An open letter to women, from a man who is concerned about their safety.

“In a perfect world, men wouldn’t assault women. We don’t live in that world.” 

I am a man, in my early 40s and at the risk of sounding like a fuddy-duddy-dad-type, please ladies, for the love of God, please stop looking at your phone when you walk alone at night.

I live in Sydney, and regularly cycle to and from my late-night job. This means I’m riding through the streets of the city at around 2am, through the middle of the pub and club districts.

All cyclists are hyper-alert as they ride because we need to stay alive, so we take a lot of notice of our surroundings. So it’s with much worry that I express my concern at the number of young women that I see walking alone on empty streets through the dangerous parts of town, staring at their phones, with no awareness of what’s going on around them.

In a perfect world, men wouldn’t assault women.

In a perfect world, men would be raised well by their families, take cues from society on acceptable behaviours while still young, they would have compassion and empathy for others and be aware that if they did have violent thoughts – to take action and deal with them before they manifest into reality.

Related: Masa was a student. She was a daughter. She was a friend. She could have been any one of us.

However we don’t live in this world.

We live in a world where some knuckle-dragging cro-magnon types are doing their very best to reverse the evolution of our species by assaulting and dehumanizing women at every opportunity. Not all of us, I assure you – but enough of us that violent assaults on women are real and all too frequent.

So as I ride at night, I see these women walking all alone. Their faces are lit up by the constant stream of bleeping updates and text messages, sucking them out of their real-world space and into a virtual space of Instagrammed food, Snapchats and late-night text exchanges.

Their attention is immersed into this virtual world and completely detached from the real world. They are mentally in a place where everything is safe and nothing bad ever happens, while they are physically walking through a potentially very dangerous and frightening place.

Related: “Don’t approach me in the street. You don’t have that right.”

I wish so much that you didn’t have to worry about this. I wish we lived in a world where a woman was able to walk alone down a street free of danger. But that’s not reality.

So, as you’re walking alone through the dodgy back streets by the Casino in Sydney, up the alleys near Oxford St Darlinghurst, or the sketchy part of whatever city you live in – please leave your phone in your bag. You can’t be aware of oncoming traffic, blokes whizzing past on bicycles, or opportunistic psychopaths if you’re staring at your phone.

A woman walking alone might be considered an easy target. However, a woman walking alone who’s engrossed in her phone and completely oblivious to other people on the street, cars approaching slowly from behind or an approaching dark area where someone could be hiding?

Your status update/text/liking of that succulent salad on the profile of an impossibly built Fitspo model’s Instagram – all of these things are less important than you making it home safe.

Mamamia aims to publish a variety of opinions on the important topics of the day. For are differing opinion try this: “The one tip that will stop women from being killed.“