The Safety Work of Women Who Run: Negotiating Fear, Experiences and Normalization of Abuse

Abstract

The everyday ‘intrusion’ into women’s lives by men in public spaces has been documented within criminological literature for over three decades, identified as part of the continuum of sexual violence. In this paper, we focus on the distinct experiences of women runners, presenting findings from an empirical project exploring the abuse of women who run, and how women negotiate and respond to this form of gender-based violence. The findings reveal high levels of abuse, including verbal comments, being followed, flashed at, physically and sexually assaulted. Although women rarely report incidents to the police, their frequent experiences lead to the normalization of abuse, high levels of fear and women runners engaging in significant ‘safety work’ in order to avoid such intrusions.