Georgia Harrison’s platforming of women’s tracking apps is well-intentioned, but misguided

Sarah Everard was murdered in March and in that time a number of measures have been proposed and implemented to make the streets safer for women. Plain clothed police officers in pubs and clubs are being piloted. An extra £25m was pledged by Number 10 to increasing street lighting and CCTV. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he would "drive out violence against women and girls and make every part of the criminal justice system work to better protect and defend them."

In the six months since Sarah’s abduction, rape and murder, at least 81 women have died at the hands of men in the UK.

So forgive me for saying that initiatives like 888 and HelpMeAngela, a BT phone service and app respectively, feel a bit like sticking a severed leg back on with a plaster (along with, among other things, anti-rape underwear, and anti-date rape nail varnish).

In the wake of the murders of Sarah, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, and most recently Sabina Nessa, a spotlight has been shone on the endemic of male violence in this country – how it’s normalised between friends, how it’s never called out on the streets and how it’s, at the VERY least, not taken seriously by police (case in point: in this week’s news, it was reported that one serving officer faces disciplinary action after allegedly underpaying 90p for Jaffa Cakes at a charity tuckshop; oh, how we laughed, conveniently forgetting that Sarah’s killer Wayne Couzins had twice been reported for indecent exposure and faced no disciplinary action, or that a recent FoI request showed that in the last five years, at least 750 allegations of sexual misconduct were made against serving officers, resulting in just 34 dismissals.)

Anyway, I digress. In a climate where women are repeatedly blamed for their own assaults and murder, where senior police commissioner Philip Allott suggested that Sarah should have simply been more streetwise and resisted arrest (on live TV), services like 888 will do nothing to address the root of the issue. Women have been calling for better education on misogyny and violence against women; they’ve been calling for the government to put the onus on men and perpetrators, but these urgent appeals continue to be loudly ignored.

Love Island’s Georgia Harrison, who starred on the 2018 series, has been admirable in using the platform she has to educate and speak out on worthwhile causes. After an abusive relationship with fellow reality star and all round problematic wrong’un Stephen Bear, where he shared sexually explicit material of her online without her knowledge or consent, Georgia bravely spoke out about the victim impact of revenge porn and held him to account publicly. During this most recent wave of media outrage and social media noise around women’s safety, Georgia shared a news segment featuring the founder of HelpMeAngela, who described the initiative as, "A personal safety community to make a positive difference to everybody across the UK."

"We’ll be there for you not only when you’re outside but when you’re in your place of work as well, and our mission is to provide everybody with a ‘guardian angel’," she said.

Georgia told of how, on one occasion, she called a friend when she felt unsafe in a taxi.

"Had I not made that call my fate could have been very different," she captioned the post.

"[I heard] about the app months ago and I thought it was a great idea. To feel safe when travelling alone, knowing there's a team ready to help. Allowing us to know our daughters, sisters, mothers and the men in our life have a way of getting help.

"Features include a way of notifying a team you need help without having to make an obvious phone call. They call to see if you are ok and if you're not will send the police to your location. If you don’t answer they will send help."

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Calling a friend is a well-rehearsed routine for women travelling on their own at night, along with but not limited to: carrying a rape alarm, pepper spray, or keys between our fingers; wearing brightly coloured clothes; keeping to well-lit streets and sharing our location with friends - if not to say, "this is where I am," then to say, "this is where you’ll find my body".

And, newsflash: none of these things stop women getting raped. None of these things stop us being assaulted, or harassed, or flashed.

As Laura Bates, author of Men Who Hate Women and founder of The Everyday Sexism Project, said on Twitter, "This does nothing to tackle the real problem: male violence. Endemic everyday sexism. The notion of women's bodies as public property. Toxic masculinity. Not only would this not actually prevent violence, it would also inevitably just present a new way to blame victims. She didn't call 888? Well then what did she expect?"

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She continued, "It is absurd to say every woman's movements should be tracked on every journey. If you're prepared to do this, why not track men? If one of them goes off piste, check to see if they stopped to assault or rape or murder or abduct a woman. If they've detoured to dispose of a body. The solution won't be an app or a street lamp. It will be systemic, complex and ambitious, to fit the scale of the problem. This just suggests they want to tick a box, trumpet a headline and brush the whole thing back under the carpet. Nothing changes."

We don’t need 'guardian angels'. We’re not defenceless targets that need protecting; we’re already streetwise, we already make hundreds of calculations every day about how to minimise risk and keep ourselves safe. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have to, but what we need in this one is a government receptive to good ideas, open to constructive criticism, and, as Laura says, systematic change from the ground up.