The Mental Load of Safety: How Women Globally Calculate Risk Daily

Educator Jackson Katz ran a famous exercise. He asked a room of men what they do daily to avoid sexual assault. Usually, silence. Then he asked women. The list filled the board: don't walk alone at night, watch your drink, park under a light, share your location, don't make eye contact, pretend you're on the phone.

That list is labor. It's invisible, unpaid, and constant.

South Africa, September 2026

This month, that labor became impossible to ignore. Police in South Africa are investigating whether a serial killer is responsible after the bodies of nine women were found in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg, since July. Most were young Black women from working-class townships. After the killings, police told women to avoid walking or exercising alone. Human Rights Watch pushed back: warnings shift responsibility onto women and can't replace real prevention like safety audits, better lighting, and faster responses to missing-person reports.

That same week, a viral video from a Sandton restaurant showed a man allegedly threatening women. He was arrested. Marches followed in Cape Town and Kempton Park. All of this comes almost a year after South Africa declared gender-based violence and femicide a national disaster in November 2025. Many South Africans are now asking what, concretely, has changed.

It's global, not local

South Africa's numbers are extreme, but the pattern isn't unique. UN Women and UNODC estimated that around 85,000 women and girls were intentionally killed in 2023, and about 60% of them by a partner or family member. That's roughly one every ten minutes.

And fear itself changes behavior. Gallup's global surveys consistently find women are less likely than men to feel safe walking alone at night where they live, and the gap shows up in rich and poor countries alike.

What the calculation costs

This is where the "mental load" framing matters. Safety planning isn't just stressful. It has economic consequences:

• Education: Economist Girija Borker studied students in Delhi and found women were willing to pick a significantly lower-ranked college if the route there felt safer. Men didn't make that trade.

• Work: Women turn down night shifts, far-away jobs, and late networking events. On gig apps, that means skipping the best-paying surge hours.

• Health: Constant vigilance is a form of chronic stress. Many women simply stop running after dark, which quietly cuts exercise.

• Dating: Women share screenshots, send location pins to friends, and meet only in public. It works, but it's another unpaid shift.

Geographer Leslie Kern, in Feminist City, shows how cities were designed around the needs of men commuting to work, not women moving through public space at all hours. South African scholar Pumla Dineo Gqola calls the system that keeps women fearful "the female fear factory," which is fear that disciplines where women go and what they do.

Shifting the burden

Personal safety tips have their place. But when the only solution offered is "be careful," the cost of violence stays with the people most at risk. Better answers exist: well-lit transit, safety audits led by women who use the spaces, trained police, funded shelters, and men who step in when they see harassment.

Something to reflect on: What would you do tomorrow if you didn't have to calculate risk? Your answer shows what the fear is costing you.

Sources: Human Rights Watch, "South African Women Need Protection, Not Warnings" (Sept 22, 2026); IOL on the GBVF national disaster declaration; UN Women/UNODC Femicide Report (2024); Borker, safe-route college choice study (Delhi); Kern, Feminist City (2019); Gqola, Female Fear Factory (2021).