how to tell if men will attack you on the street

Or at least make slightly better guesses about it

I have walked through a lot of dangerous areas in my life and only got almost-killed on the street once. Walking is my favorite mode of transport, and I also don’t seem to have much of a survival instinct compared to other women, and I’ve lived long-term in ~8 cities and shorter-term in several more across the world. Here’s my guide on ‘how do I accurately assess risk on the street as a woman’.

This is pretty vibes-based, because I only have a limited amount of anecdotal data and there are so many other places in the world I’ve never been. I’m sure many women have much more total exposure hours than I do! But I also have a much higher risk tolerance than most other women, and I do not feel threatened by being catcalled, which has let me learn from experiences most other women would never get into in the first place (sometimes for good reason).

My foremost and biggest rule - are there other women walking around alone?

This is by far the most important thing I use to check if I should feel afraid. If I’m passing other women walking around solo, I feel good, golden, I can put on headphones and zone out.

This, like most of my assessments, are of course not absolute. I’m sure there’s areas in the world where seeing other alone-women would not indicate safety for you specifically. But it’s something that reassures me.

For example: one night I walked home alone from blues dancing in Istanbul, about a 40 minute walk. I walked a long portion down Istiklal street, which is a huge, famous tourist street, usually full of throngs of foot traffic. It was busy that night, which was reassuring! Crowds are safe! There were hundreds of people.

Except this night, as I looked around, I slowly realized that they were all men. That’s weird - surely there must be a woman somewhere. But no - face after face after face, all men. I gradually realized I was the only woman on that street. I was alone.

I was terrified. My terror turned out to be justified; after I got off the busy street, I passed a man heading the opposite way. After I turned a corner, I glanced behind me and saw that he had turned around and was now following me. He ended up stalking and eventually chasing me down, only to be scared off when I screamed.

I sorta think you can’t really know how safe a thing is unless you’re behaving riskily enough to occasionally run into genuine threat. After this I was like ‘okay there’s the limit for the risks I’m willing to take.’

Are there bars on the windows

I once spent a few weeks alone in Cape Town, in South Africa, which has one of the highest rape rates in the world (if not the highest). I normally don’t worry too much about stats - things are very neighborhood specific! All the rape might (and probably did) happen in the townships; maybe your own neighborhood is completely fine.

I did stay in a nice area - but the place I stayed at had three separate barred gates before I finally got to my door. When I took a walk to get groceries, every single fence I passed was curled with barbed wire or spikes, and every single window had iron bars.

The protections those around you have to take to protect their property are a good signal! If you are walking down a street and there’s no bars on windows, that’s a great sign.

How destroyable are the objects around you

Okay - you’re standing at a possibly sketchy area being uncertain how scared you should be. Take a moment to imagine that you would like to do the most possible damage to the things around you in the least possible time. What would you do?

If you can do a lot of damage (and this damage hasn’t been done), you’re probably safe. If there are delicate flowers in a pot next to you, beautiful. If there’s a little cafe sign that could easily be kicked over, fantastic. If there’s a sculpture you could shove over if you tried, even better.

In general, places will show the vulnerability they have already been able to survive. If all those things are intact, that means you are not in a location where they have been regularly attacked, which means you’re likely in a situation where you will not be regularly attacked.

You can’t predict mental illness

Everybody I know seems about appropriately wary about those who are screaming at invisible people. You are probably correct to be afraid of them. The fact that they’re there and haven’t been arrested already is slightly good news but not very much good news. Being in a nice place where women are walking around alone also does not help predict your safety much either.

How many people are around you, at all?

When alone, I try to think through concrete scenarios. What am I actually afraid of? A guy trying to murder me? He’ll pull a gun? Try to rape me? While the risk is never zero, being surrounded by people usually drops the risk enormously. With the exception of some particularly extreme cultures, a guy would have to be absolutely stupid to actually do anything to you if he’s surrounded by other people! Much of the bystander effect is a myth; the famous Kitty Genovese event where supposedly thirty-seven witnesses didn’t come to her aid is basically false.

Once when I was hanging out with my homeless friends, a guy walked up and invited me to a frat party. I hadn’t been to one before, so I said yes and followed him. He led me back to his place, which was a room with a mattress on the floor, and nobody else there. I thought this was sus and told him I was gonna go home. He offered to walk me home and I happily said sure. At my apartment building, there were glass doors to get into the lobby. He said he wanted to come in to go pee; I said no, he could pee in the alley. He said please? I said no. I said goodnight, and tried to shut the door; he held it open and tried to force his way in. I gripped the handles and planted my foot in his chest and kicked him out, hard, and slammed the door shut. I waved cheerily at him ‘goodbye!’ and went up to my apartment.

At no point during any of this was I afraid. There were other people around, both within visual distance and also people who could hear me if I screamed. I did not parse him as a meaningful threat. If nobody had been around, though, I would have been terrified. It would have been likely traumatizing for me. But as it was, I experienced essentially no trauma, no increased fear in general, no side effects, no nightmares, absolutely no issues.

Attractiveness doesn’t matter maybe?

I’m a bit confused about this. I personally have experienced zero difference in my sense of safety based on how I’m dressed, and while I don’t deny there are scenarios where it would be important, I suspect a lot of women conflate general attention with danger. My Istanbul stalking experience saw me wearing a curve-covering coat that hid my butt, and in general my anxiety does not correlate with how much my nipples are showing that day. And I do wear a wide variety of clothing! I often like dressing borderline-amish, and other times I am happy wearing almost nothing.

I suspect this is because I mostly do not parse sexual attention from men on the street as threats. I do not think they are going to hurt me and I’m not afraid of them. If a man catcalls me, I view this as him announcing his own presence to both me and everyone else around me, and this feels safe to me. If he follows me and goes ‘oh baby why you ignoring me,’ it’s uncomfortable but what do I think he’s gonna do, just rape me there in the street? No! There’s other people around! It’s the middle of the day! He’s annoying and makes me feel bad but I’m not in danger!

I think my threat model is men who are taking advantage of opportunity, not advantage of you specifically. My threat model is more a man who notices that you are a woman who is sufficiently isolated. Your clothes don’t matter, he can take those off. He will not catcall you, he will not harass you. He will try to make sure you do not see him, he will follow you silently, and he will wait until no one can help you.

—

It’s possible I’m putting off certain signals that cause men not to try to physically harm me, thus causing me to believe the world is safer than it really is for other women. I’m not sure how to know this! This is ultimately intuitions I’ve built on my experience.

And there’s obviously edge cases. Sometimes the insane guy will randomly stab you no matter how many kind observers and pretty flowers are nearby. You can never be guaranteed to be perfectly safe, and often the bad gut feeling is an important one that can save your life even if it doesn’t seem justified.

But I still suspect overall, in many cases, women are very uncalibrated about risk in the street. I often see them expressing fear in places I would not have fear, or parsing interactions with men as much more threatening than I would. And idk, maybe this is good, like these women are successfully keeping themselves out of situations like walking alone at 2am in Istanbul, and I’ve been needlessly stupid. But I do like knowing that I have brushed up against the edge of what risk I’m okay with taking; at least I’m not leaving a bunch of freedom on the table!