A walk in the park

Yesterday I was walking across my local park when suddenly I felt a powerful, painful smack between my shoulder blades as if someone had thrown something there with great force. I screamed and turned around only to see a teenage boy running back to his friends. I don’t know what he threw. I yelled “What the fuck?” at them and they just stared at me and I didn’t know what else to say, especially as I didn’t really know what had happened, so I just kept walking. A man on a bike who’d seen it all stopped to see if I was OK and to my surprise I found I had tears in my eyes. I felt embarrassed and tried to play it down, as it was obviously just some kids having a laugh, and he pointed out to me that what had actually happened was that someone had crept up on me from behind in order to hurt and frighten me and I didn’t need to act like it was nothing. He went off to give the boys an earful and I carried on on my way. A bit later he caught up with me again saying that the boy had wanted to apologise but that I was already gone. Afterwards I felt guilty that I hadn’t waited for the boy to apologise to me, that I hadn’t taken the time to explain to him why he shouldn’t have hit a woman in the park - like somehow it was my responsibility to use the opportunity as a teaching moment, like I owed this kid something even though it hadn’t been my choice to have him attack me.  Afterwards I was speaking about it with some friends and we realised that we have all done this - found ourselves in a situation where someone has attacked us in some way great or small and we’ve felt like it was our responsibility to say something or stand up for ourselves, and that in not doing so we are somehow partly to blame for what happened. The fact is, when someone singles you out for an attack, they choose you for your vulnerability, and part of that vulnerability is that they know you are at a disadvantage to them and can’t speak up. The silencing is not your fault and it’s not incidental to the attack, it is part of the attack. In this case, as the man in the bike pointed out to me, this group of boys decided to target a woman walking alone and hit her from behind, rather than approaching a man from the front. And even as a woman in my forties I don’t feel comfortable taking on a group of boys, it’s just impossible to say how they would react and I was heavily outnumbered.  Growing up female you come under so much pressure to prevent an attack ever happening to you. You’re taught not to wear certain things or go certain places, not to be alone at night, to be careful how you look at people or what you say. You can start to believe that if you follow all these rules nothing will happen to you, and therefore if something does happen, it must be your fault. We take responsibility for things that are not our responsibility all the time. In this case I thought it’s no big deal, I’m the adult, I wasn’t badly hurt, they were just messing around, they don’t know what they are doing so it’s up to me to explain why what they did was out of line. But I didn’t have to. It’s OK that I didn’t want to. And also, was it really no big deal?  What is an attack for? Sometimes there is a specific goal, say if you are mugged for your wallet. Mostly the idea is to intimidate someone so that the attacker feels more powerful in comparison, and that’s as true if someone is joking around with their mates as it is in, say, a serious sexual assault. The scale is vastly different but the motivation is closer than you might think. The connecting factor is a total lack of empathy for the person on the receiving end. It is never about the person who is being attacked. They are only an object for the attacker to play out some desire about how they want to feel about themselves.  Obviously on the scale of things this was a minor incident and there is no lasting harm - my back was sore for a few hours and I had a moment’s hesitation about walking through the park again, which I ignored. I was glad someone spoke to the boys, glad that the kid wanted to apologise even if I didn’t give him the chance, and maybe he’ll think twice before doing something like that again. But I remain curious about my immediate impulse to somehow take responsibility for the situation and my guilt that I didn’t. It’s not up to me to teach that boy a lesson; the situation was never about me at all. But maybe in thinking I should have spoken up, I’m trying to get back the sense of agency that I lost in that moment. To make it not random, to not be an object, to not be powerless. To not be exactly what I am, what we all are, someone who is not in control, to whom anything can happen at any time, even if I am just walking through the park, minding my own business.