My daughter is 24, and she loves walking. During lockdown, with the gyms closed, she often walks for hours at a time. Sometimes she walks on her own. Sometimes she’ll go with a friend.
Recently she and her friend were walking when a group of men started watching them. It was first unnerving, and then frightening. The roads were empty, the men were ahead of them. They doubled back, then called an Uber. Would be they be safer in a car, with a strange man driving? Thankfully, yes. No, they did not call the police. What would they have said?
Sometimes she walks around our local park. In that same park a 22-year-old woman, Iuliana, was killed in December 2017 as she walked home on Christmas Eve at 8pm. The police didn’t do much when she was reported missing. Her friends searched for her , and they found her mutilated body. A man was later convicted of her murder. Drugs and alcohol played a part in his actions, and so did porn. It was, said the judge, “horrendous and barbaric”. Her killer’s defence lawyer called it “irrational beyond comprehension”.
Her death prompted difficult conversations with my daughter — conversations about walking alone at night, conversations about personal safety. At the time she was a student, walking 45 minutes in the dark to her evening job. But she wouldn’t walk across a park at night. However, it’s not just at night that women are in danger. She was a student in Leicester, and in June 2020 a woman suffered a sexual assault in Victoria Park in the city, at 4.30pm , in broad daylight. I remember thinking — idiotically — that I was relieved that my daughter no longer lived in Leicester. Because, London is so much safer?
When my daughter was at sixth form college, she knew a girl called Karolina. She was warm and friendly, welcoming on her first day, always a nice person to spend time with. She went on from college to Westminster University to study interior architecture, she worked at the Polish embassy. But when she was 20, Karolina was stabbed to death by her former boyfriend. Her killer had, the Old Bailey heard, “taken the end of the relationship badly”.
So I am used to painfully difficult conversations with my daughter about male violence, and the ways that women can try to avoid it. We talk about toxic relationships, about warning signs, about texting travel plans, taking taxis, holding keys in her small hand. And when I was her age I remember my grandma always making sure I had taxi money, I remember reporting as a young journalist on the disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh, and the Ealing Vicarage rape case, in which a young woman was violently attacked in her own home a male judge later telling her that the trauma she had suffered was not so great, as he jailed her attacker for five years. In response I went to self-defence classes, where I had to be taught how to scream, because, when I tried, I opened my mouth and no noise came out.
All these fears and all these conversations are crucial. But just as important are the talks that I have with my son around the same subject. Conversations about consent and respect. Conversations about conducting himself as a mensch, about maintaining self-control, even when intoxicated, and about the consequences that can come to men and boys if they are not careful of their own behaviour.
The way that men deal with disappointment and rejection, the fragility of their egos, their lack of control - these are all factors that contribute to violence against women. So is an attitude that says that a boy’s physical desires should dominate, that consent isn’t really important, that no means yes, and it’s all just a joke. There are the things that they learn from porn and the ones they learn from the internet, and the dehumanising effect that social media can have. There’s a dating culture which is basically about meeting strangers, who have judged you on your appearance. All of this needs to be discussed in classrooms and youth groups and most importantly at home. Women have been talking about this for generations. But what about men?
As Jewish parents we are proud of and protective towards our children. We do not expect our sons to be the monster, the sadist, the barbarian. But what do we know about their attitudes and actions, at parties, online?
Start these conversations young, keep talking, and never ever stop. So our sons do not stray into shameful behaviour. And our daughters can live and love, and walk where they want, in safety and freedom.
