Women’s Night Safety Charter

[NitroNine]

I cannot help but feel that Sadiq Khan perhaps needs to understand what women & girls are to be able to actually help keep us safe at any hour in the 24; be it light, dark, or the fuzzy-soft brightening/dimming of the sun that sits between the two starker phases.

No use the Night Czar* coming up with a nice shiny charter if “woman” is going to be defined as anyone who says “I’m a woman” [today/this morning/for the next 30 minutes] 🤦🏻‍♀️

(As ever, that’s not saying all trans women are predators - it’s about the fact if you open the door predators are going to come charging right through it. Single sex spaces are a bolt on the door & some really determined predators will kick the door down anyway. Changing up the rules to gender rather than sex isn’t simply unlocking the door, it’s flinging it open, putting out a welcome mat, & wafting out the smells of coffee, cake & fresh bread.)

www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/arts-and-culture/24-hour-london/womens-night-safety-charter

• which is possibly the best job title EVER & clearly belongs in a parallel world

Well yes quite...

I'm completely distracted by the Czar spelling. Did Russian history a level and its was allllll Tsar! After a Google Czar is Apparently more historically authentic.

Though doubly distracting right now for obvious reasons

I wonder how long before it's rainbowed?

I get distracted by Czar-not-Tsar for Russian History reasons, too. It’s an odd job title, however one romanises царь - do they have serfs not interns?

With what happened to Joan Smith last August - which Khan’s made no apology for & no attempt to remedy - it is going to be TWAW from the start. And thus doomed for reason I pointed out above: you can’t address VAWG if you can’t identify women & girls to start with.

Am I going crazy or.. is the problem here not "women feeling safe" but rather the men committing crimes against women at night, i.e. harassing and attacking women? The page reads like a euphemism.

Or have I missed something?

It is, as ever, much easier to push it onto women (now with a more extensive supporting cast than usually granted, admittedly) to adapt adjust & change to mitigate against the risk men present. Rather than actually addressing that issue.

I suppose at least this isn’t (yet?) actually blaming women - though of course there’s plenty of time for that yet

The pledges in the charter do seem to focus on telling orgs to actually make things safer, not just engage in marketing/PR to make women feel safer.

Regardless, statistics suggest that more men are attacked when out at night. So I don't know that the emphasis on women feeling unsafe in terms of justifying the "Czar" focusing on women's safety is unreasonable. If they said the reason was because women were unsafe that would leave every action open to "what about the menz" arguments.

All a complete waste of time if the definition of women includes men