When Safety Becomes a Duty: Gender, Loneliness, and Citizenship for Urban Women

Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out what from.

—Mae West, My Little Chickadee

Women in urban industrial societies consistently report more fear of crime and spend more money on protection than men do, even though men are more likely to be actual victims of violence (Stanko 2000, Ferraro 1996). Why do women feel so unsafe, or at least appear this way on surveys? This “paradox of fear” has been attributed to numerous factors, including women’s more frequent experience of domestic battery or other forms of aggression that go unreported to police and therefore underrepresent women’s victimization in crime statistics (Condon, Lieber, and Maillochon 2005, 267–69). The fear of rape, sometimes explained as the fear of murder if one were to resist or be perceived as resistant, appears to be the single greatest factor in women’s reported fear of crime (Ferraro 1996).¹ However, women’s fear of crime by strangers remains paradoxical, since women are less likely to be sexually assaulted by strangers than by men in their own social circle, or murdered by anyone except an intimate partner (Valentine 1992, Stanko 1995, Koskela 1997, 304; Madriz 1997, 16–17).

My conjecture in the following essay is that women’s fear results as much from anxiety about being abandoned by self-styled “protectors” and from the displaced personal anxiety of those protectors as it does from fear of physical harm. While prior scholars have regarded this fear as a psychological or a sociological fact, I believe it also symptomatizes a latent political state Hannah Arendt refers to as “loneliness.” Loneliness is “the experience”—or, I would add, the presentiment—“of being abandoned by everything and everybody,” including oneself (1966, 474–76). If one believes protectors are genuinely and legitimately acting on behalf of one’s safety, one may be tempted to regard independence as self-endangering and abandonment as one’s own “fault.” Protection that encourages self-alienation is no protection, I would argue, if it threatens to deprive women of their own company at a moment of crisis. Although women’s fear of rape and other potentially related crimes are regrettably justified by statistics, the fact that the objects of this fear are rarely the family members or social acquaintances most likely to commit such violence (or to have already committed it in the past) suggests that the imaginative role played by sexual violence in expressing the meaning of possible abandonment by intimates is just as powerful as its physical role in damaging women’s bodies and confidence. Shifting the focus of analysis from the emotional impact of physical violence to the emotional impact of imagined violence, including the abandonment that may follow in its wake, allows us to see that even feminist discourses concerning the “duty to be safe” may carry a veiled or unacknowledged threat.

Many writers have addressed the impact of actual experiences of sexual violence on their exercise of citizenship, including the right to move freely and participate in public and private association.² However, women’s actual experiences are also anticipated, interpreted, and recounted to others through a variety of stories from religious teaching, media, family history, and conversations with friends or co-workers. Arendt’s concept of loneliness, which refers to something more complex than the ordinary emotional experience, enables us to grasp how imagined sexual violence, as circulated in news reports and warnings from one’s social circle, can have such a negative impact on women’s ability to feel safe in urban spaces and to defend the safety of others—ultimately, to experience themselves as citizens of a terrain and a state. Using Arendt’s term also allows us to make room for alternative experiences of public and private space, such as the friendly or trust-inspiring dialogue with oneself she refers to as “solitude.” A genuine experience of safety, one capable of making women trustworthy citizens for themselves and others, emerges only from practice in solitude and its defense.

During the 1970s and 1980s, legal responsibility for violence against women shifted...