If women are less likely to get assaulted by strangers than men: why does it keep happening to me?

Another week, another bloke I don't know grabs me on the street yay

You will probably, by now, have seen the clip of Saoirse Ronan dealing a little brutal truth to Paul Mescal, Eddie Redmayne and Denzel Washington, on Graham Norton’s sofa. Last Friday night: E. Redmayne had just anecdoted a-charming-yet-inconsequential line about how he’d been taught to use a phone as a weapon of self-defence in prep for his role in Day of the Jackal, which had prompted Mescal to muse “Who’s actually going to do that, though?”, and Washington to cackle.

“That’s what girls have to think about all the time,” snapped Ronan, which bought the sofa down, as in: into mortified silence, then set the internet on fire with righteousness, women and girls remembering all the times they’d walked home alone after dark, their keys poking out from between their knuckles, dread in their hearts.

Me?

It made me think several totally contradictory things, simultaneously.

The first was your basic YOU TELL THEM LADY PREACH HANDS EMOJI GIRL POWER YAY WE WOMEN ARE SO AFRAID BUT ALSO, LIKE, EMPOWERED? type response, IE a classic hot takey internet-trained outpouring, which seems like The Truth with capital Ts in the moment, but which probably isn’t. Because it’s rarely that simple.

The second thing I’m thinking is more complex and undoubtedly controversial, but, hey. You’ve met me.

It goes: how useful is perpetuating the narrative of stranger danger in women, really? How actually empowering is it for us to walk around in a state of low level fear, a perpetual condition of pre-victimhood, if you like? According to a report by the ONS, published in March this year, men are over twice as likely to be attacked, hurt and killed by someone they do not know on the street, or in a pub or at a house party or wherever. Which means those very men mocking the use of a phone as self-defence, on that very sofa, are in fact, twice as likely to need to know how to do it. Lucky Eddie Redmayne!

I do wonder if, the overwhelming focus on women as potential victims of strangers, the grotesquely picturesque Scandi noir type killings of women we see depicted over and over and over again on telly, the camp fire scary stories we whisper to each other about keys-between-our-knuckles and texts sent to friends, 10 mins after we pop them in an Uber (“You good, babe? You home?”) - I do wonder if that might detract from the actual truth, which is: women are infinitely more likely to get hurt and killed in our own homes, by people we know, than by people we don’t, on the street.

I’m On One where domestic abuse and violence is concerned at the moment. About how we don’t just ignore it - this thing which impacts one in four women in the UK - we don’t just look away, we kind of tolerate it. We “oh, well… what can you do?” it away. It’s only when a story as horrific as Gisele Pelicot’s hits the headlines, that we look at it properly again. Confront it. Surely those are the scary stories we should be telling? Those are the check-in texts, we should be sending?

Ah, but: the third thing I’m thinking about Saoirse Ronan, is not a thought so much, as a visceral response. Cos I actually was assaulted by a stranger, a man, on the street, a little over ten days ago; five, before that ep of Graham Norton was broadcast.

And it was not good.

I was on my way to meet some mates for lunch, right. Jolly Sunday. Broad daylight. Ambling through leafy fragrant North London, across a canal bridge, along passed a church, on a little further passed the house I think Gwyneth Paltrow lived in for a bit; wondering if we’d be drinking? Maybe a civilised half carafe of something dry and white?

When I feel a heavy, heavy hand smack down on my left shoulder. Hard.