for victims of Honour based violence, forced marriages and FMG. This new system which harnesses Microsoft AI and automation technologies through our Power Automate solution, ensures that 100% of protection orders are captured without delay. The old system relied on victims and sometimes their families to inform relevant police forces, leaving many orders unfulfilled. This is just one of many examples of technology playing its part.
I think the ultimate route forward is to make this a problem in everyone’s consciousness — we may be consciously incompetent at this point, but acknowledging as a society that this is no longer an acceptable set of problems to live with, is hopefully the starting point for real reform and for women to finally feel safe on our streets.
