Women Spend 70% of Our Energy Strategizing How to Stay Safe

Why we need more than bright lights and busy streets

Over the past few years, as awareness of the prevalence of sexual violence, rape culture, domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the risks women face in public spaces rises, the conversation tends to focus on re-education boys and men, and often populations at large, about gender-based violence, whether to ensure on an individual level that men’s anger shouldn’t be taken out on women or on a structural level to take women’s safety into consideration when designing products, prescriptions and public space.

Rightly so; however, this re-education, research and re-design takes time. Meanwhile, every two minutes somewhere in the United States a woman is raped. The numbers are generally universal around the world, regardless of country or culture. And every woman that carries the trauma of that rape (not to mention the trauma of being catcalled, harassed, followed, grabbed, groped, or beaten) is the falling domino that sets an entire row in motion that can last generations, and keep the cycle of sexual violence feeding itself:

Individuals

Women who experience sexual violence suffer trauma that can lead to:

• Reduced capacity to work