Violence against women: Saoirse Ronan said what we were thinking
Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and I am thinking of Saoirse Ronan.
Why did that clip of Saoirse Ronan on The Graham Norton Show go viral last month? Surely because it captured one of those essential truths about women’s experience. It articulated the vast gap that exists between the way men and boys feel walking through the world in their men’s and boys’ bodies, and the way women and girls feel; particularly walking alone at night.
On a recent episode of The Graham Norton Show, the male actors – empathetic, open, well-meaning as they are – were joking about some of the techniques Eddie Redmayne had been taught as part of his self-defence training for a role. “As if anyone would have time to use a phone to defend themselves,” Paul Mescal joked as Saoirse tried to interject herself into the conversion. Eventually she found a way in: “That’s what girls have to think about all the time”.
A beat. Silence. “Am I right ladies?” Saoirse said, to sudden spontaneous applause from the audience. A moment of recognition. A moment of reckoning for Graham and the guests on his couch. It wasn’t that the men were being flippant or particularly insensitive; simply, to them, thinking of that heightened level of threat women and girls feel when out walking just wasn’t even a consideration.
Photo: Maciek Musialek
A 2020 TikTok, Facebook and Twitter survey found that if there were no men on earth for 24 hours, the one thing most women would do would be to walk alone at night. When we made a theatre show about women’s experience of walking at night, we asked the audience to walk with us to a local park after the show as dusk drew in, to reflect on the experience and envision ways of changing the culture. As we walked, the audience shared their frustrations, as well as their visions for the future of women’s safety. We hung wishes from a nearby tree. “I wish I could be invisible so I can walk anytime safely,” one of our participants wrote.
One of our male audience members pointed out that men are, statistically speaking, much more likely to lose their lives through violence. Two days later, he sent us an email. He had been talking about his experience of attending our performance with a female friend. He now understood, he said, that there is a specific and unsettling difference between men and women’s experience of violence. Women are frequently targeted because they are women. The threat of violence, often the threat of sexual violence, is so pervasive, so familiar. A UN survey has shown that 70 per cent of women in the UK have experienced sexual harassment in public. This rises to 97 per cent in 18 to 24-year-olds. It is women who walk with their keys held between their fingers – and if there are no keys to hand then anything, yes, even a phone, might suffice.
“Next time I go running in the street, I will cross the road if running up behind others (particularly women),” another man told us after taking part in our event; “usually I just focus on beating my personal best”. This is one tiny step towards changing the culture, but perhaps tiny steps like this is exactly what it takes: Saoirse’s small comment, the slight shifts in individual awareness that the experience for women is different to that for men, and can be terrifying – and that we women would like to feel comfortable in our skin, secure enough to be on our own outside at night and, instead of feeling the clench of fear, notice the patterns the trees make against the sky, the stars veiled by clouds, the feel of the night air.
Creativity and the arts have to be part of the answer. In opening up a safe space for everyone to communicate their own experience, creative events can foster empathy and, as one of our participants commented, provide “the perfect form to start a conversation that can initiate change”. Another wrote of the experience of being an audience-participant of our show and the communal walk that followed it: “Beyond anything this show makes me feel seen”.
The arts can engage hearts and minds and provide the possibility of bearing witness to one another’s experience – a crucial first step in instigating change.
Audience responses to A Walk in the Park (Photo: Maciek Musialek)
Visit our project page to find out more about A Walk in the Park. The show is currently available for touring to educational venues and community arts spaces.
