When Protection Becomes Proactive, Not Reactive

In Surrey, England, police launched an operation called "Jog On." Plain-clothes female officers went out jogging through areas where women had reported being harassed, catcalled, followed, honked at. Support teams stayed nearby, ready to step in.

The harassment started almost immediately. One officer was honked at within ten minutes. Another vehicle slowed down and made a gesture just thirty seconds later.

By the end of the month, the operation had led to 18 arrests, for harassment, sexual assault, and theft.

I read this three or four times.I checked many times in many sources if this was actually true !!! I just could not believe this !

What struck me wasn't just the numbers. It was the shift in who was expected to change their behaviour.

For once, the women weren't the ones told to be more careful, to avoid certain streets, to dress differently, to not run alone. The police were the ones watching out, actively, proactively, before something worse happened !!

That's the part I keep coming back to.

So much of the advice women receive about safety puts the burden on us: stay alert, share your location, trust your gut, don't walk here after dark. All useful. All necessary, given the world we actually live in. But none of it addresses the real problem, which is that the behaviour needs to change, not just our vigilance around it.

I think about this constantly with RooMate.

Every safety feature we've built, mandatory ID verification, the 5-point safety checklist, live location sharing, exists because the world hasn't yet built enough structures that protect women proactively. We're doing what we can, within a housing platform, to shift some of that burden off the individual woman and onto the system itself.

I don't know if operations like "Jog On" will become more common.

Some people online called it entrapment. Others called it exactly the kind of proactive policing that's long overdue. I understand both reactions.

I hope this is a sign of where things are heading, more institutions building real, structural protection, rather than more advice for women to carry alone.

I want one day for RooMate to become a part of the System and the Norm rather than a nice to have.

We shouldn't have to earn our own safety by being careful enough.

It should just be there.🤍

Sotiria

I reached out to Surrey Police directly, to say thank you for this initiative. I want more institutions to follow their example.

You can read more about the "Jog On" operation here: https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.7608701

Thank you to Jack Atkinson for the photo used in this post.

Dr Sotiria Moschopoulou is a Greek dentist, Airbnb Superhostess and landlady based in London, and the founder of RooMate, a trust-based roommate matching platform for women across Greece and Europe. RooMate operates as a single-sex service under Schedule 3, Part 7 of the Equality Act 2010.

Photo by Jack Atkinson on Unsplash