Changing YOUR behaviour to keep safe

[knightlight]

Up late feeding the baby and just thinking about the running route I'm going to take later today and I've just come to the horrible realisation that despite me living on a lovely coast.....I take a horrible road route just to stay safe!

I got in from my first run in a long time this week and was complaining to DH how I felt I was breathing in car fumes the whole way as I stick to busy routes along main roads.

It occurred to me that I live near a lovely long footpath set above the road which runs downhill to the sea. It has a gorgeous sea view the whole way down and is flanked by two fields of greenery ...why don't I run that way?....because for long parts there are hedges that cut off the view from the road below which would leave me isolated and out of view and to be really frank I'm worried about being attacked out of view.

It's made me quite sad to think I have to change my behaviour to not put myself at risk. My DH wouldn't think twice about taking this route.

I also used to have the choice of two car parks in town but now only use the non sheltered more expensive one after an incident where a man hopped in the lift with me last minute, stood really close to me and was asking me lots of questions about my shopping habits (not a crime I know but still made me break into a sweat).

Does anyone else feel like there are scenarios where you miss out or you have to change YOUR behaviour just to keep safe?

Askingforafriend, I'm sorry to hear of your experience but I thank you for recounting it. It puts things into perspective.

I’m always interested in the idea that women are attacked by people they know.

Because often ‘knowing’ the attacker means the attacker was a customer at work, or a neighbour, or a teacher, or a boy from a class at school. And so if a woman or girl is running on an isolated path, the attacker is still someone she knows.

And ‘known’ to the victim makes it sound like knowing them was your choice, when often it wasn’t. Even in personal relationships the attacker is often an ex, so you’ve specifically chosen to no longer know them.

I would love to alter my life so I could feel safer. I’m hoping to get out of a customer facing role so that there aren’t as many boundary crossing men who are ‘known’ to me. But society is very keen on putting women in customer, client or patient facing roles where it is more often than not women who are paid to be nice to boundary crossing people.

And it’s also women who are pressured to be nice to random neighbours, cold callers, loners.

I would love to be safer by just not being ‘known’ to so many men. I’d love to have more control over who I know.

And ‘known’ to the victim makes it sound like knowing them was your choice, when often it wasn’t.

I've not encountered people with that attitude but I have had a rather sheltered life and the thought of it is upsetting. I'm struggling for the sort of terminology needed to search for 'voluntary' vs 'involuntary' association, do you have any ideas?

I’m assuming that if evidence is collated under the category attackers being known to the victim, it would be extremely difficult to split that into a voluntary and involuntary association.

One definition of 'known' I've seen used in the US statistics is an intimate partner or family member which is somewhat frustrating as the latter is definitely involuntary.

On the point about women being less likely to suffer violence overall as well as at the hands of strangers, one factor which I believe (as opposed to having read) is that an attacker might feel less likely to experience interference with their efforts when attacking a man, since the assumption of onlookers might be that men are better able to defend themselves. Certainly, in the few times I've witnessed violent crime, when the victim was a man, other people didn't interfere until there were clear signs of serious injury.

And there are people making that kind of assumption on this thread.

If you run isolated route a rather b, the person who hides in the bushes to attack you is probably going to be somebody you know.

Most of the attackers we know are not people we know well enough that they have easy access to our homes and privacy. They are still on the look out for opportunities.

www.rainn.org/statistics/perpetrators-sexual-violence

Well there’s this on rape in the US. The biggest risk is not intimate partners or strangers, but acquaintances.

Another thought: is the prevalence of acquaintances due, in part, to people simply being more likely to know individuals in their immediate area? It's very tricky to unpack but I am aware that, for example, the majority of solo travellers (for holidays) are female but I'm unable to find data on the day-to-day ranges of men vs women.

Thank you for the statistics, by the way.

I don’t know. I would assume that many sexism offenders fixate on particular people that they select to victimise. They go out of their way to acquaint themselves with the victim.

I would happily run on that path, and regularly do walk in the dark on my own. I find people's assessment of risk quite odd tbh. You are far far more likely to be hurt or killed in a car accident than you are to be attacked on a walk, and yet women seem to be happy to drive.

It seems strange to let something so unlikely control your everyday life unless you have actually experienced an attack, in which case it is perfectly understandable.

Of course I make choices to keep myself safe. That is life as a woman. We always have to be vigilant. It would be great to say the world should change, not me, but I’m not going to risk my safety or my daughters safety by not doing what I can to stay safe.

Very interesting about the idea what it is to “know” the perpetrator and the acquaintances stats from US. Do we know the differentials for the locations of attacks on the victims eg. own home, home of an acquaintance, outside public place etc

And ‘known’ to the victim makes it sound like knowing them was your choice, when often it wasn’t.

I would never have interpreted it that way. I'm not even sure what difference it's supposed to make or indicate? It's not meant to try and tell people they should avoid knowing people so they won't be attacked.

I didn’t mean that Goosefoot. I’m not meaning it in a kind of ooh, look at all the men she knew, what a hussy kind of way.

I do however think that people often use known to the victim stats to press the point that the family is enormously dangerous to women and children. In the stats that I linked to, most sexually abused children were abused by an acquaintance. Not a father or grandfather, but an acquaintance.

So people often interpret known to the victim as meaning an intimate partner or family member, and that it is the home that is the danger.

Hence when someone says I don’t want to go to x bar, route home, club, event people will immediately say, oh, but stranger attacks are rare. People know the attacker.

But that only makes sense if the attacker lives with you. The attacker in the bar, run route, event is probably known to you. That’s the risk you are avoiding.

But often women and girls avoid them in our spare time because our working lives frequently force us to act nice and accommodating to boundary breaking men.

I think I explained that badly.

In the U.K. 90% of attackers are known to the victim.

That then gets interpreted as DV and used to exaggerate the safety of the home and to underestimate the danger in public places.

Right, I see what you mean. A person you know in some capacity could well be the same person who attacks you walking your dog in the neighbourhood in the evening.

But I think we still have to look at things like, how likely is it that you will actually be attacked on a run, or walking home from a film, etc. whether by a stranger or someone you know. How does it compare to other risks we accept? And if the person is making a choice that is actually more risky because of fear of attack, that seems really concerning to me.

Gronky

I wonder how much of this plays a role in the statistic that women are more likely to be the victims of violence by known individuals while men are more likely to be the victims of violence by strangers. In other words, are women at less risk due to other factors or because they're more careful?

I've been thinking about this too. People are always making the point that men are statistically at greater risk of violent attack. But no one considers the possibility that this may mostly be because women on average almost certainly spend less time in situations where the likelihood of attack is high. Women mostly don't engage in gang activity, for example, are less likely to venture alone into dangerous areas at night, are more prone to try to defuse a potentially violent situation etc.

I think this is the applicable principle, using a different example: when the Department for Transport compares the fatalities sustained in traffic accidents, for example in cars vs motorcycles, they do the comparison on the basis of ‘fatalities per kilometre driven’. They don’t just conclude that driving in a car is more dangerous than driving in a motorcycle because far more people die in car crashes than motorcycle crashes.

"per kilometre driven" here amounts to a rough measure of "how much time spent being exposed to risk".

There must be a name for this among statisticians/researchers: does anyone know what it is?

@kesstrel

David Spiegelhalter has done a lot of work on how we describe risk. He differentiates between activities which raise your risk of dying while undertaking the activity (e.g. skydiving) and ones which raise your overall risk of early death (e.g. smoking). We're talking about the first type here, which he measures in micromorts (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort). So depending on what you're discussing, you could talk about micromorts per hour or micromorts per mile.

Prof. Spiegelhalter is well worth looking up if you find this stuff interesting - several of his lectures are available on YouTube etc.

Thanks, Patte. Will have a look.

But no one considers the possibility that this may mostly be because women on average almost certainly spend less time in situations where the likelihood of attack is high.

Where do you get that idea? That is exactly the sort of thing that people who use this information think about.

Goosefoot - Yeah, bad wording on my part. I should have said "none of them" - meaning none of the people who use these statistics as a "gotcha" on here, to try to show that men are in a much worse position than women when it comes to likelihood of being victims of violence.

You get the same thing with MRAs claiming that women commit more child abuse than men. While this is true of neglect at least, it fails to take into account the huge disproportion between time spent as childcarers by women and by men.