When a woman asks for safety, listen to the danger she is describing before you begin searching for something wrong with her character.We abso
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When a woman asks for safety, listen to the danger she is describing before you begin searching for something wrong with her character.
We absolutely must reflect on how we treat women and girls who ask for safety.
A woman identifies a risk, recognizes a pattern of violence, or asks for a reasonable safeguard. Instead of examining the danger she is describing, people begin examining her character. Is she hateful? Is she prejudiced? Is she being unfair? Is she making someone uncomfortable? Is she assuming the worst?
Before long, the conversation has moved away from violence prevention altogether.
The woman who wanted protection is now being discussed as though she presents a greater moral danger than the violence she was trying to avoid.
And there is something deeply unreasonable about that.
A woman should not have to become a crime victim before society recognizes the wisdom of her precautions.
It is what we do when we believe women’s lives are worth protecting
We do not ordinarily require people to experience preventable harm before permitting them to take precautions. We install locks before burglaries. We establish fire exits before fires. We create workplace safety rules because waiting for someone to be injured is a poor prevention strategy.
Yet when women seek safeguards against sexual violence, harassment, stalking, or intimidation, the conversation can become unusually preoccupied with whether their precautions might offend someone.
Consider the difference between these two questions:
Violence prevention | Reversal of responsibility |
|---|---|
What danger is she trying to prevent? | Why is she so suspicious? |
What safeguards would reduce the risk? | Whose feelings might her safeguards hurt? |
Has this type of harm occurred before? | Is she being unfair by anticipating it? |
How can we protect her ability to refuse? | Why won’t she make an exception? |
Of course, a proposed safety measure can be examined for fairness, evidence, and effectiveness. That is part of responsible prevention. But questioning a particular measure is not the same as treating a woman’s desire for safety as morally suspect.
There is also a difference between someone expressing disappointment about a boundary and someone having a right to cross it.
There is something terribly wrong with a society that can recognize violence against women as a problem, then treat women as the problem when they ask for safeguards against it. Some people are more offended by a woman’s locked door than by the history of violence that taught her to lock it. Their offense does not make her boundary unreasonable
A woman can decline a private meeting, refuse to disclose personal information, request sex-separated accommodations, avoid an individual whose behavior concerns her, or ask an institution to address threatening conduct. Those choices do not automatically establish hatred or wrongdoing.
And when institutions respond to women’s safety concerns primarily by asking women to reconsider their boundaries, they risk teaching a dangerous lesson: that being agreeable is more socially acceptable than being cautious.
The deeper question is not whether every precaution a woman proposes must be adopted without examination.
It is this:
Why does a woman’s effort to prevent harm so often become an occasion to question her morality, while the danger she identified receives less scrutiny?
A woman should not have to wait until she has been assaulted, stalked, threatened, or violated to earn permission to protect herself. And she should not have to demonstrate affection, approval, or unlimited trust toward another person to prove that her precautions are legitimate.
Violence prevention begins before the violence.
If we only respect a woman’s judgment after she has been harmed, we have confused sympathy with safety.
If you only believe in women’s safety after the violence, you believe in sympathy. We are asking for prevention.
Prevention is not an accusation. A boundary is not an attack. And a woman’s safety is not a debt she owes to someone else’s comfort.
I am not responsible for making my boundaries emotionally comfortable for everyone. I can communicate with dignity and still be firm. Another person’s disappointment does not automatically mean I have wronged them.
I refuse to confuse compassion with compulsory access. I can care about another person’s humanity without giving them access to my body, home, time, privacy, or personal life.
I will not abandon the original concern simply because someone changes the subject. When I raise an issue of safety, I am allowed to return the conversation to the conduct, the risk, and the protection being requested.
My dignity is not dependent on how agreeable I appear. I can be warm, thoughtful, direct, cautious, or quiet. None of those qualities determines whether I deserve safety.
I am allowed to choose prevention over regret. I do not owe anyone an opportunity to prove my concerns justified through harm. I can act on reasonable warning signs while there is still time to protect myself.