“That’s what girls have to think about all the time.” – Saoirse Ronan on The Graham Norton Show
Saoirse Ronan’s words have gone viral for a variety of reasons, most importantly because they are true. But they have also been reported as silencing a group of men, and not just any group of men, but important men joking about defending themselves with a mobile phone.
Ronan was also described as interrupting this group of famous men, succeeding only on her third attempt to get a word in edgeways. Certainly, she interrupted the flow of the conversation, though the men managed to overcome their shock and get the chat back to trivialities fairly quickly. I wonder if a man behaving thus would have been described this way.
And Paul Biddiss, who trained two of those men, Paul Mescal of Gladiator II and Day of the Jackal star Eddie Redmayne, says streetwise women are more aware of surveillance and harder to follow. That should interrupt every man’s train of thought. From where might women have learnt this?
Conventions in this article
For the sake of brevity, I am going to use the term women to refer to both women and girls. And many of my comments, as with Ronan’s interjection, apply equally to others such as gay and transgender individuals who have reason to fear men.
I am also going to refer to the people who are feared as men because the vast majority of violence and sexual assault is perpetrated by men and by only a small minority of women.
My experience and expertise
As a man, I have no direct experience of what it means to walk a poorly lit street and wonder if there is someone in the shadows. I have never considered crossing the road because the only person in sight is a lone stranger walking towards me. I have never been worried my drink would be spiked when I have gone to a toilet in a pub. I have not lived with fear as a constant companion.
I have been subject to violence twice, both times from men and both unexpected. A friend and I were given a kicking by a group of skinheads because of our long hair. And on meeting an ex-pupil in the street he said something rude, I objected and he broke my nose. That ended with his conviction. But in neither case did I live with anything but the briefest fear of what might happen.
So why am I writing this? One reason is that I have four granddaughters who are growing toward this world and I do not want them to walk it in fear.
“Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.” – Margaret Atwood
This disparity between men and women needs to change
This is a male problem. It is not the responsibility of women to buck up and stop being frightened, even if most men are not planning on raping or killing them. It is not the responsibility of women to hide their bodies so we men do not get too excited. It is not the responsibility of women to avoid places where they may be attacked – remembering that all too often that might be their own home.
And we are very bad at owning that responsibility. We – and I do mean men, because we live in a society where institutions of government and justice are overwhelmingly dominated by men – have built systems where women’s justifiable fears are made into jokes, degraded, diminished or completely ignored.
Only by doing that do we achieve a system where only one rape in six is reported to the police and barely 2% of those reported result in a conviction. If women made false accusations of rape as often as men say they do then I would expect the number of prosecutions to be more than the 35 reported by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for a 17-month period in 2011-12, when the CPS was headed by Sir Kier Starmer and there were 5,651 prosecutions for rape.
Are women right to be afraid?
I would like to claim that I have never given any woman cause to feel afraid of me. I will be honest and admit as a young man I did press my desires firmly upon some. And did any of those incidents constitute an assault? Only the women concerned could answer that.
I suspect given my age that most women would not be in fear of me now, but I doubt that was true of my younger self – brash and loud and sometimes intoxicated. I do know that some of my looks, words and actions were unwelcome. Did they instil fear? Or was that inherent in my gender?
Most women who are the victims of violence will have been subjected to that violence by a man or men. We can leave them pregnant, bruised, broken and dead. And how are they supposed to know who is safe and whom to fear?
The trial of the men accused of the rape of Gisèle Pelicot in France may help change the macho image most men seem to want to own, but it is unlikely to be enough. So women’s only option is to assume that any of us might be the most dangerous person they will ever meet. I think there are three areas where we can change this – personal, political and societal.
Men can, and must, change their personal behaviour
Obviously we should stop sexual assault, rape and violence but I am speaking here to the men who are unlikely to commit such blatant and overt acts. Those of us who ‘know’ we are not a threat to women – we need to make that clear.
First, we should stop the banter as it is usually a form of bullying, however subtle, separating ‘us’ and ‘them’. We can politely find out if a woman is interested in us before telling them how sexy they are, or which bits of their bodies we find attractive. We should stop claiming we are trying to protect women until we have given them reason to no longer fear us – perhaps by calling out other men who are behaving badly.
The key political change
Rape is a difficult crime to prosecute because in many cases most of the evidence is known to only two witnesses – the victim and the alleged rapist. And the CPS will only initiate a prosecution if there is a realistic prospect of conviction. So the vast majority never get to court.
The average time for cases to actually get to court is now in excess of two years. That is two years for memories to fade, witnesses to become unavailable and for survivors to withdraw as the process retraumatises them.
The criteria for which cases are prosecuted should be moved so that more get in front of juries. Let them decide who is telling the truth and who is lying. That may change the view of the CPS as to what constitutes a realistic prospect.
The government approach to the riots of July and August 2024 was for a rapid and stringent legal process. The same swift approach, using sufficient judges and courts, could be applied to almost all outstanding cases of rape and sexual assault. Perhaps then the message will get through to some of the dangerous men in society that these acts will be punished and punished rapidly.
The necessary societal change
Education is a continuous process from birth to death. It is not just school that educates our children. Parents teach them what behaviours are acceptable and what are unacceptable. Every adult in every encounter with any child teaches them about the way the world works not just by telling them what to do but in every word we utter and action we undertake.
Change could be driven rapidly in our schools provided it is supported by parents. We should stop saying boys will be boys and excuse their bad behaviour. We should stop telling them that big boys don’t cry.
If relationship education in schools was fully successful we would not be facing the current problems. We should not follow the approach of my 1960s grammar school with its messages of elitism whereby the actions, attitudes and behaviour of many of the staff showed us that the rules did not apply to them – nor, by implication, to us.
And we should condemn the example of some public schools which seem built on the principle of one law for us and one law for them. Boris Johnson as a member of the Bullingdon Club and as a prime minister who lied to Parliament is an example, not an exception. These attitudes permeate through society and too many men feed on the drops that trickle down. This needs to change.
In our current version of society, many men need help to find their way out of the toxicity of generations-old misogyny being exacerbated by the likes of Andrew Tate, whereas women do not need men to help them or to allow them to shine. Women just need men to get out of the way and leave them alone.
