Why Don’t We Talk About the Gender Safety Gap in the U.S.? (trigger warning)
(a thoroughly important, depressing read)
Why Don’t We Talk About the Gender Safety Gap in the U.S.?
This week, John Krakauer’s book, Missoula, “a depressingly typical” story about college town rapes, was released. In a recent NPR interview, Krakauer describes his dawning realization about how many women in the United States have been sexually assaulted, most often by people they know. His prior lack of awareness about women’s experiences, either of being assaulted or avoiding assault, is hardly rare.
A primary reason most people can remain blissfully unaware of the reality of sexual assault is that media continues to ignore the role that gender plays in the experience of violence. In December, for example, Gallup released its most recent assessment of a gendered safety gap in its annual U.S. crime survey, a report that garnered virtually no media interest. On the surface, the news looked generally good: “Most Americans,” researchers concluded, “continue to feel safe in their immediate communities, with 63 percent saying they would not be afraid to walk alone there at night.” However, the 63 percent number masks a difference: almost half of women, 45 percent, report not feeling safe, whereas 73 percent of men reported that they do.
What does this gap mean, why is it so persistent and why are we not talking about it? A man like Krakauer—informed, curious and educated—for example, admits to having had no prior sense of how this gap informs the lives of the women around him. Violence against women in the United States is emblematic of global realities.
Earlier this year, the United Nations released yet another report documenting “alarmingly high rates” of gender-based violence against girls and women. An estimated 35 percent of women worldwide experience a spectrum of intimate partner violence. In the United States, the gender safety gap, a measure of how physically secure men and women feel in the United States, has never dipped below double digits, something true of all industrialized nations.
. . . . .
This gap is a measure of persistent and deep structural gender inequities that continue to marginalize women in the public sphere and to perpetuate unconscionably high levels of socially tolerated gender-based violence. As the work of Hudson and others shows, women’s physical security is a foundational dimension of societal equality and peace. A formal commitment to gender equality in the law has yet to mean that men and women benefit equally from societal improvements like lower crime rates, education, better health care, and greater comparative wealth, or enjoy anywhere near parity rights to physical freedom and security. On the contrary, many consider the gap a “natural” state of affairs and women’s absorption of the gap’s costs continues to be largely taken for granted.
http://msmagazine.com/blog/2015/04/24/why-dont-we-talk-about-the-gender-safety-gap-in-the-u-s/
= new reply since forum marked as read
