Keeping girls safe

In 1965 I was 12. It was a hot summer in the Austrian countryside. I remember my mother telling me to take my top off for coolness, and my refusing. I hadn’t the tiniest hint of breasts, but something deep down – perhaps embarrassment rather than modesty – told me that exposing my nipples, as I had done on Bournemouth beach every Whitsun, was no longer safe. Was I beginning to think of myself as a woman? (Although anyone who saw me would probably have concluded that I was a boy…)

Fast forward 60 plus years, to a few weeks ago, when I was sitting in a darkened hall at a poetry reading with a male friend who loves poetry and to whom I had given a lift. Suddenly he leaned against me and asked: “Am I sitting too close to you?” Not wanting to speak (the hall was hushed) I made a “Back off” gesture with my hand, but he either ignored this or misinterpreted it and began to squeeze my thigh in a very non-accidental way. I was so shocked that this can still happen to me at 73, that at first I didn’t know how to react. After a few moments I got up, pushed past him and went to sit in an empty seat on the other side of the room. He then went outside for a smoke. When we met at the end he asked if he had upset me. “Yes!” I declared, and then reminded him that I am a married woman. After this I drove him home in virtual silence (well, he chattered on regardless). I arrived home to five emails from him, to which I answered that I want nothing more to do with him. After a few days I got another email asking if we could meet “as friends”. I replied that I don’t trust him, and blocked his number and email.

Maybe it’s the boys we should be talking to

Does it never end? Every woman knows that she has to be careful around men. Yes, #notallmen, but the trouble is, you can never know which it will be. Over the years I have been assaulted by completely unknown teenage boys in a shopping precinct, by a Palestinian boy aged about 10 in Israel, by a man on a first date. And, this most recent one, by a man 13 years younger than me, who knows I am married, but who yet somehow assumed that I would be open to his advances. Admittedly, he is mentally ill, probably currently in a manic phase – but I too have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, yet I don’t go around grabbing men.

What messages are we giving young people?

What do we tell young girls, as they grow up – or even before that – about the suspicions they need to have and the precautions they have to take? We don’t want them to think of boys and men as automatic sexual predators, and yet we want to keep them safe and prepare them for being a woman, which, as someone said, “is a very difficult business, since it consists mainly of dealing with men”. Most children these days go to co-educational schools, thank God, so girls have the opportunity to develop healthy friendships with boys and young men. I went to a girls’ school where we were not allowed to go within three yards of the fence marking off the adjoining boys’ school. I think it gave us a very distorted view of boys as being an alien species, designed for romantic purposes only (and of course it never stopped us meeting up with the neighbouring boys at the gates after school!).

Maybe, just maybe, it’s not a matter of what we tell girls at all. Maybe it’s the boys we should be talking to, teaching them that girls’ and women’s bodies are not commodities for them to avail themselves of freely, regardless of what relationship (or none) they have. Maybe, instead of fostering a culture of fear among girls (which sadly is necessary currently, and always has been), we should be fostering a culture of respect among boys? I hope things have begun to change now, but only a few years ago I heard secondary school boys being interviewed and a significant number said things like: “Well, girls are lesser, aren’t they?” My son certainly doesn’t think this way, but then he has me as a mother.

Are things any better in the Church? As long as we teach that woman was created as a sort of assistant to man (which is not remotely what the Hebrew says), we will be teaching that women are there for men to use. It’s time we did better.