Put yourself in her shoes: 'Every woman I know has a story'

OF THE THOUSANDS of women who marched to remember Jill Meagher in Melbourne last week, how many must have been thinking, It could have been me?

The safety of women at night in urban areas usually comes back to the same old precautions: don’t walk home alone; sit in the back seat of the cab; text a friend to let them know you got home safely. But what are we doing beyond individuals’ responsibility?

At Trinity College Dublin on Wednesday a new campaign, called Don’t Be That Guy, will be launched. The campaign, which began in North America, aims to “raise awareness of the link between alcohol and sexual assault” and targets potential perpetrators of sexual harassment or assault, shifting the responsibility away from potential victims.

In 2011, 1,895 harassments and related offences were recorded in Ireland (the lowest figure since 2006) and 3,570 assaults causing harm, the lowest since before 2004. Despite the importance of reporting these incidents, victims of low-level harassment often don’t.

The journalist Sinéad Gleeson was attacked about 10 years ago, walking late at night from O’Connell Street in Dublin to nearby College Green.

“I went down D’Olier Street. I felt fine, but I did notice there weren’t many people around. There was a guy in front of me. I was walking along, and I walked passed him. As I walked past he put his hand around my neck and tried to grope me. I don’t know if he was trying to pull me in somewhere, but he grabbed my boob. He was quite small and very drunk. I got really afraid, and I punched him. When I hit him he went down. He was shouting all sorts of stuff at me.”

Gleeson didn’t want to report the incident, but her father encouraged her. “The cop said, ‘You might think it was a small encounter, but you got a really good description of him. What if a few hours later he was stronger, less drunk and more angry? What if he had attacked another girl who wasn’t able to give a good description? You’d be able to solve that crime.’ ”

Those words stuck with Gleeson. “I talk to friends, and they don’t want things reported, and I just think, What if you got away but someone else didn’t?”

In the UK, Lambeth Council recently ran a campaign called “Real men know the difference between sexual assault and harmless fun”. Last month the Brixton women’s safety charter was launched. It came about as a result of the high rate of sexual crime in the area, along with women being tired of being groped in local nightclubs. Another campaign tackling everyday street harassment, Hollaback!, is a crowd-sourced initiative that began in New York and has since spread to 54 cities, allowing women and others to map and record incidents of street harassment through the campaign’s free smartphone apps.

This week Dublin Rape Crisis Centre posted new safety tips on its website, which include nominating a “designated minder” for each group of six, in the same way that designated drivers are used.

Men, of course, are also victims of harassment at night in urban areas, usually either unprovoked attacks from an unknown group or individual, or a fight between known groups of individuals. Women, too, deal with unprovoked violence. They also deal with unprovoked violence with a sexual element.

And then there’s the third category, one that is unprovoked and unwanted, not necessarily with a definable sexual element, but definitely with a gender bias. It’s the “here, why won’t you talk to me, come on” kind of harassment women put up with from strangers on the street. The smack or grab walking through a bar, or in a queue for fast food.

Vickey Curtis was attacked in Dublin two years ago, after a taxi driver wrongly claimed she hadn’t paid him. “He pulled over and started screaming at me. I told him the Garda station was down the road and to bring me there to settle the argument. He flipped the lid because he was obviously trying to scam me. He got out of the driver’s seat, and I had my bag around my shoulder, and he pulled the bag and me out of the car.

“As he was screaming I dialed 999, and then he started punching me in the face. I punched him back. When he heard me on the phone to the gardaí, he got in and drove off.” Curtis reported the incident but was told by the Garda that they “couldn’t do anything because I didn’t have his licence. I didn’t get that number, obviously, because I was being punched in the face at the time. They said that the likelihood was that he was an illegal driver hiring the car off somebody else, so they couldn’t do anything about it anyway.”

Since then Curtis has taken a photograph of a taxi’s licence anytime she gets in one, or jots the number down in her phone.

Ellen O’Malley Dunlop, chief executive of Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, refers to the upcoming Trinity campaign, saying, “It’s not just potential victims who need to heed preventative things.”

She also makes the point that reaction to harassment is not universal. “Someone being grabbed in a pub might have a devastating effect on one person but not on another. To interfere with someone in that way, it’s about not having respect for boundaries. It seems that people don’t have that kind of respect . . . Everybody’s individual space is very important. It’s nobody’s right to interrupt that in any way. That seems to be a basic learning that a lot of people don’t have.”

Hazel Cullen, now in her 20s, was with two friends when they were attacked as teenagers in Wicklow, after a man offered to help with a bike they were carrying up steps.

“He turned around to my friend and said, ‘Will you meet me?’ She said no. He said, ‘Come on,’ then he grabbed her by the arm. She clocked him across the face, and I told him to get a grip. Then he walked up the lane ahead of us.”

The man was hiding ahead of them, and when they walked by “he jumped out, punched me in the face, then jumped on top of her, and tried to rip her clothes off. I was punching him in the back, and eventually he gave up and walked away. He wasn’t drunk. He was strange, but he seemed fairly lucid.”

Cullen injured her hand fending off the attacker. “I would say I feel there’s a cultural problem,” she says. “We need to do something about that. It’s a funny one saying to girls, ‘Don’t walk home on your own,’ because that reminds me of the blame thing. Who are we blaming for this? I know so many people who have been attacked, and harassment is an everyday reality. It’s totally commonplace. Every woman I know has a story.”

The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre’s national 24-hour helpline is 1800-778888