Safety – NOUN

1. The condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury.

1.1 Denoting something designed to prevent injury or damage: ‘a safety barrier’ ‘a safety helmet’…

Or a Safety Map…

What are we talking about when we discuss safety and when we create a safety map exploring LGBT hate crime in a city? I approached this weekend with hesitancy and apprehension, not wanting to engage in a process that was going to spread or escalate fear amongst a community, not fully sure how I felt about the police and their role in this; and I leave it with questions and complexity surrounding visibility and risk, and a greater understanding of the need to raise awareness of hate crime.

The task: to ask people to mark on a map places where they don’t feel safe, or where they have experienced something negative like anti-social behaviour or hate crime (red threads); to ask them to mark places where they do feel safe/positive spaces (gold threads); and to find out about the LGBT history of Brighton and mark some places on the map that aren’t their any more (grey threads).

It was important to me to ask people about the positive sides of the city as well as the negative. It we were just to build up a map including all of the places where something negative has happened to an LGBT person would this increase safety? Perhaps we would have a wider awareness of the scale of harassment in Brighton. The police would gain information for their records, which would hopefully lead to greater protection for LGBT people. But what does safety mean to the individuals. What is at risk? What is the danger?

It worries me that many people live everyday hiding parts of who they are in public, perceiving this to be important for their safety. But is this kind of life and way of living a dangerous one? When we are denying ourselves the right to be who we are in public, are we risking happiness, fulfillment, the opportunity to flourish?

“When one lives as a body that suffers misrecognition, perhaps insult or harassment, cultural prejudice, economic discrimination, police violence or psychiatric pathologisation, that leads to a derealised way of living in the world, a way of living in the shadows, not as a human subject but as a phantasm. Someone else’s phantasm but you’re living it.” Judith Butler talking at Gender Trouble, Teatro Maria Matos, Lisbon, June 2015.

Where do we draw the line between visibility and risk? Between self expression and safety? How is this different for different people? How is it different for each of us at different times, depending on how we feel, where our confidence levels are, where we are in the world, what time of the month it is, what happened to us last time we went out in public, how long we have been presenting ourself in a particular way, who we have around us etc etc etc…?

Some thoughts ahead of the project

I often feel self conscious in public. I often feel conscious showing affection to my partner in public. And some people say, really? Is there really a threat here? You come across as quite a confident person, what are you conscious of? What are you scared of? And we don’t always know if there is actually a threat; or if we are carrying some kind of internalised fear of a threat because we have grown up in a world that presents us with an idea of normality that is different to what we are, so we carry a sense of abnormality and it grows in our flesh as we touch each other. Whether the possibility of danger or abuse is real, because the people we are passing by have grown up in a world that has narrowed their vision to only accept particular sights as normal or acceptable, or whether the danger is only sensed by us internally and not actually present, the sense of danger, the feeling of dangerous exposure, is real.

“The test of queer theory activism, the test of trans theory activism is surely to make it easier to breathe, easier to walk down the street without harassment, easier to find a liveable life, a life you can affirm with pleasure and joy, where our sense of a liveable future is stronger than our sense of suffering.” Butler

What has emerged very clearly is that we all experience the same spaces in very different ways, and what might seem like a safe place for some, could be riddled with fear for others.

In Zurich an older woman spoke about how the presence of police officers made her feel safe and created a sense that she was being protected. Where as a younger Iranian man in the group expressed how unsafe and precarious he felt around police officers, who had once arrested him and kept him in a cell for 24 hours just because he didn’t have his papers on him.

In another city, the people from the Theatre were very quick to tell me that theirs was a safe and accepting city, and that the trans participant in the group wouldn’t need any protection. However, the trans woman I was working with expressed anger at this idea, said it was a “middle class cis white straight man perspective” and told us that she suffered prejudice every single day when she walked out in public. Sometimes just looks and stares, some times verbal and physical abuse. In this same city the performance went through a train station, and in the train station the security guards laughed loudly and pointed at two men holding hands. The security guards who are there to for our security… Who has the right to be protected?

The latin route of the word ‘Courage’ means: “To tell your story with the whole of your heart”

To walk in public displaying yourself with the whole of your heart and feel safe and confident should be a basic human right. I am excited about the potential in this new project the safetymap to open up dialogue around some of these issues, and to help spread awareness of different people’s experiences of public space in Brighton.

Personally, Brighton is somewhere I’ve visited regularly since being a teenager and found comfort in its seemingly open attitude towards gender and sexuality, and large population of LGBTQ+ inhabitants. Having grown up in a small town in Hertfordshire and now living in Glasgow, I find the experience of walking around Kemp Town and seeing so many wildly dressed queers of all ages refreshing and intensely up-lifting. It is like nowhere else I’ve been in the UK.

However, having created Walking:Holding here twice in collaboration with Pink Fringe, I am aware that there is complexity within this city, which can feel very different from one street to the next. For the past hundred years many people with queer sexualities have flocked to Brighton as place to feel less alien, more accepted, to meet others like them. And with this intense density of queer ideas and people, factions can emerge, and an intense reaction against such progression can also simmer. 23% of the LGBT inhabitants of Brighton and Hove have been the victim of a hate crime (Sussex Police, ‘Brighton Pride Survey Results 2013’). Reported effects of hate crime can include depression, anger, anxiety and post-traumatic stress, which are reported to affect victims of hate crimes to a significantly higher degree than LGBT victims of other crimes (HM Government (2009) Hate Crime: The Cross-Government Action Plan).

The safety map will be created on a giant quilt and offer a warm and safe space within the Marlborough to share experiences, memories, locations and questions of the city. It will be an act of sharing, of solidarity and community care between Brighton residents. I look forward to learning from all of them and growing courage and understanding together.