Thread by @AyoCaesar

I'm sick of the amount of brainspace "Don't get raped and murdered!" takes up in my head. I'm sick of thinking it at 8.30pm, wondering if that's too late to take the cut-through to my house. I'm sick of knowing that it's not actually within my power to not get raped and murdered.

Here's the thing about stranger murders, like the ones which took the lives of Sabina Nessa and Sarah Everard. They're incredibly rare - but we, as women, think about them all the time. We adjust our behaviour and movement to mitigate against them all the time.

And these adjustments are both rational and irrational. They're rational because who *wouldn't* do everything they could to feel safer in public space? And they're irrational because we're not actually the ones making the decision about whether or not something bad happens to us.

Both the real threat of sexual violence *and the anticipated fear* of sexual violence curtail women's freedom to live our lives. To go where we choose, when we choose, wearing what we choose.

Sexual violence - particularly when it's of the most common kind, committed by somebody we know - is seen as proof that we've done something wrong. That we failed in our duty to keep ourselves safe. That somewhere along the line, we made a bad decision.

And if I'm honest, I've internalised that logic. I look at things that have happened to other women, and I think about what I would have done differently.

I think about my own assault when I was 17, and rake over all the decisions I took that put me in that space, with that man.

Throughout history, we've tried to deal with sexual violence by changing the behaviour of women - where we go, who we're with, what we wear and when we're there.

We seem to think we can deal with the minority of violent men by curtailing the freedom of the majority of women.

But in doing this we a) haven't been able to stop sexual violence, and
b) we continue to duck the central question of how our culture creates and sustains violent men, and
c) we make women more vulnerable by assigning culpability in their victimhood.

Imagine if men thought about male violence as often as women did. If they read news stories about rape and felt as angry as women do. If they thought about how they're socialised into their gender, about how violence is coded into masculinity, and wanted to change it.

Because if we're honest, men have the luxury of not thinking about rape most of the time. They certainly don't think about it every time they're walking home, or going on a date, or choosing an outfit. The work of rape prevention - or rather, the delusion of it - is women's work.