My daughter sent me this meme from the Internet but It makes a great point about what we think safety is. So much of what we see in the safety world is about petty injury, slips, trips and falls and the apparent heroics of stopping them. If only we could all be Hazardman saving women from falling over their stilettos!
A quick look at facts about gendered violence against women is distressing:
- https://www.ourwatch.org.au/quick-facts
- https://www.pmc.gov.au/resources/unlocking-prevention-potential/national-emergency-and-ongoing-national-priority
- https://www.smh.com.au/national/remember-their-faces-women-killed-in-australia-20240905-p5k881.html
Safety is a matter of perspective. What is significant, what is critical in safety? And no, abuse against women is not like some silly ghost projected by Victorian Workcover as if the Mummy will swallow you up. Gendered violence is nothing like this. Gendered violence is insidious, invisible, unconscious, deceptive, underhanded, pitched in double-speak and wicked.
What semiotics like this do is completely warp and distort the reality of gendered violence.
Only Safety seems to be able to concoct such stupid semiotics when what is required is intelligence.
After all, when you want to be progressive about safety why not have a punching fist against a brick wall (https://open.spotify.com/show/4xs4Khsh9Enz8Lhlm3LOz0) or a stiletto symbol for women in safety (https://www.womeninsafety.net/). When harming women is your symbol for safety for women, you know that Safety has been feeding nonsense into the mix.
But this is what Safety does best. It doesn’t discuss issues of significance and criticality for women. It doesn’t embrace a feminist understanding of ethics (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365144052_Feminist_Ethics) nor seek critical thinking outside its own bubble. It even recycles the nonsense of zero as if speaking nonsense to women is what they want to hear. It puts forward semiotics without any expertise in semiotics that contradicts the very message trying to be presented. It doesn’t even understand that the medium IS the message (https://safetyrisk.net/the-medium-is-the-message/). The majority of what is messaged is masculinist!
I know, let’s smash together a few blobs, rustle up some gimps and pickles, get some Mum’s for Safety marching down a street (https://safetyrisk.net/dumbs-for-safety/), puts some brains on a stick in a pot and then shout the word ‘professional’ as much as possible into the void. But for god sake: don’t consult outside the bubble of collecting meaningless post nominals that characterise an industry that doesn’t think critically. Don’t consult an ethicist and out Ethics, don’t consult a semiotician about Semiotics and make sure you consult engineers about culture, mythology and heroics. That is the Safety way (https://safetyrisk.net/best-fraud-in-safety-wins-this-is-the-way/).
What this meme above shows about gendered violence is just how out of touch the safety industry is about how to engage and discuss safety with women. Unfortunately, this meme is not a laughing matter. Maybe the best place to start discussing safety for women is a self-defence classes.
I read this recently on social media:
‘I’m a young women who often walks my dog by myself and i’ve had my fair share of catcalls, creepy encounters, etc. but the other day, i had a situation that was a little too close for comfort with a guy circling me on his bike, looking like he was sizing me and my dog up and asking me directions to a street…. that we were already on. He didn’t take off on his bike until a few cars started driving past.
I no longer feel safe walking my dog, considering the last incident happened in a fairly populated area in broad daylight. I don’t have anyone willing to walk my dog with me every day. I’ve looked into things i can do to feel safe and most of the advice is from Americans saying to bring pepper spray, pocket knives, etc. and of course, all of which are not allowed in Australia.’
Some women I know recently were able to purchase some self-defence devices because they like to walk after work and in winter it is dark. We have had several assaults in my neighbourhood just in the past 2 weeks. But such devices are impossible to purchase and are close to impossible to source from outside Australia. But they managed to do it.
I find it so bizarre that the Safety industry talks about psychosocial ‘hazards. THEY ARE NOT HAZARDS! Only safety could be so dumb as to call risks ‘hazards’ (https://safetyrisk.net/what-is-psychosocial-safety/ ). But we know why. Safety loves objects NOT subjects. Safety loves factors and systems, and never talks about personhood. And until safety starts talking about persons and Real Risk (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/real-risk/) it will never become professional.
If you would like to learn how to think critically about risk perhaps you might like to come to the SPoR Convention this September (https://spor.com.au/spor-convention-2025/).
Prof. Robert Long
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