Why are we still making women responsible for their safety?

Both my children live overseas, and if my son calls me once or twice a week, I'm relatively content. I don't tend to worry about whether he'll be safe walking from basketball training to his car after dark. Or what might happen when he's in the crowd at a festival. But with my daughter, it's different. We speak almost daily, and often that call is often made while she's walking home from work, dance class, or auditions.

The conversation goes like this: "Hi, where are you? How long till you get home?" "About 15 minutes." "Okay, stay on the line until you're in the door."

On one of those calls she told me about waiting for a tram outside Melbourne's Flinders Street station when a stranger began talking to her. She had headphones in (volume on low, because it's safer that way) and didn't respond, so he closed the distance, moving fast. She averted her eyes and made sparse answers – don't rile him up, but don't show interest.

When she wouldn't face him fully, or talk to him, he began shouting, calling her names, making obscene gestures. She found a Metro worker who was sympathetic but could do nothing. The angry man got on the same tram – they were the only passengers. She moved to the rear; he sat in the middle, turning every half-minute to stare, yell, and gesture at her.

My daughter got off the tram, missing her appointment, waiting alone in an unfamiliar suburb – all because a stranger couldn't bear his ego being bruised.

This made me pretty angry. Angry at how my daughter had been forced to make herself smaller, and change her entire day because of him. I wished I'd been there – I would have grabbed him by the collar and shouted into his face, leave her alone! Leave women alone! Understand that when you think you're 'just being friendly', women see the threat they have all faced since puberty! No doubt if I'd done that, I might be the one taken away by the cops.

This is not just a Kiwi or even an Australian issue of course – although nationwide protests in May show it's a hot topic across the Tasman – it's a worldwide problem. France introduced fines for street harassment after overwhelming evidence of women's daily experiences. South Korea installed panic buttons in subway bathrooms. In the UK, the Everyone's Invited movement has received thousands of submissions from victim survivors of assault and harassment.

Women heed caution as a matter of life or death. We hold keys in our fists, share our locations, obsess about friends making it home safely. If this sounds like an overreaction, then I suspect you've never been a woman walking alone.

At Tika, we're determined to help shift the dial by interrupting the chains of harm created by serial perpetrators of sexual assault, harassment, and online harm, but there's an even bigger picture which includes better and more widespread consent education in schools, more funding for prevention, more trauma informed practices and more men taking the initiative to role model positive relationships.

Women's safety shouldn't be solely their responsibility – it's society's collective duty to create safer public spaces for everyone.

*In 2018, Tika co-founder Zoe Lawton launched a similar project, breaking new ground in the #metoo movement in Aotearoa New Zealand. You can read about it here