“Don’t make eye contact, because the moment you do, it’s inviting them to come over and start saying sh*t.”
Twenty-year-old student Ella Duffus is amongst the one in four women who feel unsafe when alone at night in Australia. Ella shared an encounter she had last year with a total stranger, when she was travelling into town for a friend’s birthday. The man came and sat close to her on an empty carriage, and then followed her as she got off the train at Wollongong train station, until she reached two security guards out the front of the club where she was meeting her friends.
“It took two big guys with muscles to get him to leave me the f**k alone.”
This is not an uncommon experience. The 2016 ABS Personal Safety Survey showed that over a quarter of women choose not to walk alone at night because they feel unsafe, compared to only 4.2 per cent of men.
Ella gave some of her biggest tips for when you’re travelling alone at night on public transport, or simply just out and about at night as a young woman.
“Keep your head up, look confident, because as soon as you look unconfident, that’s when they’ll try to take advantage of you.”
The NSW government is spending $30 million on lighting, public art and landscaping to improve safety in parks, public places and around transport hubs under its Safer Cities program.
Despite all this, fears appear to be worsening. A 2022 Plan International Australia report found that one in five young women felt less safe alone at night than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic. Only 5 per cent of women aged between 18 and 24 felt safer in places like streets, train stations and parks.
The following multimedia feature, ‘I’m afraid when it’s dark’, layers audio from several different interviews with both young men and women between the ages of 18 and 22, to bring more awareness about the fear that is associated with being a young person in an unknown or relatively unpopulated environment at night. The daytime images are intended to contrast with the feelings of anxiety within Ella’s story and illustrate how ordinary places like a university campus, a bus stop or a park can feel unsafe once the sun disappears and crowds begin to thin.