Thursday 2 April 2015

Stalking ISN'T Method...

This week Jamie Dornan, the Northern Irish model-turned-actor who went from messing with Gillian Anderson’s head in “The Fall” to ‘starring’ in “Fifty Shades of Shi…er, I mean Grey” told the LA Times in an interview that, to help him prepare for his role in “The Fall”, he once spent a few moments stalking a woman who got off the Tube, “just to see what it was like”. He says he’s not proud of himself for doing it, which is a point in his favour, but does go on to add he also found it “kind of exciting, in a really sort of dirty way”.

Well guess what, Jamie Dornan, you utter muppet. It is NOT an exciting experience; for the person being followed, it can be absolutely bloody terrifying. And I know of what I speak, for some years ago I was followed by some completely random bloke and it remains one of the singularly most frightening experiences of my life. And when one of the bloggers on the Indy’s website made this exact point, out came all the anti-feminists to tell her – and, presumably, myself and every other woman who’s been followed – to “get over it”.

A selection of the comments which I personally found the most charming (complete with their original typos/misogynistic rants):

I'm a big bloke - 6'5" and broadly built, and when I'm out at night I often see women cross the road, speed up, slow down or in one case, actually run, to get away from me. How do you think this makes me feel?!? I would never hurt a fly and yet I am constantly assumed to be a threat! I'd like to know what goes through the minds of those women - what exactly to they think I am? A mugger? A serial killer? A rapist? Even though this has been happening my entire adult life, it still hurts. And now you suggest that I should modify my behavior?”

Some guy who finds you interesting and tries to start a conversation with you is not "following" you or "stalking" you, whether or not you welcome the attention.”

Why are you demonising men for the simple act of walking behind someone?”

I don't get nervous when a man just happens to be a decent close proximity to me because I don't hate all men, and I am not a delusional paranoid schizophrenic. You're article is inciting fear in women. It's not healthy. This entire article is far more worrisome and insulting than Jamie Dornan ever was following that girl for five freaking seconds.”

'Why should ordinary law abiding men feel the need to divert themselves to assuage the largely unfounded fears of women?”

The fact is that men make up 80% of the victims of street violence. We are far more likely to be assaulted, robbed, murdered etc. etc.”

As a woman, I don't relate to this article because I don't assume every man that is standing next to me or walking next to or behind me, is a threat. You can't live in fear. The only time when my alert is up full throttle is when I am out in the middle of the night and alone. Because THATS when all the scary ones come out, ,ore often then in daylight. And at least in daylight, there will most likely be witnesses...”

To me this article sounded almost like she was dictating women to assume every man that you pass on the street is going to attack you. It's opression against men.”

And my own personal “favourite”:

Mind you, you're not that attractive so you should have appreciated the attention.”

Ah, well now I’ve had all that explained to me I clearly see I should have realised I was oppressing the poor lad who followed me and instead of being scared I should have been flattered by the attention. Thanks for that, I feel so much better.

Except, of course, I don’t.

Now obviously I’m not suggesting for one single second that every man who walks down the street is out to drag me into the nearest bush and rape me, nor do I spend my entire life darting across roads and scurrying back again to avoid any man who happens to come my way. I can even be relatively nice if someone does try and start a conversation with me. However, there is a vast and frankly terrifying gulf between a man walking along the street behind you when you’re both on your way home from work and a man who is quite clearly following – nay, stalking – you.

I was 19 when it happened to me. I have never forgotten it, especially not the sense of utter helplessness I felt while it was going on, or the fear it might escalate from simply following me to something far more heinous. To put it simply, I have never been so scared.

So, the facts:

I was staying for a few days with my parents, brother and brother’s best friend down at my step-nan’s house on the Kent coast. Been there lots of times, always loved it. Close to where she lived there’s an old ruined church called Reculver which I have always loved; it’s four miles along the sea wall from the beach and the walk is beautiful – four miles there, four miles back, all with the sea on one side of you and fields on the other. On a glorious summer’s day you literally can’t ask for anything better and so I took myself off, as I often did, to mosey along down there for a bit. I had my headphones on, the sun was shining and I practically danced along the path to Reculver. When I got there, I spent a bit of time chilling out in the sunshine and rediscovering the ruins (it was a Roman fort before it was a church) and then decided to head back again in time for tea. And that’s when it happened.

Now please bear in mind that this was the middle of the afternoon and the path to and from Reculver was pretty busy. Plenty of people were walking one way or the other – it’s a route popular with cyclists and dog walkers – so there were, to paraphrase from one of the comments above, plenty of ‘witnesses’ about. My mp3 player ran out of battery as I headed home but I kept my headphones in and just meandered along the path watching the sea, minding my own business. I remember there being a German family on the beach to my left; there were a lot of them and they seemed to be having a really good time, which made me smile. Oh, and I should also add for the record that this was in the days before I had a mobile phone (because I am *that* old), so wasn’t able to either pretend to be on the phone to someone else or ring for back up…

So.

He came up behind me on his bike. I wasn’t aware of him at first, mainly because I was too busy watching the kids from the German family attempt to throw one of their siblings into the sea, but I soon realised he wasn’t trying to get past me, he was following me. What really surprises me, looking back, is how quickly I started to feel uncomfortable by this; he was quite close to me and kept trying to talk to me – although my mp3 player wasn’t working and I could hear every word he said, it was pretty obvious I had my headphones in and so one would assume I was listening to music and therefore not paying attention. But as I say, I could hear everything he said and it quickly turned nasty. One of the things he kept saying to me, over and over again, was “what’s the matter, you don’t like black boys?”

I was really, really freaked out by this. It was intimidating, it was uncomfortable – frankly, it was harassment. This went on for about an hour; I was getting more and more distressed by it and literally had no idea what to do with myself. Part of me wanted to turn round and tell him to sod off and leave me alone, but I was scared that if I did he might retaliate. At best he might hit me. At worst…well, let’s not go there since it didn’t actually come to that. But I was genuinely terrified; I didn’t know this guy from Adam and had no idea what he was capable of doing, so I just carried on walking and hoped he’d get bored and leave me alone. When he finally did cycle off – after a few false starts when he’d go off ahead of me, slow down and wait for me to catch up and then start the whole thing over again – I had to sit on the sea wall because my legs were shaking so much. There was an overwhelming sense of helplessness, of fear and also relief because he hadn’t actually done anything to me; I had, in my mind, got away quite lightly, and I was so overwhelmed that I burst into tears.

Not one person stopped to ask me if I was all right.

Now I can appreciate people not stepping in while the harassment was actually happening. After all I had my headphones in, albeit with no sound coming from them, and was walking as briskly as I could to get rid of this guy; people may not have realised there was anything wrong, and that’s ok.

What’s not ok is that nobody, not one single person, stopped to ask a sobbing girl if she was all right. In a way that only added to my sense of apprehension; I didn’t know if the guy was going to come back, but if somebody had at least stopped and asked if I was all right it would have helped me realise I wasn’t alone, and at that particular moment in time I had never felt more alone.

As it was, I eventually managed to pull myself together enough to walk the rest of the way back to the promenade where the walk starts/finishes, although not without looking over my shoulder or ahead of me just in case he came back. When I reached the prom I went straight to the phone box, thanked my lucky stars for remembering my Brownie mantra of “always keep 10p in your purse for emergencies” and called my step-nan’s house. When my brother – my poor brother – answered, I burst into tears and was so hysterical I could barely speak; he put my mum on the phone and she came to pick me up.

I’ve never been more pleased to see her.

There was nothing to actually be done about what had happened; I wasn’t physically hurt and anyway, I hadn’t got a good enough look at him to be able to tell the police anything if we had reported it, but I’ve never forgotten how utterly helpless and scared I felt in that time. And this was in broad daylight, on a busy path; I can’t even begin to think how much worse it would have been if it had happened late at night when there are by default less people around. And it’s actually had a lasting effect: I was always relatively blasé about coming back from places late at night before then, not worrying whether I cut through the alleyway to reach our street or who was behind me, but after this incident I started following the ‘rules’ we girls have always been given. If I come back from a gig in London by myself now, I always make a point of pretending to be on my phone. I am hyper-aware of who is around me. Sometimes I walk in the road if it’s quiet, just in case someone jumps out of a darkened hedge or side street and grabs me. And I never cut through the alley, taking the long way round instead. In fact until I started writing this blog entry I genuinely didn’t realise how much I’ve modified and accommodated my usual behaviour since that moment, and that in itself is quite scary.

So for all that Jamie Dornan maintains it was “exciting”, and for all those commentators who hyperbolised the subsequent article into a “feminazi man-hating ‘all men are rapists’ puff piece of propaganda” I would like to say this.

I know – all women know – not every man is about to jump them and do unspeakable things to them. Most of you are lovely, decent human beings. But sometimes you do things, no matter how innocently, which make us nervous, even if you don’t intend to and there’s absolutely nothing untoward about your actions or intentions whatsoever. So please don’t be offended if we cross the street if you walk behind us, or look over our shoulders and speed up a bit. It’s not you personally. It’s just we live in a world where the sort of incident I described as happening to me happens to an awful lot of women, on a daily basis, and it sometimes ends horrifically; that has a psychological impact on us whether we’re aware of it or not. By asking you to please consider how your approach might feel to a woman as you walk behind her I’m not implying you’re going to attack her, or that she needs to be afraid of you; I’m not even asking you to ‘modify’ your behaviour or assume every single woman you meet is going to run screaming from you. I’m just asking you to please be aware that this happens to us and it impacts how we react to things.

As to the guy who followed me, I’m not going to lie. There is a part of me which still wonders what might have happened if I had reacted to him. Maybe if I’d screamed at him to leave me alone he might have realised he was intimidating me and backed off. He may even have apologised; perhaps he meant nothing by it. Or perhaps it would have antagonised him and what was already a scary situation could have become far, far worse.

It’s that not knowing which troubles me…