I was a teenager when I learned that simply being a girl in public could sometimes make you a target.
It happened to me. More than once.
And years later, I know it has happened to my daughter too.
Different generation. Same experience.
And really, I’m infuriated that it still happens.
Because for decades, the conversation around street harassment has so often focused on what women and girls should do about it. Like it’s somehow our fault.
Don’t walk alone.
Don’t run after dark.
Don’t wear headphones.
Stay in well-lit areas.
Tell someone where you’re going.
Carry your phone.
Watch the cars around you.
Trust your instincts.
All sensible safety advice, perhaps. But notice who is being given the homework.
That’s why a police operation in Surrey, England, caught my attention.
This time, the women weren’t being told to change their behavior
In 2025, Surrey Police launched an initiative called “Jog On” to tackle the harassment of women exercising in public.
Instead of waiting for another woman to report that she’d been followed, shouted at, honked at, or subjected to sexually suggestive comments while running, female police officers volunteered to put on ordinary running clothes and jog through areas where harassment was known to happen.
They weren’t alone. Support teams remained nearby, ready to intervene.
And they didn’t have to wait long.
According to reporting on the operation, one officer was honked at within 10 minutes. During another patrol, a vehicle reportedly slowed down, beeped, and made a gesture toward an officer just 30 seconds after she started running.
Thirty seconds.
Think about that.
She barely had time to start running before somebody decided that her presence on a public street entitled him to make her uncomfortable.
The month-long pilot ultimately resulted in 18 arrests for offenses including harassment, sexual assault, and theft. The officers also made other interventions where behavior didn’t warrant arrest.
And that distinction matters. The police weren’t claiming that every horn honk or unwanted comment should put someone in handcuffs.
They were looking at the behavior differently. They were asking what it might tell them. And how it might escalate.
“It’s just a compliment” misses the point
Women have heard all the explanations.
He was joking.
It was harmless.
He thought she was attractive.
Take it as a compliment.
But the woman receiving that attention doesn’t know the intentions of the stranger delivering it.
Is he going to keep driving?
Is he going to turn around?
Is he going to follow me?
Is the man shouting from the sidewalk going to stay there?
That uncertainty is part of the experience.
Surrey Police connected Jog On to broader work addressing violence against women and girls, describing the operation as a way to identify predatory behavior and intervene early.
That’s an important change in perspective.
Instead of asking women to become better at avoiding harassment, police were paying attention to the people choosing to harass them.
I shouldn’t still be having this conversation with my daughter
That’s the big thing. Not after #MeToo, not after years of women publicly describing harassment and abuse, and not while the continuing revelations in the Epstein files are reminding us—again and again and again—what can happen when troubling behavior toward women and girls is minimized, normalized, or ignored.
When this happened to me as a teenager, I didn’t have today’s language for it. I just knew that an ordinary moment could suddenly become uncomfortable because a stranger had decided to make me the object of his attention.
Now I’m a mother.
And I know my daughter has experienced it too.
That’s the part that’s hard to accept.
We tell ourselves things are different for our daughters. In many important ways, they are. But then something happens that makes you realize how much has remained stubbornly unchanged.
A girl should be able to walk down a street.
A woman should be able to go for a run.
Neither should have to calculate whether the man in the passing car is going to honk, yell, slow down, turn around, or follow her.
And she certainly shouldn’t be told that dealing with those possibilities is simply part of being female.
I’m talking to my sons about it too
But this isn’t a conversation I only have with my daughter.
I’ve tried to make sure my sons notice it too.
When we’ve been together and I’ve seen a man honk at a woman, shout something from a car, or behave in a way that makes her visibly uncomfortable, I’ve pointed it out.
I want them to recognize that behavior for what it is. And I want them to call it out when they see it happening.
That doesn’t mean putting themselves in danger or escalating a situation. Sometimes calling it out is as simple as refusing to laugh along when a friend makes a comment. Saying, “That’s not okay.” Not joining in. Checking that the woman is all right. Making it clear to the other boys and men around them that this isn’t harmless fun.
Because if boys grow up seeing this treated as normal background noise, it becomes very easy not to question it.
We spend a lot of time teaching our daughters what to do when they feel unsafe. We should be spending at least as much time teaching our sons what to do when they see someone making a girl or woman feel unsafe.
My sons aren’t responsible for the behavior of other men.
But they can choose what kind of men they want to be—and what kind of behavior they’re willing to accept from the men around them.
What if we stopped making women’s safety a women’s problem?
That’s what I like most about the thinking behind Jog On.
It wasn’t another campaign telling women how to stay safe.
The women didn’t change routes.
They didn’t change clothes.
They didn’t change the time they ran.
Instead, police went to the places where women said the problem was happening and watched the people causing it.
Surrey Police said its own research showed just how much of this behavior normally goes unseen. In a survey of 450 female residents, 49 percent said they never reported harassment.
Which makes sense.
Most women aren’t going to call the police every time someone shouts something from a car window. We shrug it off. We complain about it to a friend. We speed up. We change direction. We get home.
And the person responsible carries on, quite possibly doing it to somebody else. Like nothing happened at all.
Jog On disrupted that pattern.
For once, someone else was paying attention.
Maybe that’s the lesson worth taking from Surrey
One police operation in England isn’t going to end street harassment.
But there is something powerful about the question behind it.
What would happen if we spent less time teaching women how to accommodate threatening or degrading behavior and more time confronting the people responsible for it?
And what would happen if, alongside teaching our daughters how to protect themselves, we taught our sons that they have a role to play too?
My generation shouldn’t have had to learn how to navigate this as teenagers.
My daughter’s generation shouldn’t have had to learn it either.
And the next generation of girls shouldn’t grow up assuming that being honked at, followed, shouted at, or sexualized by strangers is simply one of those things women have to put up with.
Women have been watching out for themselves for a very long time.
It’s good to see somebody finally watching out for them.
