CW: Sexual assault, domestic abuse.

When I was in a club in York I witnessed a drunk young guy – a fresher, I think – unwantingly invade women’s personal space when dancing. He groped one and she responded with that briefly visible window of evident anger and shock, then moved away from him. There’s a kind of ingrained helplessness to it that comes from personal experience and the common experience of society. It’s so commonplace that women have learned how to react in a way that doesn’t provoke the situation. They just fiercely don’t want to let it ruin their night.

I knew he wasn’t going away. So I told my social anxiety regarding talking to strangers to temporarily fuck off, and sicced the bouncers on him. Naturally the guy in his sense of drunken entitlement made the situation more aggressive than it had to be, and the result of 3 bouncers on him was both more dramatic than I was expecting and also damn satisfying. In that moment, I had done something about what was happening. That one moment. What moments had I done nothing?

Years earlier, myself and housemates saw a domestic in the middle of the street in Lancaster. We watched it carefully as we walked. The man got aggressive and he grabbed her by the hair. They disappeared around a corner and we stopped, very uncertain. We were much younger than we are now. With mutual agreement, we then backtracked, followed them around the corner. The woman disappeared and the man came up to us, right in our faces. He was a big guy, and was extremely threatening, telling us he’d come out of prison, and he was going to stab us. He acted like he was only seeking the merest nudge to attack us, so we didn’t say a word but we didn’t move either, we just stared him down.

Eventually the police arrived – someone else having called them – and they chased him off. We gave a statement to them. They tracked down the woman but she didn’t press charges. The cop said the women tend to protect these people in these situations. Of course they do – things are unlikely to come of it, and the man isn’t magically going anywhere – he’d only come after her even worse for grassing on him. That’s not even getting into the messy, toxic, gaslighting situation of a “loving”, abusive relationship. Interfering with something like that can be the hardest of things.

It was another moment when me and others had stepped in. And done the bare minimum. Not a randomer in a club, this time, but interfering in a domestic situation. For all the needed talk at the moment about fear of strangers, it’s important to know most assault of women – sexual or otherwise – comes from those they know. But what if it’d been only me there? Would I have followed anyway? What would I have done – what could I have done? I like to think I would’ve carefully followed anyway, but I would’ve felt powerless and something bad could’ve happened to me, too.

What other moments in my life had I not stepped in? How many times do I or others not interfere in the situations we see – especially those seemingly between partners? Do we feel inherently dirty and uncomfortable about our non-involvement, or do we forget all about them? Do we just wait at the sidelines, feeling bad but hoping it will blow over one day and then we can sweep in to say “Oh, I know, it must have been awful”?

So us guys, who most of the time have the privilege of safety from the worst of ramifications, stay quiet more often that not. What about the women? Do they stay quiet? Just let things slide? Over and over and over. How much harder might it be for a woman in a group of lads? How many times have they made a deliberate – or unconscious – choice not to speak up?

The culture of it becomes ingrained. The current of anger and anxiety lies under the surface, trying to hide itself out of a sense of self-preservation, or insecurity. And the subtle effects of that pile up over time. Then, if that woman suffers something worse, it already has a bedrock of ingrained baggage to fall on. Just let it go… it’s not worth it… it must be my fault… I don’t want to cause a fuss… it won’t come to anything if I report it… they were just messing around… I’m making it out to be worse than it is… they didn’t mean to hurt me… I don’t think it was rape… they’re good guys really… I shouldn’t have done this or that… I shouldn’t have led them on… I shouldn’t have got so drunk… I don’t want to get a reputation… My friends won’t take it seriously… It’ll only make my life worse to make a thing of it…

Already, in her eyes, she thinks of all those countless guys she has encountered – and maybe some women – who might treat it flippantly. Joke about things – not because they think of themselves as being pro-sexual assault, but because they don’t understand it, and aren’t trying to, because they aren’t listening, because they are – in a thousand tiny ways – growing that sick, viscous foundation that forms itself under every woman from before they even hit puberty. Before the woman knows it they are stuck fast to it, and when they need to pull themselves free and get help, they can’t.

Even when there are others out there that might well listen and understand, the pervasive feeling becomes that they won’t. That they say they will, but it’s superficial. They won’t really get it. They’ll be sympathetic but then innocuously say something that destroys the whole illusory edifice.

To tell someone when you are sexually assaulted, when your body and privacy and mind has been violated, requires a monumental amount of trust. Trust that, given this drowning, toxic foundation that has grown up around it, is already so uncertain, battling against shame, embarrassment, self-preservation, and self-blame. It is the most tenuous of things, often never even formed. And the moment someone just doesn’t even try to understand, it falls apart completely, perhaps never to return. The determination becomes that speaking up, that rocking the boat, is the worst of options.

Too many people get away with things in our societies – not just sexual assault, but catcalling, objectification, gaslighting, abuse apologism, victim blaming, slut shaming, predatory behaviour, invading personal space/boundaries, unsolicited sexual pics/messages, male entitlement, making excuses for shitty behaviour, standing by people when we shouldn’t, as well as something incredibly basic that we are ALL guilty of: not standing up to our friends or confronting strangers when we have the power and safety to do so, not calling out lad culture.

Too many people will decry sexual assault and abuse superficially but without understanding its scope. They may simply, so easily and so naively, categorise rapists as criminals and perverts, like they are a completely different species to them, as though they couldn’t possibly in any world be their own friends and family – and then don’t truly allow themselves to understand the issues at large and all the little behaviours that contribute to them. NotAllMen and the like isn’t a defence, its a rebuttal of the entire issue. It’s a deflection from a reactionary who would rather focus on scrubbing themselves clean in the eyes of others than actually listen to people. It’s deliberately putting fingers in your ears, all to maintain that cognitive dissonance. And it lies in a very similar ballpark to All Lives Matter. These are the men that think it rarely happens, and they think that in part because the women in their lives choose not to tell them a damn thing – and for good reason.

I know many women who have suffered sexual assault – whether it be rape or countless gropes. Others won’t have told me. Most of those ones I know have been by people they knew. I know of someone who was raped so many times by her partner. Things like this, and so many others, I feel powerless about, and maybe I was, maybe I am.

But I – and everyone – can help in the countless regular smaller ways. These things don’t happen in a vacuum. They’re not the domain of perverse criminals. You cannot tell by how they look, or how they chat to you as another guy, or their Facebook profile, or the causes they support, or how good a mate they’ve been to you. Maybe you can tell by the way they talk about women, or their stances on these kinds of issues, or what women have to say about them. But not always.

We help by finding the courage and will and fortitude within us – qualities that women have been continuously forced to demonstrate in far less safe environments than we are likely to see – to reshape this aforementioned foundation, to make it be a fine, hardy place for anyone to plant their feet, one concrete with trust, understanding, awareness, empathy, with moral integrity, with willingness to always listen and always learn, with solidarity and support, and mutual bravery, and between us all we can shut down all those behaviours and attitudes before they develop into something more, before they encourage others, and before they hold back women from telling their stories.

Above all, we start by listening.