With assaults increasing throughout the city, women are largely alone in defending themselves.
In the early morning of September 8th, a 19-year-old woman named Ellio Wagner was walking to work in Flatiron, New York, when a man struck her in the face before fleeing the scene.
“This is really traumatic, and it makes me very scared to be walking around New York alone, which is not something I’ve really been scared of,” Wagner said in a TikTok where she recounted the assault. She ended the video by saying, “I just want everyone to stay safe, but New York can be a very dangerous place.”
Unfortunately, this is not a rare incident. Instead, it is emblematic of a pressing sentiment across the city: New York has become an increasingly precarious environment for women.
Crime levels across the New York City subway system have dropped since the fall of 2022, coinciding with the deployment of 1,200 more NYPD overtime officer shifts across the subway system as part of Mayor Adams’ Subway Safety Plan. However, felony assaults and misdemeanor assaults in the city have both increased by almost six percent, according to data released on the NYPD crime stats site.
Instead of this issue being at the forefront of political agendas, we see dismal media coverage, insufficient government-mandated safeguards, and negligible police action. This unresponsiveness implicitly condones and propagates these crimes and places an unnecessary burden on women, restricts their agency, and enforces their self-taming.
Based on the uptick in assaults, hiking up police presence is not the monolithic solution to deter public violence against women, said Karen Miner-Romanoff, a Criminology and Law and Society professor at New York University.
“Deterrence is likely not going to work on segways because it’s not people who are waiting for customer benefits,” she said. “And [an] assault is usually spurred at the moment. It’s usually in the heat of passion.”
Increasing the police’s presence and power does not solve public violence against women. Instead, it can criminalize women, target minority and under-resourced communities, and condone underlying social problems.
Miner-Romanoff explained that the inaccessibility of social services during the pandemic likely contributed to this surge.
“That takes a tremendous toll on people,” she said. “Especially those that were already under-resourced and those that didn’t have great access to care, health care, mental health care, other types of social services for couples or children or families.”
Sexual assault perpetrators are also likely fortified by a culture of impunity. There is a small risk of being held seriously accountable for sexual assaults in our country.
For every 1000 assaults, 975 perpetrators evade punishment, according to data from the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN).
These miscarriages of justice could be a product of a plethora of circumstances, including a lack of third-party witnesses, meager financial resources or personnel, or prosecutorial negligence.
However, the United States also has a vast underreporting rate. More than two-thirds of sexual assaults are not reported to the police, according to data from RAINN.
Miner-Romanoff believes that not only is there double trauma for the victim in recounting their story, but they risk the consequences of the stigma that arises from being a victim. This includes dealing with often apathetic and trauma-uninformed police. “There has been a lot of reform, but cultures are slow to change.”
In June 2022, the Justice Department announced an investigation of the New York Police Department’s Special Victims Division and its sex crimes operations after receiving a deluge of allegations of deficiencies within the unit’s policies, training procedures, and treatment of victims.
“Victims of sex crimes deserve the same rigorous and unbiased investigations of their cases that the NYPD affords to other categories of crime,” Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in the department’s news release. “Likewise, relentless and effective pursuit of perpetrators of sexual violence, unburdened by gender stereotypes or differential treatment, is essential to public safety.”
This issue manifests itself in test kit backlogging, where hundreds of thousands of rape test kits are sitting on shelves across the country. The purpose of these kits is to collect and preserve critical DNA evidence to help pinpoint the sexual offender.
Miner-Romanoff said, “Imagine that you actually have the possibility for physical forensic or DNA evidence, and it’s just sitting on a shelf. Which means if I’m the victim, I feel very unheard. I ask myself, ‘Why did I bother?’”
While this phenomenon is ostensibly rooted in the lack of essential funding, it also reflects hostile societal attitudes about sexual assault and its gravity compared to other crimes. Disenfranchised and marginalized women overwhelmingly bear the brunt of this reality, often deemed of lower importance than white women, and, consequently, are less likely to place their trust in the justice system and the police.
“Police are likely to have the same attitudes [as the rest of society] unless we work at changing attitudes,” Miner-Romanoff said. “We have to expose [the stigma]. We have to talk about it more, and we have to get out of the closet. We have to remove the shame.”
Oftentimes, the most integral preventative measures for macro-scale problems such as these, Miner-Romanoff explained, require something that can be risky for politicians hyperfocused on scoring immediate public favor – patience.
“Those things take a long time,” said Miner-Romanoff. “So, you need a really strong will, and you need someone who’s willing to see it out. And then you need the American people who elect these people to understand and to want to see. But when we’re afraid, we tend to want really quick solutions, and a lot of times, that’s police.”
It is not only our city leaders who are culpable. In a post #MeToo era, the mass media’s general response to this uptick in assaults is confounding until we account for the fact that it is an extension of an ecosystem that values monetary gains and popularity over impact.
“The media responds to what we read,” said Miner-Romanoff. “They respond to what we seem to be interested in, and breaking down the dynamics of all of the different theories about why people might commit sexual assault isn’t something I think that readers want to read. They want it fast. They want it short…Most of the time, we don’t dive into criminogenic reasons that people commit crimes. And if we did, we’d have to look at structural issues, and I’m not sure we’re willing to do that.”
Therefore, the weight for women to protect themselves and create the social contexts they want to operate in falls squarely on their shoulders.
A truly revolutionary existence for women is devoid of feeling governed by the threat of sexual violence and the risk of victimization. Instead, it is enriched by compassion and gushing with peace. It is without aching trepidation when we step outside our front doors, operating not as a woman imprisoned by fear and never tasting the alchemy of life but as a fully alive human being. Only then can we unleash our full potential.