Please don't ask me to text you that I've arrived home safely – it's sexist.

METERText me when you get home, okay?” The sentence is phrased as a question, but it is conveyed as an instruction; I am neither expected nor allowed to refuse.

I shift uncomfortably as I weigh my options. I don’t know the woman in front of me all that well; she’s more of an acquaintance than a friend. So I change my matter-of-fact, unfiltered response to a less confrontational one: “Oh, I always forget to do that!” – and add a quirky “I’m so absent-minded!” – “So it’s easier if you don’t expect to hear back from me. I don’t want you to worry!”

Sometimes this tactic works. Not tonight.

His face darkens as he leans over and grips my arm a little too tightly. “Now, Helen, you know that's not safe! Will you promise you'll write to me when you get back?” – again, very loudly. No a question: “Or just share your location so I can see that you got home.”

The logic that I won’t be “safe” walking the 15 minutes from the bar to my house (a walk I’ve made hundreds, if not thousands, of times without harm), but that I should voluntarily give my real-time location to a near-stranger doesn’t quite add up. Nor does the idea that seeing that I’ve arrived home equate to seeing that I’ve arrived home. No dangerWho's to say I haven't been chloroformed in the meantime and dragged out the front door against my will?

But I don't say any of these things – I sense that this won't do much to appease her – and I refrain from launching into the feminist diatribe that has, in the past, caused more than one person to slowly walk away while frantically searching for the exit sign. I simply don't have the energy today.

Instead, I lie and say cheerfully, “Of course I will!” even though I know full well that I absolutely won’t.

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I don’t know when this new “safety” measure became so ingrained in women’s nighttime rituals, as ingrained as saying “goodnight” and “we must repeat this soon!” to everyone on leaving a venue. It must be a relatively modern phenomenon, though: no one used it when staggering home from student nightclubs in the 2000s, or when splitting up to take night buses across London when I was in my twenties. It’s only really been in the last five years that I’ve noticed that “let me know when you get home” has gone from being a marginal request to an omnipresent demand.

There are few things that make me as nervous as I am. For starters, I'll bet my ass that this woman, and the countless others who have preceded her, will forget our conversation the moment I leave the room. He won't notice Whether I text you or not, the whole exercise is rendered obsolete. And, in the unlikely event that I do, what exactly are you going to do about it: follow me home? Call the police? Send in a SWAT team? The correct answer is “absolutely nothing,” which, again, renders the check-in superfluous.

Then there's the fact that my hard-won and fiercely defended independence is being called into question. I love being able to live alone, travel alone, take the long way around if I feel like it. I love, above all, having the freedom to be spontaneous. How did it become mandatory to accept being tracked and watched? Why should I sacrifice autonomy to report my whereabouts myself, like a prisoner on parole?

I know that, on the surface, it's not a big deal. I know this woman has the best of intentions. I know I'm possibly a selfish little girl for refusing to smile, to agree, and to send the silly little text that seems to make everyone feel so much better. But here's the problem that bugs me, that makes me want to snarl obscenities and stomp my feet every time a well-meaning friend tells me that texting is an obligatory part of being a responsible woman: I have never, not once, heard a man told the same thing. And therein lies the sexist problem.

There is a sense, which has grown exponentially in the wake of the tragic murders of Ashling Murphy, Sabina Nessa, Zara Aleena and Sarah Everard at the hands of men they did not know, that women are not safe on their own. People read these attention-grabbing headlines and make blanket assumptions: we are in danger from strangers, anytime, anywhere. Life is now an endless catalogue of warning signs and don’ts: don’t walk in the park; don’t run at night; don’t walk home alone; don’t fall prey to the unlicensed taxi driver; don’t try to get to your front door without a rape alarm, pepper spray and keys in hand; and, of course, don’t go to bed without first letting your friends know that you “arrived home safely.”

This attitude is understandable, and I have enormous sympathy for it. These stories are terrifyingly powerful. They scare us, they stay with us, they quicken our pace and quicken our heart rate. They tell us that we must practice constant vigilance, putting systems and strategies in place to avoid becoming the subject of our own dreaded candlelight vigils. After all: when we can't even trust the police to keep us safe, who can we trust?

But as natural as these reactions are, they simply aren’t based on fact. The statistics are clear: it’s men, not women, who are most at risk of being attacked by a stranger when they return home after a night out. A far higher proportion of police-recorded violent crimes against women are committed by an intimate partner (43 per cent of female victims, compared with 23 per cent of men), according to Office for National Statistics data for 2022. Men are twice as likely as women to have been attacked by a complete stranger (20 per cent and 9 per cent respectively), while 24 per cent of violent crimes perpetrated against women are committed by an acquaintance. That friend of a friend who offers to walk you home to keep you “safe” is statistically more likely to be a danger than the random guy you pass on the street.

The same pattern applies to sexual violence: only about 10 percent of rapes and sexual assaults against women are committed by strangers. Half of rapes are carried out by a partner or ex-partner, while five out of six are carried out by someone the woman already knows.

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Even considering the worst-case scenario, men accounted for the vast majority (71 percent) of the 590 homicide victims in 2023. Women are also more likely to be killed by someone they know than men: Of the 100 domestic homicide victims in the year ending March 2023, 70 were women.

Why am I bringing up all these depressing statistics? Simply to shine a light on the fact that if we are asking someone to send a message to say they have arrived home safely, it should actually be men. Anything else is ignoring reality; anything else is instilling in women an irrational fear that is completely unjustified the overwhelming majority of the time. Violence against women and girls is a huge and serious problem that cannot be ignored, but more often than not it is the men already in our lives who harm us. In the same way that a plane crash dominates the headlines while vehicle collisions go largely unnoticed, the stories of Ashling and Sabina and Zara and Sarah were front page news. because They were rare, not because they happened all the time.

That’s why I can’t just smile, nod, and comply when someone insists I share my location. In doing so, I mindlessly participate in the same kind of toxic patriarchal narratives that suggest men are strong and capable and can move freely through the world, while women are fragile and weak and should be wrapped in pastel-colored cotton wool and told to stay home for our own good.

More darkly still, these same narratives seek to tell us that it is… our fault when bad things happen to us: if only she hadn't been drunk/wouldn't have worn that dress/wouldn't have walked in the park/wouldn't have gone for a run alone/wouldn't have refused to text saying she had “arrived home safely.”

Sarah Everard’s life would not have been saved if she had promised to send WhatsApp messages to her friends. Sabina Nessa would not be alive if she had shared her live location. To suggest otherwise is to do these innocent women – and their loved ones – a disservice.

There are many things that scare us in this life, and regardless of our sex or gender, we are constantly forced to make decisions that balance risk and reward. I am not suggesting that anyone should go out of their way to seek out danger, or that we should not look out for our friends. But I do believe that those risk assessments should be proportionate and based on the reality of the world we live in. I believe that we have little to no control over most of the worst things that can happen to us. And I believe that living in unnecessary fear is no way to live.

If it makes you feel better to ask the women you know to text you when they've gotten home safely, feel free to do so. But be sure to share your love and ask the men in your life to do the same, or prepare to experience my unfiltered feminist rant firsthand…