There’s a rape alarm, stashed somewhere in a drawer in my bedroom. We – the young women – were given them in the first week of university, when some of us had just been released into the world for the first time. In a box under the drawer, there’s a small can of Elnett hairspray. I remember buying two: one for the beehive I was rocking at the time, the other for spraying a man in the face should he attack me, a tip I had read about in Cosmopolitan magazine, because pepper spray isn’t legal in the UK. For a while I kept these in the pocket of my vintage fur coat, until the coat fell apart as I stood on an escalator at Angel tube station (serves me right), and they were forgotten. I remembered the existence of these items, their ultimate futility, when I read about the new women’s safety app backed by the Home Office, created in response to last year’s huge outcry about violence against women. The app, which tracks users’ journeys home, has been rightly criticised by experts as doing nothing to solve the underlying problem of misogyny. As far as I can see, it simply codifies the safety behaviour in which women already engage: “Text me when you get home.” The app gives you a monitored route, and if you move more than 40 metres from it or are still for three minutes, the app asks you if you’re OK. If you don’t reply, it sends a notification to one of your “guardians” (a friend or family member, not patronising or loaded language at all), who can check on you and alert the police. The shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding, Jess Phillips, has referred to it as a “sticking plaster”. I have already mentally consigned it to the dressing table, along with the rape alarm and the hairspray and the myriad other inventions I’ve read about in the course of the 10 years since I was attacked by a stranger on a London street: the straw that tells you if you’ve been spiked, the anti-rape underwear. Please, spare me more attempts to “innovate” our way out of a problem that demands widespread structural change. This app would not have saved me the trauma of a stranger’s hands around my neck, slowly squeezing the life out of me. Perhaps it might have alerted my “guardian” to the fact that I hadn’t moved for three minutes, though if I hadn’t moved, I might have been brain-dead within five. While writing this, I Googled “how long does it take to strangle someone to death?”, but found myself having to close the tab – because, hoo boy, reading about it was still too much, and healing can never be total. In any case, there was an off-duty police officer living nearby who heard my screams and alerted his colleagues, who did not arrive in time. Did he come out of his house? No, he did not. No one did. A passerby came to my aid, eventually. I’m wary to say what else saved me, because the extended implication is that it could have saved other women too – and really, it’s a roll of the dice that depends on so many factors. How your fight or flight kicks in, how big the man is, whether he has a weapon. At about the same time, some other man was dragging women off the street into people’s front gardens and raping them, and some of them were freezing in fear. The fact that I did not freeze is testament to nothing except the cocktail of chemicals in my animal brain at that time. It’s true that I had the self-defence skills, imparted by my mother (thanks, Mum!), and I do believe that self-defence should be taught in schools, but again, it hardly solves the underlying problem. And besides, how sad it makes me to think of all the women out there saying firmly to their little girls: “Knee him in the goolies, gauge him in the eyes, scream as loud as you can.” How sick it makes me, that I’ll probably have to say the same to my own daughter if I have one. I’m also tired of writing about this. I’d like my writing to be powered by joy – at least some of the time – but it’s hard, when you keep seeing the same ill-informed initiatives over and over again, the same mealy mouthed platitudes. Will I see a properly funded, cohesive violence against women strategy in my lifetime? Or will I have to carry on writing variations on the same theme for the rest of my writing career? When do I get to not feel this angry? It all makes me want to scream and shout. The extra police in nightclubs, the “flag down a bus” advice, the AI-operated drones, all of it. The only thing that I find encouraging is the increasing numbers of women, many of them young, who are sick to the back teeth of it all and are taking to the streets, boycotting clubs, raising their voices. The way the vigil for Sarah Everard was policed was a travesty, but the action itself gave me hope. We women at least have each other, though we could do with more men on board, as ever. I predict that these policies will eventually be consigned to a drawer, gathering dust like all those rape alarms, relics of another failed brainstorming session, leaving us where we were before, have always been, since the dawn of time: fighting, or fleeing, or freezing. Rolling the dice. Hoping to live.