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"It's hardly rape."

Content warning: sexual harassment, rape

“It’s hardly rape, is it?”

...is the clap back I hear to accounts of men touching a woman’s thigh on the train, to catcalling women on the street, to boys pinging a girl’s bra strap.

“It’s hardly rape” asks, ‘Can’t you just let it go?’

It says, ‘It doesn’t really matter does it? No one’s causing you physical harm.’

This is usually followed by, “Maybe you should focus on men who actually hurt women, like rapists.”

At the surface level, this sounds reasonable. Why work to stop men wolf-whistling women on the street when there are girls being sold into slavery?

Many reasons.

For one, harassing someone is wrong (and do we really need any more reason than that?).

For another, these ‘small things’ (I don’t actually concede that these things are ‘small’) do cause real harm. Both to the woman experiencing it and to all the rest of us.

‘How does hurling abuse at one woman harm another?’

I’m so glad you asked.

Parking that when a man yells obscenities in the street at one woman he is definitely yelling at others, there’s the other reason that this behaviour is linked with other acts of harassment and violence.

Being cat-called as you walk past construction workers, then groped on public transport, and being called a ‘bitch’ after declining a man’s invitation for a drink are not coincidences.

They aren’t single acts that randomly befoul an individual.

They are linked by a common cause.

One in 5 women are raped in the UK. Two women a week are murdered.

For the same reason.

Sexism, misogyny, sexual harassment, sexual violence and all the other forms of violence against women and girls are symptoms of the same illness, gender inequality.

When a group of men are in the street and one yells and whistles at the lone woman walking past, I see him using her for his own amusement, humiliating her because ‘it’s a laugh’.

He doesn’t care about how that might make her feel self-conscious, pissed-off, scared. Doesn’t respect that she just wants to get home safely.

And when we respond with a shrug of our shoulders and say, ‘boys will be boys’, or ‘well, her dress is quite short’, then we agree: this man has a right to yell at her.

We dismiss how she feels or what she wants.

The man learns he can do what he likes to her. He understands that he has power over her. They are not equal.

Now people will point out that catcalling is an ocean away from rape,

but...

is it?

If you exert your power over a woman, not respecting her as a person, uncaring of how she feels or what she wants then that’s how you treat women. It’s how you’re going to treat us in all situations. Whether it’s a woman you’re walking past in the street, a woman you work with, the woman you’re dating.

Cat-calling isn’t rape,

but it is treating women and girls as objects that you have power over.

Doesn’t sound so disconnected from rape to me.