Thought for the Day: 17th March 2021

This is the script from my Thought for the Day, broadcast on BBC Radio Four on 17th March 2021.

The writer and teacher Ram Dass wrote that life is a journey where we are all just walking each other home. He meant of course that life is a spiritual undertaking as well as a physical one, and that death, rather than being our final destination, actually returns us to our origins. As a Christian I am grounded by the stark reminder given every Ash Wednesday at the beginning of Lent, that I am dust and to dust I shall return, but before I become dust again, I must navigate this life here on earth, and to be a woman is often a painful physical reality that I can’t escape from. 

Being a woman in public space can feel like being an interloper in alien territory, a stranger in a strange and often dangerous land. We are reminded in so many ways that public space is not ours to inhabit, and we must pay a tax for the privilege of visiting. So we pay our dues. We fold our bodies into corners on packed trains and buses. We look down and speak quietly. We move aside. We shield our bodies with our bags. We keep a tight hold of our house keys and we make a mental note of how to activate the SOS button on our phones. We look over our shoulders. We text people with our whereabouts. We don’t make eye-contact and we never relax. 

Public space does not belong to women, it never did. Our social history shows us that for every attempt women have made to step out of our domestic sphere and inhabit public, shared space, we are punished for it. Perhaps nobody exists in public space wholly without fear and maybe extra CCTV is the answer and better street lighting or more plainclothes police officers. The creation of safer streets is something that should benefit us all, but it’s only part of the answer. Questions still remain about the effectiveness of our criminal justice system, and unless we tackle the ingrained, root causes of street harassment public space will never be safe for women and girls. 

Jesus called himself the Good Shepherd, an image which casts us as the sheep. The best way to keep sheep safe is to make sure they are always confined to the sheepfold, lest they be scattered and snatched by wolves. Not all wolves, people might say, but on an otherwise deserted street late at night, it’s impossible to tell which ones are a danger. 

When women are threatened the response is usually to impose restrictive safety measures, but to keep us penned up in the sheepfold is to deny women life in abundance.  We want to be safe but we also want to be free. We are one flock and we all just trying to make our way home.