Word power: why the way women speak about violence matters.

The murder of Sarah Everard has unleashed a vast outcry from women about how unsafe they feel being out alone. The posts contain long list of steps intended as self-defence or at the very least to enable them to be tracked should they be abducted. They detail how restrictive and limiting those steps are in daily life. Many of the lists I have seen use the words such as ‘all women feel this way’, ‘this is all of us ’, ‘every single woman every day’. I want to examine this language but before I do let’s take a pause to establish some baselines.

Violence by anyone against anyone is wrong. Any person expressing that they are afraid of violence is making a valid statement describing their feelings and I have no desire or intention to attack or deny their lived experience. Everyone should be free to walk the streets of their country at all times without concern as to their safety. There are deep rooted social issues at play about gender norms and abuse within relationships but they are beyond the scope of this article, although they are equally worthy of discussion. I am responding here specifically to the language used in posts about ‘all’ women feeling ‘afraid’ to go out in society in case they experience violence or harassment from a stranger.

I know for a fact that the statements alleging that ‘all women’ are fearful and taking constant steps to protect themselves is not true. Because I don’t live that way. And nor do my female relatives, as you will see. Now, thats not to shame or blame anyone who does. Not at all. But equally my experience is valid and it makes me want to ask the simple question: Why? What difference exists that allows me to positively enjoy walking city streets late at night and to have a hobby of photographing graffiti down back alleys in solitude, the world over while others find it hard to walk home from the local?

Is it connected to language and family story-telling?

I don’t have answers but I am a writer and many writers write to make sense of what is going on around them, to ponder questions more deeply. We think thorough our fingers moving on a keyboard or our hand moving a pen. This article is as much for me as it is you. But it’s also for the world at large because if I can have this freedom that everyone else should have, if we can understand where it comes from, maybe we can extend it to others. In the same way that medical breakthroughs can come by examining the person who seems immune to a disease, so we can usefully look at the tiny minority experience. It can be challenging to speak out and challenge the sweeping statements on social media. They are so heartfelt and genuine and true to those who make them. Yet, to not do so is to deny my life experiences, those who join me in what may well be a minority, and to potentially silence a discussion that may help others.

Where do I come from?

We all bring our experiences to this discussion. The media posts from women who have been attacked or have supported friends and family who have been attacked are redolent with that vital personal experience. Equally my thoughts are influenced by my background. I have university level education in law, and criminology and in both degrees my thesis was about violence to women. I have acted as a lawyer for victims and made protective orders for people of both genders as a Judge. I hold a Masters in creative writing have expertise in story-telling and am steeped in the impact of precise language both in writing and in oral advocacy. More recently my education is in psychology.

I am also the daughter of a Police officer who worked the scenes of crimes on many murders. As a child he would get a call out and I would turn on the local radio station to find the details of the murder we knew had happened. He found the forensics on the infamous Helen McCourt murder and still gives directions by the location of local murder scenes. I was not shielded or protected from information, did not grow up in bucolic countryside or in gated communities. I know of the violence. But I simply do not recognise myself in the “all women” comments.

Am I alone in this?

My first thought was, maybe this is because I have something missing in my brain. So I did a non-scientific poll on an extended family What’s App which includes women of two generations. Did any of them feel that they had to carry keys as a weapon when they walked home? Did they text people as they left and arrived on a journey? Did they fear being out alone? A long discussion ensued. All of the answers I got were: No. One said they would be aware of whether any one was behind them if they were walking their dogs in an isolated area at night but they still didn’t desist from going on that walk regularly and were not in fear. One said they didn’t particularly like the dark but they didn’t alter their behaviour at all. They did recognise that as a phenomenon, women were experiencing violence but it didn’t create a need in them to curtail their freedoms.

I wondered at first whether our cavalier attitude was down to lack of experience but after we had been messaging about the topic constantly for five hours the messages suddenly took a turn. An Aunty remembered the time the long-standing female housemate ( let’s call her Amy) of one of my female cousins was accosted by a mentally ill man with a knife while she was playing tennis with a female partner. The man thought that Travellers were out to get him and had a knife. Amy calmly rang the police, telling the man she was ringing to get help against the non-existent Travellers whilst of course alerting the Police to the fact that he was on the floodlit tennis court brandishing a knife at two women. Her playing partner grabbed the knife and threw it into brambles while they waited for the Police.

The story was told as a factual account, devoid of emotive words and only as an aside, an almost forgotten event, after a long theoretical discussion about this issue. Amy still plays tennis in the same place. I specifically asked, twice, if she now lived with anxiety about male violence. The answer, twice: no.

And now I think about it, I have three times physically intervened in incidents (in London, Bath and Liverpool) when I have seen women being physically assaulted by a man on the street. Once I intervened in male-on-male violence in a public building. In all of them I got the victim to safety well before the Police arrived and in the male-on-male case I stayed with the perpetrator preventing him from getting back to his victim ( who was still in the building albeit safe) until the Police arrived.

So it’s not true that all women who have experience of public danger living restricted scared lives. It is many, many women for sure. But not all.

And that brings me back to the importance of the language we use when speaking of this violence.

The language — the difference between fear anxiety and caution.

Firstly, the posts I have read all talk about fear, when actually what many are describing is anxiety. The difference is that fear is the emotion we feel when we are actually in danger right there and then in the moment. Fear is something we should feel. It is a natural biological function to keep us safe. See a person coming at you with a gun and think it’s fine? That’s not normal. Terror is normal. Our brains are designed to react in the way that will give us the greatest sense of survival, be that fight, flight or freeze.

So, for anyone who actually has a person grabbing at them, groping them, harassing them verbally, fear is an appropriate and desired response. However, it should come to an end when the ‘there-and-then’ danger ends.

The feeling of not being safe, the worry about what might happen is not fear. It’s anxiety. Anxiety is what you feel when you know that in some other place at another time a woman got hurt and you worry that therefore it might happen to you tonight. It’s what you feel when a man is behind you doing nothing wrong, but you still have intrusive thoughts about what he might do. That is not to diminish the feelings. Anxiety can be severe and crippling and itself make you feel like your heart is giving in. Physiologically the symptoms cane be similar to fear becuase the stress hormones both realse are the same. The origin, psychologically, however, is different. However, whereas fear is desirable, constant high-level anxiety is not.

Anxiety is in effect the flight, fight or freeze response kicking in inappropriately. the response can also kick in post an actual attack when the fear response has been activated and victims experience flash backs and repeated patterns of emotional response. That’s a real thing and not what I am talking about here. That’s the territory of specialised therapy like EMDR or brain spotting. I am talking about the generalised anxiety that something might happen.

Caution is a third animal. Caution is action taken to avoid danger or risk. That sounds very like what is being posted about when women describe always being walked home or carrying mace. But again, some precision is necessary here. Caution and anxiety can co-exist but are not identical. Both fall along a spectrum. The level of caution you take will depend on your assessment of the presence of and the nature of risk and that in turn will be affected by your level of anxiety.

Let’s take the non-violent example of bungee jumping. If you jump off a cliff there is real, present and grave danger of death. One level of caution means you walk away from the cliff staying well away from the edge and the crazy tourists throwing themselves off. Less caution means you look at the review of the company’s safety record, double check the safety claps on the harness and then jump. No or very little caution means you sling any old rope over you and leap. Any of those three actions can be done with or without feelings of anxiety.

Caution per se is not a bad thing until taken to unnecessary extremes or combined with such levels of anxiety that it makes everyday life crippling. No one needs to bungee jump but everyone needs to get home from the restaurant from time to time. Making the choice to call a reputable taxi firm rather than accepting a lift from a creepy stranger in the pub is appropriate caution and need not involve the slightest anxiety. Anxiety added to that caution is when women don’t feel safe in that taxi even though the driver has done nothing untoward. Anxiety is the word you may be supplying even as you read that sentence, the word yet.

Caution matched with a realistic risk assessment of threat of present danger is appropriate. Fear when that risk manifests is appropriate. Anxiety however, is not something we should live with daily during routine activities.

There is no question that there is a risk of violence in being out of our houses. Sadly, however, there is a greater statistical risk of a woman being a victim of domestic violence in our own homes than there is of being a victim of stranger violence on the streets. And that risk of violence on the streets whilst present and real, is not a certainty or even a probablity. Driving brings risks of death. Drinking alcohol increases health risks, giving birth has risks. Risks are ever present in everything we do. But the anxiety levels for many women are palpably higher in relation to street violence. Their modification of their behaviour is greater. But not for all women. That may have much to do with our ability to accurately risk assess and how we precive different forms of risk. And that in turn relates to storytelling and language.

Storytelling

The impetus to write this article came because I noticed my anxiety levels start to rise the more of the social media posts I read saying that “all women’ felt a certain way. I didn’t feel that way but yet I became anxious that maybe I should. The only thing that had changed was the story I was being given. The anxiety of others became infectious. I noticed thats and thought we,, can my lack of anxiety then be made infectious?

I have read so many posts about women saying how they were taught to take these extreme evasive routines. One report even said that they were taught to break a man’s nose when they were five years old. Of course, the base fact thats starts this debate is that men have been violent to women and that’s not the women’s fault. And women are entitled to express their response as that as they wish. I do not presume to speak definitively for the women who made those posts but its certainly possible that the ‘all women’ posts stem from a well meaning desire to form a tight knit support group, to not be alone in fear and to express vividly the magnitude of the issues at stake.

But that doesn’t prevent us asking: Is the anxiety being unconsciously inculcated by the way in which the advice about caution is expressed by women to women? Is there a more helpful way to speak about violence to women that does not minimise the issue but does minimise the anxiety?

My immediate family certainly does not ignore the existence of danger. I recently asked my Dad for advice on how to photograph an ill lit subject, thinking of the buildings in Venice where we sat in twilight. “Well,” he said reaching back for a real life example from his experience to use, “let’s imagine you need a picture of a dead body down a mineshaft…”. This being surrounded by murder and crime is not normal. The awareness of risk was at least equal and possibly greater in my family that in most households. But the stories were not told with any level of anxiety attached. Compassion for the victims and their families, yes. A strong sense of the importance of justice and the need for societal change, yes. Personal anxiety, and a list of restrictive or cautionary steps to take when I went out, no.

In fact, what did give me anxiety as a kid was a constant reference to the ‘rapture’, an Evangelical Christian belief that if you didn’t believe the right thing, one day all those who did (by implication including your parents) would suddenly without warning be taken to heaven and you would be left alone in the burning world of Armageddon. Likely to happen? No. Much less likely than the murders my father attended to. But more anxiety provoking because of how the stories were told. Bare facts of crimes were not given in fear -inducing persuasive language. Scary stories of Armageddon were absolutely aimed at getting me to limit my behaviours and behave in anxious ways. So language, I believe, can make a huge difference in how we are enabled to live our lives.

And yet. Stories are received differently by each of us. Writing is a dialogue between author and reader and the writer cannot control how the stories are received and accepted. Some of you will be nodding in agreement with me right now. Some of you — if you have even continued read this far — will be condemning me to Madeline Albright’s special place in hell for women who do not help other women.

I renounced the faith of my childhood and converted as an adult to a different faith. But my sister still retains that evangelical faith. On the What’s App messages she wrote about happily roaming London at night because she believed God would protect her. She recalled how as a child she was afraid of the dark but then she learned to pray and then believe (aka tell herself the story) that there was no need to be afraid of the dark . Still, it illustrates the point — the stories we tell ourselves, even if ludicrous to others, matter in how we are able to live our life. And the stories we tell ourselves so often come from the stories we are told.

I cannot prove this. It’s a theory only, written about to get my own thoughts straight. I doubt there is only one facet to this issue, certainly no quick solve. There may well be other features of my extended family that contribute to our lack of anxiety about walking the streets. It certainly has to be said that none of us are petite and one of us was an England prop forward so maybe size or genetics play a part also?

So who knows? I cannot claim answers. But I have enough primary evidence on the language and story-telling point that I’d like to ask some curious questions: What would happen if we stopped emphasising the scary stories, the exaggerated assertions that ‘all women are afraid’ that we ‘must’ on a ‘daily basis’ protect ourselves with constant self-imposed restrictions? What if we spoke less to each other and to our children from a place of anxiety and more from measured, informed caution whilst acknowledging and working to tackle real issues of violence? What if we women chose not to fill our minds with anxiety producing language? What if we adopted therapeutic techniques to reduce inherited anxiety on a daily basis whilst still adopting much more modest and realistic cautionary practical measures to avoid danger only when it is probable and not merely possible?

What if, as well as remembering the devastating consequences of attacks on women’s physical and mental health, as well as acknowledging the cumulative drip-drip effect of smaller harassing abusive incidents, we also we remembered and deliberately told balancing stories about the many times we went out and nothing happened to us?

What if women told more true stories about powerful competent tennis playing women who weren’t scared and who had the knife wielding man easily controlled?

What if, with our carefully chosen words we both stood up for justice and equality and spoke of how it is really, truly, possible for women to be aware of those facts, to demand they change and still not live in constant anxiety of those facts.

Our words are in our power. They are our power. Let’s use them in our own cause.