A WEEK OF FEAR AND FURY

Women have been conditioned from childhood to self-police. This is survival -personal safety has always been our lone responsibility (a burden we carry and pass onto our fellow sisters). We need to adapt; our behaviours, the clothes we wear, the public spaces we inhibit. Giving rise to a notion that harm done to you is, ultimately, self-inflicted. These wounds run deep - among women aged 18-24, 97% said they had been sexually harassed, while 80% of women of all ages said they had experienced sexual harassment in public spaces. The emotional weight of this reality is too heavy to bear. We are exhausted. And furious. Like writer Rebecca Schiller, “the volume of my anger is the hot, heavy, enormity of the sun.”

It is a steadfastly growing rage. When you’re confronted with the fact that sexual harassment is still not a crime in the UK; that society has made it all-too easy for men to be bystanders to the threat(s) women feel every single day. Rage around the lack of education for boys/men on consent and boundaries. Rage that the Met Police made multiple arrests against peaceful women protesters at Sarah Everard’s vigil in Clapham Common (a gathering that aimed to highlight women’s right to live without fear and Reclaim These Streets - "at every stage they made the wrong call,” said Labour's shadow domestic violence minister Jess Philips). Rage that Cressida Dick, the first female Met commissioner, has woefully failed to recognise this week just how much the criminal justice system is failing women. Rage that we’ve been fed a narrative that gendered violence is – quite simply - a “women’s issue.”

(One particularly illuminating post shared widely on Instagram, was an excerpt from anti-sexism educator Jackson Katz’ Ted Talk in 2012, which implored men to take an active role in the cultural contagion. Something I’d never considered that much before, but makes complete and utter sense. “We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women,” Katz explains. “We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many boys harassed girls. So you can see how the use of this passive voice has a political effect. It shifts the focus off men and boys and onto girls and women. Even the term violence against women is problematic. It’s a passive construction. There’s no active agent in the sentence. It’s a bad thing that happens to women. It’s a bad thing that happens to women, but when you look at that term violence against women, nobody is doing it to them. It just happens. Men aren’t even a part of it!”)

Of course, there’s a wider narrative at play, the deep well of female rage is intersectional and complex. Violence against girls and women tied in with racism, homophobia and transphobia. Grief that 21-year-old Blessing Olusegun, whose body was discovered on a beach in East Sussex last year, did not receive such widespread levels of media attention. Flashbacks to last summer, when two police officers took selfies next to the dead bodies of murdered sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman (“those police officers felt so safe, so untouchable, that they felt they could take photographs of dead Black girls," their mother said.) Audre Lorde wrote that every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. “Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change,” she says. “And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions underlining our lives.”

For decades, women have been taught to be shameful of their anger. It is unfeminine, unjustified and, as demonstrated over the weekend, unlawful. But it is our widespread anger, our voices, that will overhaul the very systems built to tear us down. Sharing our stories that have been contained in private, for fear of repercussions. Challenging a justice system that continually, evidentially, sustains a culture of silence. Demand that it is men’s behaviour in need of mass scrutiny in the long fight to end violence against women. Harness that rage, as a petrol for progressive social change. We have waited long enough.