Hello and welcome to the 48th issue of Place! Just over three weeks ago, Sarah Everard left a friend’s house in South London to walk home. But what should have been a routine experience of place – the space Sarah called home – ended in tragedy. This week at Place, editor Karis Hustad embarks on an evening jog in her own neighborhood in North London. In conversation with “Feminist City” by Leslie Kern, a book she read in 2020, Karis considers the geographies of fear and risk that have been built into the bodies and minds of women and minorities – and the acts of courage taken in spite of them.
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Risk / Feminist City
Earlier this week I went for a jog. It had been a long day in front of my laptop, sitting below a single window that tempted me with the emerging sunshine of spring. My brain and my body needed the break. As I pulled on my leggings, the patch of powder blue sky I could see was starting to fade into a deep cobalt, and by the time I stepped out my front door the sun had completely set.
In order to make this decision, I had to make an invisible bargain with the city at night. Some agreements were easy: I would stay on the well-lit streets, forgoing the quiet curved road with magnolia trees that I love to wander along during the midday. Others, harder: I would keep my headphones on because the rhythm of pop music keeps me motivated to run further even though it will make it harder to hear if there is someone keeping pace close behind me. I would not make eye contact with anyone, even accidentally, as even a split second pupil-to-pupil connection is an invitation. Finally, the most difficult to accept but also the most necessary: If something happened to me while out on this jog, after every so-called precaution was taken, I had to accept that it would - whether it was or not - be my fault.
Risk is not inherent to spaces, but it is inherent to being a woman, and that risk is multiplied the more marginalized society has deemed your identity to be. Usually, the above bargaining is a silent program installed in my brain, the awareness that my existence makes me a target so debilitating if fully comprehended that I treat it like acceptance. It starts early and the messages are consistent - my friend and I uncomfortably giggling at the number of men that would yell at us from their car windows as we walked to the coffee shop after middle school, learning to hold my keys between my fingers like Wolverine when walking to my car in high school, the rape whistle we were given at my university freshman orientation in lieu of actual conversations around consent, the blue emergency poles with bright red buttons dotted throughout campus as though the far higher dangers were in the boozy house parties and behind closed residence hall doors. We are taught that this fear is natural and our defenses are evolutionary.
“The socialization was so powerful and so deep that ‘female fear’ itself has been assumed to be an innate trait of girls and women...Yet women consistently recount being fearful of strangers in public spaces. This seeming disconnect was labeled the ‘paradox of women’s fear,’ with some researchers characterizing women’s feelings as ‘irrational’ and ‘unexplained’ by the evidence.”
“Feminist scholars point out that sexual assault is grossly underreported, suggesting that rates of violence against women are massively underestimated using statistics based on reported crimes. The everyday experiences of catcalling and sexual harassment serve to reinforce fear as women are constantly sexualized, objectified, and made to feel uncomfortable in public spaces.”
I warmed up for my run with some side lunges as I headed down the sidewalk - two young men were walking in my direction and I was sure to face them as they passed. As I slowly started my run down my quiet residential street I played out scenarios as I crossed the shadowy parts between the lamp posts. If someone tried to grab me, would I run out into the middle of the street? Dangerous for me, yes but also would guarantee that the traffic would draw attention. How long would it take me to sprint to the cross street where a handful of people were walking home with grocery bags? As I picked up speed I subconsciously fired up a radar of about 15 feet of distance on all sides of me, surveying potential danger, informed by decades of existence, stalked by horrifying anecdotes, and the statistics that whisper the risk in our ear. 43% of women experience harassment while running. 75% of women are too afraid to exercise after dark. There are multitudes more numbers that factor into the risk calculations of my Asian and Black friends, the threat of violence and harassment weighted far more heavily on what shouldn’t have to be a decision in the first place.
I thought about how this street looks like the one that Sarah Everard walked, just nine miles south, three weeks previous. When the news broke, my female friends and I dissected the case. “Did she actually walk across Clapham Common?” “It’s so sketchy there at night” “I thought the last place she was seen was on a residential road - isn’t there CCTV?” We condemn the killer’s singular act, while silently comparing the case with our own experience of these spaces we have no choice but to inhabit. What would we have done different? Would we have walked on a different road? Not worn headphones? Would it have made a difference?
“Women’s fear of men takes on a geographic logic. We figure out which places to avoid, rather than which people….For women of color, who report higher levels of harassment and violence than white women, white men and male authority figures such as police officers may be especially worrisome. But since we have very little control over the presence of men in our environments, and can’t function in a state of constant fright, we displace some of our fear onto spaces: city streets, alleyways, subway platforms, darkened sidewalks.”
“These spaces populate our personal mental maps of safety and fear. The map is a living collage, with images, words, and emotions layered over our neighbourhoods and travel routes. The layers come from personal experiences of danger and harassment but also media, rumours, urban myths and the good old ‘common sense’ that saturates any culture. The map shifts from day to night, weekday to weekend, season to season....the map is dynamic. One uncomfortable or scary moment can change it forever.”
As I run, I attempt to breathe in and out every two steps, chasing the elusive “runner’s high” in which your stride and breathing are in alignment and the stress relieving endorphins finally flow. The tall black light posts along Highbury Fields mark my progress, the intersection at Highbury and Islington tube station is my destination. It’s a crowded path; I dodge dogs, couples in linked arms and Deliveroo drivers on buzzing electric bikes. There are routes that would allow for fewer physical obstacles, but they would be less safe.
Many people use runs and long meandering walks as a means of discovery, external and internal. This route, marked with hurdles physical and invisible, is a constant distraction from the stress relief that allows me to wind down from my day, letting my neurons fire freely to make sense of the world that I ingested. This relief is not a luxury, but a physical need for humans - stress, when gone unresolved can lead to heart disease and gastrointestinal dysfunction. It is a physiological requirement that, for women and people of color, is imbued with the simultaneous practice of courage and fear.
I make it to my destination 20 minutes later - a burrito to reward my workout and a long walk home. This run was uneventful. There were no comments or invasion of space. I allowed myself to relax in the cool evening air, under the safety of a busy and relatively crime-free road.
But it is also these moments of perceived safety that make the reality of risk so much more ambiguously terrifying. The risk I know is real is entirely in the power of others, whether it’s the man who makes the comment or the man who doesn’t step in, or the man who chooses not to speak out in support of women. I am aware that if I attempt to jog at the edge of the Grand Canyon I could fall in because of the laws of gravity. But when I jog down my street, I don’t know how close I am to the edge. That’s up to someone else to decide.
“It’s hard to overestimate the effect of daily fear. Even when fear isn’t actively present, the burden of a set of routinized precautions is always there, although they’re so naturalized that we barely notice we’re doing them. What’s amazing, and typically overlooked, is the fact that women constantly defy their fears and act in ways that are brave, empowered, and liberating in cities.”
“Women still jog through Central Park. Women ride the bus at night. Women walk home alone at 2 a.m. when the bar closes. Women open their windows on hot summer nights. Yet women’s fear is believed to be so deeply ingrained (even if some call it irrational) that discussions of courage, wisdom, and good sense are rare and easily discounted as false outward displays of bravado. Moreover, women find it incredibly difficult to acknowledge their own bravery and clear judgement.”
All this does not mean we have no agency in the safety of the places we step into, or that marginalised people can’t draw their own maps (often out of necessity). Bystander intervention training can prepare us to step in if needed in cases of xenophobic harassment. The activism of Black Lives Matter in occupying streets for protest and fighting for abolition will lead to safer communities. Men and women gathered in vigil to honor Sarah despite the Met’s heavy-handed tactics, fighting for the importance of grieving. We can and need to be fully present in changing our geographies if we want to experience them fully.
Small acts of courage - even if just going for a run at dusk - can help to normalise women using spaces when and how they see fit. And so I will continue to lace up my sneakers and step out the front door. I want to own the risk.
-Karis Hustad is a co-editor of Place and a journalist, usually covering debt, based in London.
-Quotes are from “Feminist City” by Leslie Kern
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Join us next week for a look at little things on long haul journeys.