The Cost of Fear

**Personal safety shouldn’t mean avoiding danger or living in fear

A self-defense helps women and others targeted for gender-based violence discern fact from fiction and improve their personal safety in ways that support social change

There are two kinds of safety choices: those that disrupt power structures and those that leave them unquestioned. Gender-based violence is a social and political problem, but it’s often enacted in the most intimate spheres of our lives. 

In this book, nationally recognized leader in abuse prevention Meg Stone debunks baseless advice we get about personal safety. Tips like “don’t go shopping alone” and “don’t wear a ponytail” are not based on any evidence, but that doesn’t stop police officers and other men in authority from telling women to restrict our lives.

Sharing stories from a Black transgender woman building a grassroots group to defend her community, to a would-be Taekwondo Olympian fighting back in the courts, to a pharmaceutical scientist fighting back in the lab, Stone argues there are two opposing philosophies of how to make people safer, one of which exacerbates victim-blame (safety through compliance) and the other challenges it (safety through resistance). 

Stone gives readers practical strategies for keeping themselves and their loved ones safer in ways that that affirm their right to be full participants in social, political and professional life.

Auteur

Meg Stone

Texte du rabat

**A violence prevention expert helps women and other targets of gender-based violence discern fact from fiction, improve their personal safety, and support social change

Personal safety shouldn’t mean living in fear, nor should it come at the expense of political progress.

There are two kinds of safety choices: those that disrupt power structures and those that leave them unquestioned. Safety decisions that challenge power inequities require more fortitude, but they also lead to real change.

Every time we alter our lives to avoid violence, we are making a political statement, whether we intend to or not. Crossing the street to avoid a homeless person says one thing. Not leaving your kid alone with a parish priest in the wake of a clergy sexual abuse crisis says another.

In The Cost of Fear, nationally recognized leader in abuse prevention Meg Stone returns the focus to empowerment and shows us safety strategies that really work. Stone argues there are two opposing philosophies of how to make people safer, one of which exacerbates victim-blame (safety through compliance) and the other challenges it (safety through resistance).

Deeply researched, The Cost of Fear includes interviews with people who have used their bodies to stop violence, those who teach self-defense as part of political organizing, as well as organizations that are effectively preventing sexual violence by inviting people to speak up for themselves.

Stone gives readers practical strategies for keeping themselves and their loved ones safer and shows how personal safety is an essential part of political change, especially for an injustice as intimate as gender-based violence.