But this doesn’t seem to have yielded a generation that feels safe. Instead, we have one that feels so unsafe they want to use political process to make things better. That, at least, seems to be the upshot of a new HEPI poll which revealed that (along with broad and rising support for censorship, trigger warnings, and firing problematic professors) 79% of undergraduates think students’ demands for “safety” should always be met. And a look at the factors driving this seismic change suggests a startling conclusion: that we should take “woke” claims of “trauma” much more seriously — but also wholly disregard “woke” claims about their origin.

For it’s not the universities encouraging young people to make “safety” a political demand. Rather, such calls seem to originate with students themselves. In the recent persecution of Kathleen Stock at Sussex University, for example, administrators may have supported or at least failed to halt her harassment. But protests were led by undergraduate activists. One placard said “we were meant to be safe here”.

Nor do such demands start at university, but erupt in schools as well. In May, a British sixth-former was hounded out of her school for questioning consensus views on trans rights, and instead of defending her, the school apologised to other pupils for not maintaining a “safe space”.

I asked Andrew, head of sixth form at an independent girls’ school, what he thought was driving the hunger to be safe. He told me that some of it is grounded in reality: in his observation many of his pupils are “genuinely apprehensive about the future”. Their worries vary from the abstract, such as climate change, to more concrete fears about economics, the job market and declining prospects for home ownership — worries that are objectively far from groundless.

In the view of sociologist Matthew Goodwin, a key driver of the new safety-oriented intolerance is the internet. The deputy head at one London state school, James, backs this up: in his view, social media makes it “much easier” to “isolate oneself from opposing (and discomforting) arguments”. His view resonates with Andrew’s observations of how his pupils behave: “Those who are most concerned about safety”, Andrew says, “are the ones who are very ‘online’.”

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And indeed, a defining feature of online sociality is filter bubbles, where we come to think everyone shares our opinions because algorithms filter out content from anyone who doesn’t. One pupil, Andrew tells me, goes even beyond the algorithmic hygiene of her filter bubble to create her own, proactively: she routinely checks an author’s biography for politically disagreeable views and discards “books written by anyone with whom she disagrees politically or philosophically”.

It makes sense, too, that a cohort accustomed to resolving conflict by muting, unfollowing or blocking disagreeable voices might struggle in real-world conflict. In the view of Anne, an American professor, “a big part of it is conflict aversion”, which means “any emotional discomfort they feel from disagreement (whether a peer or a text) is interpreted as a personal attack and ‘unsafe’”. In response to this poverty of interpersonal skills, she says, there’s an expectation that “professors are responsible to create conflict-free and tension-free environments”.

This tallies with a recent report on American campuses, where Title IX protections intended to shield women against sex discrimination have become an expansive means of refereeing interpersonal disputes, one Title IX coordinator tells the author “she sometimes thought of her job as running ‘The Break Up Office’”. In other words: instead of resolving an unhappy break-up among themselves, students seek redress via official sex-discrimination policies.

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Another factor that might contribute to such conflict aversion is well-meaning school policies designed to protect schoolchildren. My own daughter isn’t a university student at the other end of her educational journey; and yet her (lovely, attentive, empathetic) primary-school teachers regularly drum home the message that intractable conflict is best resolved by telling a teacher. It’s often struck me that if widespread, over time such policies might well result in more adults whose first response to interpersonal conflict would be seeking resolution via an authority figure.

And perhaps this starts before schools, too. Free Range Kids, a project and book by American mum Lenore Skenazy, argues that in the name of “safety”, over-protective parenting — or, as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff put it in 2018, “coddling” — is undermining young people’s agency, confidence and resilience.

And it’s difficult to dispute that a fixation on “safety” pervades both products and services aimed at children and also behavioural norms. This inevitably shapes children’s experience, even in family cultures that aren’t especially anxious about safety. I realised how deep this reaches when my own daughter became agitated because I started the car moving, slowly, on our driveway, before she’d finished fastening her seatbelt.

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This still doesn’t feel like the root of it though. One of the first student eruptions of this nature to make the news took place at Yale in 2015, where two faculty members, Nicholas and Erika Christakis, wrote to students encouraging them to tolerate even offensive Halloween costumes. In the ensuing uproar one young woman told Christakis that the college “is no longer a safe space”.

What shook the world about the 2016 Yale video, and remains startling about the many subsequent similar scenarios at schools, universities and the wider world is how radically dysregulated many politically-engaged young people genuinely seem to be. They actually are that upset. For many proponents of “wokeness”, political issues genuinely seem to cause dramatic emotional highs and lows — so much so in fact that the phrase “literally shaking and crying” is widely used to parody this kind of high-pitched activist tone.

But while the fragility in question often seems to be channeled into political activism, what if it doesn’t originate there? A 2020 Pew study reported that the combination of progressivism and youth strongly correlates with mental health difficulties, a finding gleefully seized upon to claim that progressivism drives people crazy. But it’s possible that this has the causality backwards, and it’s more that unhappy people seize upon what Jason Manning has called “Victimhood Culture” to justify an already-endemic state of maladjustment.

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Consider this short article, published by an Australian university, which describes “coping with a meltdown”. Symptoms of a “meltdown” reportedly include shaking, terror, poor decision-making, and destructive self-soothing, and overwhelming emotions such as helplessness, anger and fear. According to the article, we all experience “meltdowns”. Except actually no, we don’t.

And the “meltdowns”, the emotional dysregulation and demands for safety — all the behavioural tics characteristic of militant wokeism — map startlingly closely onto common symptoms of pre-verbal trauma. That is, they’re consistent with symptoms displayed by children abused or neglected before they learned to talk.

The child development theorist Erik Erickson characterised the first stage of infancy as where we develop a foundational confidence that a caregiver will be there when we need them. And where this is interrupted by traumatic experiences, the sense of chronic threat can last forever. As psychotherapist Dorothy Scotten argues, pre-verbal experience of abuse or neglect then means “the infant loses the sense of safety and begins her/his life in a state of psychological mistrust and instability”. Long-term effects of such trauma can then include “a feeling of helplessness, residual fear and lack of safety” along with self-destructive behaviours such as substance abuse, difficulty forming relationships, and overwhelming emotions such as “infantile rage”. Not a million miles, in other words, from the supposed symptoms of “meltdown”.

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Another paper describes a traumatised child who expressed “feelings of being unsafe and inadequately protected by caregivers and an intense behavioural regression to an infantile level at home”. This included acting out; the child “would camp outside his mother’s bedroom door pretending to be a ‘lost puppy’ wanting to be taken in”. The longing this expresses for a place of absolute safety is echoed in Christakis’ confrontation with the Yale student body. Here several tearful young women berate Christakis about how Yale was a “home” for them — but now, as one puts it: “Somehow this home is broken.”

It seems unlikely that every single one of these young people has been profoundly physically abused. What about neglected, though? In the Seventies, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth documented the way young children form a strong attachment to a single caregiver. They concluded that attachment took three broad forms: secure, ambivalent or disordered.

Most attachments styles fell within secure or ambivalent patterns, they found. Children with secure attachment were confident that their caregivers would respond in an attuned way; those with an ambivalent attachment pattern could either be anxious and clingy or avoidant. And disordered attachment was found in neglectful, frightened or frightening caregiving situations such as addiction or violent homes.

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Are we looking at a mass outbreak of disordered attachment? Perhaps; for the other generational change that swept across the West around the same time as the internet was increased uptake of institutional childcare. In 1980, the year after I was born, it was estimated that around a third of mothers had jobs. By 2011, though, a UCL study reported that among the middle class, stay-at-home mums of young children were increasingly a rarity concentrated among the richest and poorest, while in the middle class nearly 70% had jobs before their child was one year old.

A great deal of research has been done on the effect of childcare on attachment. Results vary considerably by geography and the age of children, but a review of results concluded that there’s likely to be some effect. And, importantly, especially where care is poor-quality and infants are very young, long hours in childcare pose a significant risk factor for disordered attachment.

There are, to my knowledge, no studies on whether any correlations exist between an institutionalised early infancy and an unhappy young-adult preoccupation with “safety”. But if there is a correlation, it might also explain the greater American prevalence and intensity of this type of dysregulated youth politics: American women have no right to maternity leave, and one in four American mothers is back at work within two weeks. That’s a lot of tiny babies in institutional childcare.

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Something as seismic as the change in sensibility we’re seeing is unlikely to have a single cause. But the step change in childcare uptake happened just long enough ago for those kids to be arriving in adulthood now. It’s possible that genuine worries for the future, internet filter bubbles, and a culture of safetyism have landed, for some, on psyches that were fragile almost from birth.

And it’s possible that this subset was predisposed to fragility, by an early infancy spent in “care” settings long on stimulation, and short on attuned caregiving and cuddles — a setting inimical to forming the kind of secure or even ambivalent attachment patterns needed for healthy functioning as an adult. If this is so, it’s also possible that much of contemporary student activism isn’t really about race, gender, climate or whatever so much as it is about young adults desperately trying to elicit the care from a new institution, that they missed out on in a different institutional setting long before they even formed conscious memories.

If this so, we should take student claims of distress and trauma more seriously – even as we dispute their origins. And we should also be cautious about taking such individuals’ political demands at face value. For it may be that some of our angriest activists have simply seized upon the opportunity offered by “Victim Culture” to make a renewed plea for something they craved as a baby, and didn’t receive: a reliable sense of being held, and loved, and safe.

I have walked the streets of London and Liverpool on my own for the past 20 years, at all times of night, rarely giving it a second thought. So reading women’s accounts of their everyday experiences, and talking to the women in my life about theirs, is a glimpse into an alien world. I am left with the terrible, bleak feeling that it will be impossible to ever make women feel adequately safe.

There is a kind of stereotyped masculine response to these female fears. That is: they are irrational. Murder, especially the murder of women, and especially the random murder of women by strangers in the street, is vanishingly rare. You are far more likely to be hit by a car on your walk home. So if you worry about it, goes this response, you are wrong.

This response is not exactly wrong, but it misses the point by a distance. It’s absolutely true that murder is rare in the UK; you are less likely, as a citizen of the UK in 2021, to be murdered than almost any other human in history. The Crime Survey for England and Wales puts the UK’s homicide rate at about 1.1 per 100,000. For comparison, according to the UN, the USA has something like 5 per 100,000; Brazil, about 27.

In the UK, and many other countries, the number of murders per year has been dropping since at least 1990. Going further back, there was a surge in the later years of the 20th century, but on a longer timescale the trend is clear: you were many, many times more likely to be murdered for most of human history than you are now in the UK, or in most other countries.

To carry on in the same stereotyped vein, if you are a woman, you are even less likely to be murdered. Of the 695 people murdered in England and Wales in the year to March 2020, 506 of them were men. And for the specific issue of murders on the street, by strangers — the fear we’re dealing with — the disparity is greater still: 154 men were murdered by strangers, and just 23 women. 

All this is true. But that doesn’t mean that the streets feel safe for women.

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For one thing, it’s not just getting murdered that women fear. They fear getting abducted. They fear being raped. They are made by men to feel uncomfortable. Men yell things out of cars at women as they drive past, or follow them as they walk home, shouting out to them. One woman I know finished a half marathon as a bunch of men at the finish line loudly rated the attractiveness of the runners (“would, wouldn’t.”) 

I’m a bit sceptical of surveys like the recent one which found that 97% of young women have been sexually harassed, because the definition of “sexually harassed” varies, and I’d say some of the things they include in their data are borderline. But I bet that most women have some stories like the ones above. 

It’s mercifully true that almost none of those cases will escalate into murder, and few into actual violence. But, equally, I don’t think it’s irrational to be unnerved, in a world where these things happen reasonably regularly, and so to avoid being out alone after dark. 

If men being threatening is the main driver of women feeling unsafe, you might think that we have a clear way to move forward. Simply get men to stop being threatening, and women will feel safe. But I worry that will fail, on two grounds. One, I don’t think it’s possible, and two, even if it were, I don’t think it would work.

The first trouble is that we bump up against the law of large numbers. Imagine that the average woman walks past 200 men in a day. I expect working women in large cities see much more than that, in non-pandemic times, but others who are at home or who live in small communities see far fewer, so perhaps that number’s about right. In a year, that’s 73,000 encounters; in a decade, 730,000. Even if only a tiny fraction of men are dangerous or threatening, women will occasionally encounter them. 

Forget “not all men”: even if it’s “almost zero men”, there are enough to make women feel threatened. And it’s probably not almost zero men; it’s probably some relatively small but non-trivial fraction of them. (Or, even worse, a larger fraction of men, but only some of the time, for instance when drunk.) How many incidents per decade would it take to make you anxious? One? Two? 

There’s more than just this going on though. We’re also battling against human psychology.

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In the US and UK, crime has been falling consistently for 30 years. In America, there are something like half as many violent crimes per person per year, and about half as many property crimes, as there were in the early 1990s. In the UK, the crime rate has fallen to something like a quarter of its 1996 peak.

But in both the USA and UK, most people believe that crime is increasing. The percentage who think so has dropped in the UK over the last 10 years, but still, nearly two-thirds of adults think that crime is more common now than it was a few years ago. Almost 80% of US adults think there is more crime now than a year ago. People’s perception of the risk of crime is only very loosely tied to the actual risk of crime in their country. Bringing it down — making people safer — will probably only have a relatively small effect on how safe people feel.

What’s more, while it is true that things like traffic accidents are much more common, humans are much more likely to be scared of dramatic, rare risks than common ones: “They worry more about earthquakes than they do about slipping on the bathroom floor, even though the latter kills far more people than the former,” wrote the security expert Bruce Schneier back in 2006. 

Schneier also points out that personified danger, dangers with identifiable victims, is far scarier than anonymous, statistical risks. 10,000 faceless people dying of diabetes will never get to us in the way that a single named child ill with bone cancer will. If there’s a human agent behind the risk, that’s even worse. And risks that we don’t choose, risks that are beyond our control, are scarier than those we choose. High-profile murders by strangers meet all of these criteria. They are almost designed to scare us. 

And we will always keep hearing about them, once again because of the law of large numbers. There are about 70 million people in the UK. If we get the risk of murder down to an unrealistically low one-in-70-million per year, we will still hear about them once a year, because they will make the news. The news will never dedicate 100 times as much coverage to diabetes deaths as they do to street murders, because that’s just not how the media works or, really, ever could work. A newspaper headline of “100,000 aircraft landed safely yesterday” would not sell many copies.

More than that, women tend to be more risk-averse than men. I want to be really clear about something: this is not “irrational”. There’s no optimal level of risk aversion, no correct amount to be worried. But it is an empirical fact that although men are more likely to be victims of crime and violence, they are less likely to be worried about it. 

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That makes sense. Even if I do get jumped in Finsbury Park as I walk home some night, there’s some deluded bit of me that thinks I could fight, or at least run. I would feel like I have some control, and risks we think (rightly or wrongly) that we can control are less scary. Most women do not have that feeling. It is hardly surprising that the world is scarier for women.

Plus, we’re diurnal animals. The night is frightening for us, and has been since before we evolved from our common ancestor with chimps. You don’t have to go all evolutionary psychology to think that being alone on a dark street is going to be scary for humans, whatever the real risks are.

Women also differ widely in their responses to things. There is a great essay by Scott Alexander, called “Different Worlds”, talking about how the same situation will be perceived entirely differently by different people. We all have different levels of threat-perception, and almost all signals we receive from the world are ambiguous. Some people will read some behaviour as dangerous, some as benign.

I read this story, about a woman’s reaction to unwanted attention on a train, and it felt threatening and unpleasant. But perhaps some other women might think it was harmless flirting. And the survey into sexual harassment I mentioned above included “being stared at” as sexual harassment, but I remember some female friends, when they were single, telling each other about that guy at the bar “checking you out”. The line between flirty “checking out” and harassment-level “being stared at” will be different for different women. Which is entirely normal and unavoidable. But it does mean that some women will be much more likely to feel threatened than others. Which will in turn mean that it will be harder to reach a point where all, or enough, women feel safe.

What can be done? Certainly men could be more aware of behaviour that might seem threatening. And doing whatever we can to reduce the level of crime, improving rape conviction rates, reducing workplace harassment and stigmatising the sort of creepy behaviour I talked about above — those things are good in their own right, and probably will have some effect on how safe women feel. I’ve seen women suggesting curfews for men — I’m not sure how seriously — and no doubt that would lower the incidence of attacks, although it’s not really proportional or realistic; it would involve punishing an awful lot of innocent men for the actions of a terrible minority. As would restricting alcohol sales, given that at least half of attackers in violent crime are under the influence.

Fundamentally, we are fighting too many things — especially the law of large numbers, a sensationalist media, and human psychology — for it to be realistic that women will ever feel safe enough. Men will never understand how women feel; but even worse, we may never be able to entirely change it.