Stranger danger: Solo female travel

I’ve read very little Sylvia Plath­—I have The Bell Jar sitting on my bookshelf, but I’m yet to pick it up. But the one bit of Plath I have read has never left me; has followed me around as I travelled and sought adventure.

‘Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery… I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…’

Travelling alone is something women are discouraged from doing; I’m fortunate my own parents weren’t too discouraging in their concerns. But the rest of the world feeds us the same tired propaganda: travel alone and you’ll be punished by rape or murder. Instead of looking at what happened in the individual cases that make the news, we’re told if we travel alone we’re putting ourselves at risk. I naturally take steps to mitigate the chances I find myself in a bad situation—we all do—but I can’t stop random acts of violence on the road any more than I can at home.

By design, travellers are surrounded by total strangers—the very population women are socialised to fear, and yeah, there are some very real safety concerns associated with being around strangers. But while you can’t travel without encountering people you don’t know, you can’t say you know everyone in any given tube carriage or on any city street. If you’re at risk surrounded by strangers in Timbuktu, you’re at risk surrounded by strangers in London.

After all, gender-based violence and harassment is just as prevalent in the western world from San Francisco to Sydney as it is in the ‘top ten most dangerous countries for female travellers’ as reported by the Daily Mail in 2015. Number one on this list may be India for its ‘gang rapes of local women and tourists [having] reached worrying levels in parts of the country with reports suggesting that a sexual assault is reported every twenty minutes,’ but the USA—absent from the Mail’s list—suffers a staggering rape every six minutes. No one is saying India doesn’t have a problem with dismal attitudes to women but neither is anyone saying that gender-based violence is a global issue.

Travelling as a woman is always going to carry a certain element of risk that male travellers simply don’t even need to think about but they’re the same risks and dangers women everywhere face by just walking out their front door. I’ve been groped on the London Underground (twice), threatened outside Montmarte, and propositioned then spat at in Stuttgart—Western society certainly isn’t devoid of dangerously anti-woman sentiment.

The key word in that Sylvia Plath quote is ‘supposedly’. A female solo traveller is perceived vulnerable and reckless; stupid or even asking for it. We’re not. The real concern is not how we can keep ourselves safe while travelling, but instead why are we still more likely than men to be victims of violence anywhere?

Safety for female travellers is more about luck than it is preparation—and isn’t that just ridiculous? Anyone who says they avoided issues on the road because they were prepared implies a false sense of security and insults any woman who has been harmed when they may have done all the ‘right things’ too. Citing preparation as the sole reason for safety ignores the fact violence against women is an epidemic; I can be as prepared as possible, but I can’t plan against the sheer bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I am much more likely to be labelled naïve or too trusting than reckless or careless and I take issue with this too. I can’t travel—or live for that matter—from a place of fear. My travelling has shown me that people everywhere are far more likely to be good; I have experienced countless random acts of kindness; felt welcomed in every city and met gentle souls all over the world. I put my faith in the people of the world to keep me safe, and so far, they have.

The map of the world according to outlets like the Daily Mail would have you think a broad swath of the world is untravellable—that the people in these countries cultivate hate and are actively out to get me. That’s not true. People have gone out of their way to help me when I needed it; when I was sick, lost, alone, and scared—and that’s true at home and abroad. Sylvia Plath’s concerns follow me around the world, but I hope I’m helping prove you can sleep in an open field, travel west, walk freely at night and mingle with all manner of humans anywhere. ■

Adventure

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