Dropping The Call

I have written about some of the personal safety issues regarding mobile phone use before, however there is a lot of activity on social media at the moment, concerning/surrounding this, so I thought it would be a subject worth revisiting and expanding on. Firstly, let me state that if you are looking at your phone or on the phone in a public space, you are distracted, your awareness is compromised etc., and you may stand out as an easy target. However, not being on your phone, doesn’t automatically make you more aware, mean that you don’t have other distractions, or cause you to immediately disappear from a predator’s radar. Getting off your phone, isn’t enough – learning how to identify and predict danger and develop suitable disengagement strategies is also necessary. We should also recognize that mobile phones do have some benefits regarding our safety, and we should learn where and when to take advantage of them; I don’t include in these “safety apps” which alert friends to the fact that you may be in danger, etc., as trusting and relying on someone else to sort out a personal safety issue for you is not a good strategy – most people won’t act (due to denial and discounting the threat/danger – especially when they aren’t the one facing it), and if they do, it’s extremely unlikely that they will be quick enough to have an effect due to the speed of real-world violence e.g. there have been rapes that have occurred in a few seconds; the rapist was already aroused, and only need a few seconds to access and control their target.

We are creatures who want to “feel” safe, and we will often pursue this goal, even when we know our actions may compromise our safety – or we may do so without realizing they do. Awhile back, I was on a panel discussing campus safety at a University. One of the pieces of advice that was given by a student, and that received a lot of nods and positive response, was that when you are walking alone late at night, you should talk to a friend on your phone so that, a) any potential assailants would know that somebody knew where you were and would avoid you as a target, b) an assailant wouldn’t try and interact with you because you were having a conversation with somebody else, and c) you wouldn’t feel frightened or scared. Firstly, it may be safer to call an Uber or other ride-sharing service than be out walking late at night – or call the campus police for a lift, which was a service the police sergeant on the panel was advocating i.e. you don’t have to be in that position in the first place, etc. However, there is likely to be that scenario, where you find yourself on your own, in a deserted place, late at night, etc. These situations aren’t always avoidable, and we should know how to behave and operate when we are in them. I know of few predatory criminals that would be deterred by someone knowing where you are; muggings, assaults, and the like are usually over in seconds, and it’s going to take the other person a relatively long time, to realize what is happening, formulate a plan and either get themselves or somebody else to you – if that all happened within 15-minutes I’d be astounded. Act out in your head, all the information you’d need and what you’d actually do, if you heard a friend of yours have their phone snatched away and thrown on the ground, etc. Would your first though be that they’d been attacked, or would you think it was probably more likely that they dropped the phone? Would you immediately call the police, or might you be apprehensive about wasting their time, etc.?

I would also question the politeness of a criminal who was thinking of assaulting, mugging, or raping you. Is it likely that they will respect the social convention of not interrupting another person’s conversation? I’m not sure that a fear of appearing rude is top on their list of concerns. It is more likely that they will see your conversation as a distraction that they can exploit and/or your phone as a relatively easy commodity for them to steal – they don’t even need to engage you in conversation if this is the case; and the phone is unlocked, which means anything you have open at the time is available to them. If your email is open, they may even be able to reset passwords and usernames of certain apps – and if the answers to your security questions, such as which High School you went to, or the name of your first pet, etc. are available via your postings or profiles on social media, they may well be able to gain access to your bank accounts or similar (if you haven’t asked your banking app to remember your password, in which case they’re already in once past the lockscreen).

If we are trying to suppress our fear system’s identification of danger, we are in big trouble i.e. if we actively engage in an activity to prevent us from being scared, we have got things upside down. If we know that we are putting ourselves in a situation where we could experience our fear system being triggered and alert us to a threat, and we don’t want to experience this “warning” but rather stay oblivious to it, by engaging in a conversation, things are really wrong. Either we should be avoiding that situation in the first place, or recognizing that we need to be actively aware and engaged with our environment when we are in it – because we need to be alerted to potential dangers, and enact our safety strategies when this occurs; such as getting our pepper spray ready to use, or changing our route so that we can get to a more populated place, quickly. It may be comforting to talk to a friend who is safe and warm in their house, relaxed and drinking a glass of wine, etc., whilst we are on our own, waking through an underpopulated location, late at night, but their world is not ours, and we shouldn’t be looking to try and exist in it, so we don’t have to acknowledge the realities we face. A conversation with a friend who was with us in this location would be fine, as they would be experiencing the same things, and possibly help alert us to danger, however a conversation with somebody who is somewhere else is a complete distraction that prevents our fear system from doing the job it was designed for i.e. alerting us to danger.

 Our mobile phones can be useful security assets e.g. they can store and make available our ICE (In Case of Emergency) contact, they can be used to access ride-sharing services, or simply call somebody to let them know when we should be back home, etc., but they are an unnecessary distraction when out in public, and when using them we may fail to identify danger and/or those people who possess harmful intent towards us. Not only should we stop using our phone as a comfort blanket when we feel unsafe, but we should also restrict our use of them to those environments when we can be sure that we are safe.