Or Taking the Long Way Round
A conversation with our youngest, who is 14 years old, came up recently when we were talking about taking buses to and from school. Mary was under the illusion that I had not taken busses when I was at school and I was like "oh no I started off taking the busses to and from school", but I had only ever really spoken about the walks and going to my friends' houses after school, made extra poignant as one of their lovely mums who always made me dinner and things died recently and I could not get to the funeral 🙁
"Why did you stop?" Mary asked me and I hesitated... after all I was actually entitled to a free bus pass as well so yeah it didn't make sense... especially as we'd had to argue with the council about this as they were insistent that the long alleyway was a viable route, except we had all been told repeatedly by parents and school that we were not to go down this alleyway by the station on our own as there had been a couple of horrible sexual attacks down there. As an adult I walk down there all the time but still not really at night and as a school pupil, rightly or wrongly, I was scared of the alleyway and only walked down it if my friend Lindsy was walking that way. So what could have posessed me to stop taking the warm dry safety of the bus that wasn't costing me money?
"Two reasons... bullies, and then there was the boy who wouldn't stop pinching my bum and trying to grope me through the gaps in the seats, so I started only getting the bus if I could see certain safe people I could sit with - namely one girl who lived by the bus stop I got off at and a girl who transfered to our school later on and was someone I wanted to be - blonde etc... Turns out she wasn't happy and wanted the opposite to what she was as well, as we are all taught to hate our bodies. I doubt either of them knew I only got the bus if they were there, of course one of my besties used to get the bus all the time but (bless her) she often made things worse for me without meaning to, and things were pretty bad for them in general - so again I got the bus with her when we were travelling in our pack of 4-6 social outcasts together. Ironically I would wait at the bus stop with her to protect her later on and she got the later bus to avoid similar issues so we were always looking at the bus to check who was on it. This is also how we ended up all hanging out in the library both at the school and the one in town - we could hide from the bullies and it didn't cost any money."
The look on Mary's face said everything - having made them report incidents I was then listing sereal events of sexual harrassement including the boy trying to follow me home to find where I lived and he was in the upper school when I was lower. But the thing was he wasn't even the only one - boys in school would pinch your arse and I knew I was ugly and no one wanted to go out with me, and still. I even had an incident during my A levels of being pulled into a toilet and being held against a wall by my neck, but fortunately the other boys saw this and rushed in to rescue me and then it was so normal that the 'girls' which included gay boys then organised a buddy system so I wasn't wandering around college on my own. And you know I was often bruised at least from these encounters and it never occured to any of us to report them. We did however change the routes we walked around college to be longer but avoid where the harrasment might be - this was extra needed as I had kind of flipped out at one of my assalients meaning I had slapped them in the face with pizza pre-emptively one day, which I think technically meant in that instance I was the attacker, and I thought I would be punished and they would not.
And though here I mention stuff from other school children as mentioned they were often in higher years and it really wasn't just kids being kids. There were unsavouries who hung about outside the youth centre - grown arsed men and others who had authority and should have known better. There are stories I hold that are not my own so I will not share them, but oh my god.
When I got to university I walked into a debate in the common room (TV room with pool table) and one of the lads turned to me "Sarah your from like Essex/East London like me aren't you?" I nodded and he told the rest of the group to ask me the question.
A news story had broken that rape was the most common way girls lost their vaginity in the area and they were asking me to say that was wrong and the thing was, I could not; and a long discussion then occured because we were all trying to talk about a complex subject with out the terminology - we did not have phrases like grey rape which is so so common and wasn't even seen as a thing really. There was the general feeling that if you brought charges against a rapist that you knew - it was you who would be punished for the rest of your life. I had friends who had indeed had to move home and sometimes even get name changes because of the harrassment they recieved afterwards - this was while they were school aged and underaged :/
It was fine to report stranger danger - so when we were accosted in the woods at a camp by men who'd broken into the site full of underaged girls and I had used the self defense Dad taught me on them - that was fine and all reported and we were made hot chocolate. Turns out the kid who's crap at PE can out run an athletics club kid and collapse a full grown muscle bound bloke, even though they are ever so slightly larger than a squirrel and had a permanent limp - but only when they are actually being chased. To be fair to the men they might not have had evil on their mind and just wanted a camp fire and then realised they would be in trouble which is why they grabbed us in a bear hug to stop us running off and blabbing they were there, but again - that is still how you get killed. I have always been in the most assulted demographic (or at least this is what I was told by the police) - but am now aged out of it so I forget - everything from my height to how I walked - I actually went and did more advanced martial arts to learn to walk differently at night and even so, I got assaulted on the way home whilst on the phone to my Dad - fortunately the duck and weave helped me and I just ended up covered in yoghurt of all things as they threw it at me. I think that was mainly an attempted mugging but there was a sexual element and the embarassment was they were like school boys and I was in my 20's and I remember thinking: my god, this never ends. My poor dad was beside himself having only heard what was happening and insisted on staying on the phone the whole way home and after that he often went out of his way to pick me up at night including coming into central London.
This is the thing there is often a blurred line between robbery and sexual assult - I don't know if that is the same for men. I know it is for me fem gay/trans friends who I would guard from the night because if there is one group that is more likely to end up dead than me it is The Dolls. But I doubt somehow that a man being mugged is also going be threatened with rape in most instances of being mugged.
Actually how often is the average person mugged? I mean I know I am the demographic that gets mugged but I had kind of assumed everyone had been through some sort of mugging but recently stuff has come up that suggests that perhapse this varies with where you live, for a start.
So I thought all this stuff was getting better but a few things make that seem wrong now - I may have been lead astray by Jean not being a dainty build, and who is quite obviously muscley and dresses like a lad and who was a teenager mainly in the quarantine and not going out for years - they in fact go and get Mary from the same situation that they would just walk home from. This, plus things like womens rights being taken away especially in the US makes me despair - it was supposed to be a better world I brought kids into, not a slide backwards on everything my mother, grandmothers and great grandmothers had fought for.
Talking of thinking things are normal - I realised I thought it was normal to have stalkers - doesn't everyone have stalkers? My first one was when I was about 12-13 and was a boy from church camp who somehow found out my address when I stopped answering the house phone because it was always him (ok he probably just looked us up in the telephone directory as my friend gave him my phone number).
Often stalkers come from friends giving out your phone number or address or saying which building at college you are in or when your shifts are because they think it would be so cute for you to go out together - NO. Don't do it to your friend please! There is a difference in putting two people you think might get on in the same large communial space with mutal friends and setting up your friends like this. Especially if they have asked you multiple times not to do it. It's not fair on anyone.
However the stalkers still have free will and sitting outside someones gate for hours because they wont come and see you is not ok - just in case that isn't obvious and it certainly is not a romantic gesture. And equally you need an expressed yes of interest to be completely honest here, because you see people like me have had men turn nasty when we've told them out and out we are not interested; and by nasty I mean violent. I just struggle to break away from this coded language which is also about not triggering such violence. So we might be smiling and we might talking nicely to you but we are trying to escape without getting a fractured arm - which is actually something that happened to me - they grabbed my arm and would not let go because I was trying to leave. Other things that have happened when tricked into dates and saying no... rocks and I mean large fist sized rocks thrown at me, hair set on fire and punched in the stomach. I really need to stop using the words 'getting a little nasty' which is historically how I would have described this behaviour.
And this is before the dudes who just take a fancy to you because they see you on the bus or walking around in Gloucester - to be fair Gloucester has a lovely set up with City Protection Officers who will meet you and walk you to things but they have limited hours which means late night performances and even Choir ends too late for them. Alaric is currently picking me up from outside Choir due to some issues there of late - not stalking just pestering and I also need to thank the table top gamers who have helped.
Obviously there is also the issue of what is a fan and what is a stalker - these situations tend to arise more from a professional work setting. I do bizzarely have fans and they are lovely mostly, but occassionally there is something that is just something else - sometimes just hate straight up but with an obsession - you know they track me down specifically to tell me how awful I am or they start off gushing love and wanting to send me presents and then when I refuse to meet up with them, or I accidently don't remember them and say hello at an event, they get nasty. Sometimes they are purely internet people and I end up recieving hate mail because the entire American Bible Belt has apparently been informed of how immoral I am and some minute percent of them rise to the call of arms against me.
One partucular incident that resulted in death threats and a targeted hate campaign did end up involving the police, and I was very grateful for everything they, did made me very very weary of anything that might give me success too fast. I feel sometimes this has resulted in some self sabotage - once again for fear of rape or death I have chosen the long way around.
I think things are definately better if you look at the overall historic trend of womens' rights from the norman invasion onwards but women were basically belongings under that regime - people shy away from the term slave but legally they belonged to the men in their lives, and you can see the situations where women started to pull out of this in things like court proceedings for witch trials - an independently wealthy women? Must be a witch! Just an independent thinking woman = witch.
But you know we still sent our kids to martial arts and self defense classes with the specific purpose of not attracting and fending off attackers in a way I don't think would have been so urgent if they had been born with willies.
Slight caveat to that last statement - I am aware from friends who are surviors and who in some instances needed help to see the situation they were actualy in and that stats that men who suffer domestic violence and sexual abuse are often disreguarded worse than women who are coming forward suffering the same crimes and the women are already being treated like shit so this is even worse, with it often seen as comedic; and it is horrendous and wrong. It is kind of invisible with the assumption it can't happen. Highlighting my lived experience is not detracting from this other narrative and in fact they are both threads in the same tangle of how society builds up its constructs of what men and women are - same as Trans people and how they are treated hence my reference to The Dolls.
So where does all this leave us? I realised that though I had given my children tools to defend themselves and explained the general I had never actually spoken about the personal whys with them and the personal whys are an important share because if we are not careful every victim thinks they are on their own and that it is their fault or that they will somehow be punished for mentioning behavours that are presented as normal. My own mother was mortified she had waited "too long" to tell me her own experiences for me to use them to avoid my own. Everyone thinks they are on their own and that is part of the danger. This is why MeToo was actually so important.
I remember just over 10 years ago a young science student asked for advice with a couple of us older women whether she would/should/could make a formal complaint about sexual harrassment and the advice she was getting was "you should, yes, but it might mean you ruin your career, at least here at this institution" and I was like: how horrendous is that? But it also wasn't bad advice it was just honest... this has been re-highlighted for me of late as I have watched a similar thing with the academic music world and a friend's journey in taking the hard road and how it is only now coming to a resolution, and their actions had a snowball affect - the personal toll has been great but they stood firm and made the world a safer place for younger students.
One day I hope we won't have to stop or change direction or not get on the train because there is only one passenger on there - actual advice I got from the powers that be on travel on public transport. One day we won't have to think twice about taking the shorter direct route, or hold our keys in our hands or have Claim Back The Night walks or hide in 24 hr McDonalds when you have no money and have to rely on female staff members being nice and explaining to their manager that, no, you were going to be loitering until probably dawn as the man outside wasn't going away and free coffee would be a good idea.
And that's one of the things about not talking about this stuff - it means all those actual real world heroes like the lady in the McDonalds do not get thanked enough and I thank them with all my heart. It was also an example of how your attire/outfit/length of skirt mean absolutely nothing - that night I was actually coming home from a hospital treatment that had taken longer than expected and it was late and I had to change from underground to mainline for the last part of my journey - I was wearing a baggy tracksuit and the guy was trying to litrally drag me home with him. In the end my Dad drove over to get me but that took several hours to organise. I was so tired and I just hope the McDonalds staff know how important they were.
There is also a thing called the Passerby Affect or something - so the other day there was a group who are often after money for their addiction issues - probably unkindly I refer to them as The Crack Heads and they always come up to me when I am trying to walk into town but they didn't this time because they were all around this rather worried little old lady at the bus stop who made eye contact with me and I asked her if she was sure she had the right bus stop and we walked on to the bus stop two down and round a corner and in an area of town with more people at the bus stop and open shops. I was late for my meeting because of this - but stuff like this is important its easy to think someone else will step in - I am a crippled short woman who could not physically fight the group - no one would blame me for walking on but just being there and observing the situation was enough to remove the potential victim from the situation - we had a night bus initiative that took stranded students home at uni and there is the Night Angels which has started here in Gloucester along with the Holly Guard App (Holly was my friend's young hair dresser who was killed by her stalking ex, and there is now a charity set up by her father to help people who are, say, walking home and are worried, built in conjunction with the police who have been working on their failings in cases like Hollie's.).
I think movements like He for She and Me Too have helped drastically in making the problem more visible and also providing some ways ahead with how to change things for the better. Lots of men just don't realise what women or feminine people experience - so I was in a group chat with Alaric's friends and I mentioned having to sort out my facebook inbox when the kids weren't about because of the dick pics but how my then-not-quite teenager had recieved their first unsolicited image via a platform that wasn't supposed to have that problem and I had had to show them how to block and report that person as well as go through basic internet safety. The group were horrified, not about there being such pics as consenting adults often send such things, but because these were unasked for and on top of that sent to a known child >:( and even when they are asked for as an adult you really have to weigh up how likely is this person to be a dick and invoke revenge porn if you break up or have a disagreement and... that can still sink your career as a woman :/
However I am also pleased that the younger generation are more likely to take action against their attackers and are in general a lot less afraid that we were. I think things have improved but we are seeing more incidents reported which is why it looks like there are more attacks but it is an increase in reports rather than just being seen as 'how things are' and that can only be a good thing.
As this piece of writing is already a magnitude longer than I had expected it to be when I sat down and because it is still growing I feel I would be remiss in not mentioning the recent protests and counter protests and the fear of Boat People raping.
I trawled through the stats which was actually hard and harrowing to do. Less that 3 in 100 rapes that are reported to the police then have charges brought and charges brought is the same as conviction and that can take years and years. And 6 out of 7 times it is by someone the person knows, 50% of the time it is their partner or ex - these stats do not make the "boat people" seem that significant - doesn't mean there are not incidents, and in fact I know that violent crimes drastically increase if there is a large poverty gap; well illegal immigrants and asylum seekers would be in that demographic so I had a look at who rapes and sexually abuses. This was made slightly hard as there is not a direct break down of rape by ethnicity etc... and the numbers caught are low and the victim might not know the ethencity etc... or country of origin of attacker... when looking at accounts that do not lead to conviction but the data there is suggests that rape is not a crime that lurks in one demographic - so much so that this is the quote from England and Wales Rape Crises "The facts: there is no typical rapist. People who commit sexual violence and abuse come from every economic, ethnic, racial, age and social group."
So yeah boat people are not a significant threat, and in fact are an at risk demographic/group of people for disappearing and being sex trafficked - which, in case you were wondering, is rape too - it is also the most common modern day slavery in the UK. Again, refugees are a target for this abuse - they are the ones suffering. The other industries are construction so a lot of the cheap building labour used on large construction and agricultural projects, such as jobs around large industrail scale farming and food production, in case you were wondering. Someone who chooses to be a sex worker/prostitute is not the same as being trafficked and the taboo about talking about sex work puts all them in more danger as even those who choose to be there feel they can not report violent crimes against their persons, leaving the dangerous people at large to hurt again.
One of the arguments I see is that stopping refugees would stop the trafficking but that just isn't true - victums do get bought in other ways, it's more the refugees are vulnerable; and yes that is a huge thing but leaving them living in freezing tents or forcing them back to countries where they will be killed or, ironically, have basically goods-and-chattles status is not the answer. These are human beings.
And this is again where word usage is an issue - the word "refugee" has somewhat vanished recently, I have noted, along with a distinction between immigrant and illigal immigrant (which is a weird term in and of itself if you think about it!).
A lot of the rest of the modern slaves are domestic household help and work in the nail bars etc... which a lot of the time is just sex trafficking with extra drudgery added in on top.
There is more on this and how to spot and report it one the National Crime Agency Website. And remember people aren't necessarily "foreign" when forced into sex and human trafficking but it is not the boat people swooping up our young girls.
There is so much - where do we even start?
We need empowerment and avenues and channels of non judgment for people to come forward about abuse. We need respect for fellow humans to be taught.
There was a poem I heard a few years ag.o I think its one of Holly McNish's, but it runs through boys pulling pigtails at school and everyone being "oh boys will be boys" or "it means he likes you" and ending with: is it ok for an eighteen year old to pin down a girl. "No of course not"... well... "how would he know? He has never been told." the poem is good and this is very bad half remembered paraphrasing and it might have been a conversation with her but you get the idea. With the rise of the "alpha" males and people like Andrew Tate we need to make very sure that we keep an eye on the rights we do have and empower our young people regardless of what's in their pants.
Why I stopped taking the bus and took the long way home should be something that remains firmly in the past.
We have Reclaim The Night here in Gloucester - you probably have one near you too.
(later edit 25/11/2025 because I was sent the poster for Gloucester's Reclaim the Night)
Everybody welcome:
Kings Square
Gloucester
Friday 28th Nov 2025
6-8:30 pm
Health, Uncategorised | sarah | 
Sat 11th Apr 2026 5:28 pm | 
Comments (0) 
Subscribe