Freedom to Loiter — Women & Public Spaces
By: Apoorva Rajendran
Tags: Gender Equality, Girl Up, Gender Roles, Women In Public Spaces, Womens Rights

I was returning from an evening of movies and shopping with a friend one night, and we were standing outside the mall waiting for our cab to take us back home. A trio of possibly inebriated men walked past us. One of them stopped, turned and scanned me top to bottom for a full second, before his mouth pulled back into a condescending sneer, and he said, (in Kannada) “Did you forget the rest of your clothes at home?” I was wearing a knee-length skirt and a baggy t-shirt — an unfashionable yet comfortable attire. I stared at him in shock, at his impudence, my surprise and lack of Kannada skills preventing me from coming up with a response. Hold on, I know what you are thinking. But this man is not an exception. This man is everyman. This man believed that he had the full right to pass loud judgment on my body and my attire because I was a woman, and I did not conform to his idea of what an ideal woman should be wearing.

In her famous work A Wheel within a Wheel, American suffragette Frances Willard talks about the freedom she gets from riding a bicycle, and states that mobility is primarily at the centre of feminism. The liberation that is achieved through freedom of movement leads to a greater level of accomplishment, a soul-stirring sense of confidence, expanded horizons, aspirations and personal growth. However, given the patriarchal shackles that we find ourselves bound by, the liberty of women to run wild while roaming outdoors seems to get crippled for the sake of upholding an upright moral character. The meaning of a ‘respectable’ girl is constantly shifting and being contested. These changes reflect the cultural progress over prescribed gender norms that requires us to keep re-defining certain behaviours.

To elaborate, centuries of women’s movements have secured for women the right to vote, right to education, right to participate in the workforce and several other rights that enable them to come out of their kitchens and claim equal citizenship in public life. However, we have not addressed the question ‘who legitimately owns the public domain’, and the gender-based segregation of spaces as public(masculine) and private(feminine) has not been challenged. We encouraged and enabled our girls to step out of the kitchen, but didn’t inform and motivate the boys to make way. Sexual harassment and other forms of sexual violence in public spaces, both in urban and rural settings, are an everyday occurrence for women and girls in every country around the world.

Women and girls experience and fear different forms of sexual violence in public spaces, from unwelcome sexual remarks and gestures, to rape and femicide. It happens on streets, in and around public transportation, schools, workplaces, public toilets, water and food distribution sites, and parks. This reality reduces women’s and girls’ freedom of movement. It reduces their ability to participate in school, work, and public life. It limits their access to essential services and their enjoyment of cultural and recreational activities, and negatively impacts their health and well-being. Hang out at a park, eat a meal alone, find a public toilet, take a solitary stroll at night, breastfeed a baby, mingle in a crowd — these are simple things that women can’t fully take for granted yet.

A woman in a public space is immediately an object of consumption. And I’m not just talking about the risk of sexual harassment. The very fact that there are more men than women in the average public space makes us an object of intrigue when we step out. My body, my clothes, my manner, are immediately dissected and deemed appropriate or inappropriate (usually the latter, but hey, who’s keeping track?). As a woman, my body takes centre stage, awaiting appraisal, before my words and opinions are taken stock of, because men are just people, their gender is almost non-existent in the way that maleness is made generic.

Planning and designing safe public spaces for women and girls is the process whereby urban planners, designers, architects, women, grassroots and other community actors collaborate to make the physical features of public spaces safe and welcoming for women and girls. If public spaces are dark, abandoned, unclean, overgrown, or lacking certain elements like benches or emergency phones, they are potentially unsafe for everybody, but for women and girls in particular. Therefore, there is an increased chance that women and girls will not use spaces where they feel fear and/or experience violence. Let’s recognise the disparity between men and women’s experiences of public spaces and work on dismantling that. A woman has the right to occupy public spaces without fearing for her safety, no matter the time of the day or her choice of clothing. Criminalising us for daring to go partying at night, or jogging on that lonely road, only adds to the perception that we are not welcome in public spaces.

What we need to work on is how to make public spaces more accessible for women. In recent years, homegrown movements like Blank Noise and Why Loiter have attempted to snuff out the fear from women. We need to ensure that the conversations around women’s bodies in public spaces are focussed on our right to occupy it without harm, rather than focussing on how to keep us safe in what are essentially men’s spaces. After all, the potential for true development can only be unlocked when the public space has been reclaimed, every individual stands liberated and has the power to experience the freedom to loiter.

- Apoorva Rajendran