My mother is wildly overprotective. If there’s ever a chance of me walking home alone at night, she’ll turn up in the family car like Batman, ready to give me a lift home. And whilst I’m grateful for the free ride, I can’t help but think that, if I were a boy, I might have a bit more freedom. At the same time, I don’t envy the conundrum faced by the parents of young girls in today’s world.

On one hand, they want to raise us to be empowered, to feel as though we are fundamentally equal to our male peers. On the other hand, women face great inequities. Like being victim to sexual assault, gendered violence, slut-shaming and catcalling, often very demoralising and traumatic experiences, with one in four women report experiencing street harassment at least once a month. In addition, women fall victim to the motherhood penalty, where they are forced by society to give up work to carry out domestic tasks and that their purpose is to be a mother and housewife. Also, the cost of being a woman is astronomical with women spending a whopping 18000 dollars on their periods throughout their lifetimes, on top of their lessened wages due to the gender pay gap. Unfortunately, as much as we believe in equality, it simply doesn’t exist yet. It is difficult to solve all these issues at once, but clearly the catastrophic impacts of gendered violence and rape lead to women feeling unsafe in their environments, meaning they are less likely to feel confident to stand up for their rights. Nothing proves this more than the devastating attacks on Eurydice Dixon and Aiia Maasarwe. These aren't just names I’m throwing at you. These are real women who have lost their lives. And when these types of stories repeat themselves over and over again, it’s understandable that parents are protective.

It’s understandable, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. Because when we focus on protecting girls and keeping them safe from the outside world, we are inadvertently teaching them to fear their surroundings and to avoid taking up the space they’re entitled to. We saw this when, following the attack on Eurydice Dixon, The Chief of Victorian police advised young women to “take responsibility for their safety,” perpetuating the idea that violence against women in public spaces is our responsibility to avoid. It should have been the responsibility of the government to make our cities safe to live in. This kind of ‘victim-blaming’ doesn’t protect us, it fuels inequality.

Some people argue that the answer to this problem is simply to stop cautioning girls about their safety at all and to, instead, focus purely on combating violence from men.

This is tempting because, of course, we should be demanding more of men when it comes to women’s safety.

But, it would be naive in our current world to never give women safety advice. This is the dilemma that my Mum is faced with - how can we protect young girls without making them feel inherently vulnerable?

Luckily, there are practical solutions to this dilemma which don’t involve teaching young girls hand to hand combat or arming them with pepper spray. And they all come down to the relatively less ‘Hollywood’ solution of city planning.

‘Gender Mainstreaming’ in city planning is the idea that urban planners should have to ensure that public spaces benefit all genders equally. Unfortunately, most of our cities were built with the expectation that women’s place was in the home and that public spaces belonged to men. But when we consider what women need, we end up with cities that work better for everyone, with reforms like better lighting, more active and diverse public spaces and more frequent public transport.

And we can also use technology to our advantage. Take Shebah, an all-female ride-share service developed here, in Australia. In Vienna, they’ve even built an apartment complex called ‘Women-Work-City’, which includes a grocery store, a doctor and childcare facilities, making it easier for working women to go about their business at night without the risk of street harassment.

These kinds of solutions don’t require women to stay home after dark, nor do they require police to constantly roam the streets - they just ask the community to take shared responsibility for women’s safety and to minimise spaces where we are isolated and invisible. Most of all, they just demand that governments make women and their safety a priority.

I can empathise with my Mum’s protectiveness, but I wish I lived in a world where she didn’t have to choose between encouraging my freedom and ensuring my safety. I wish we didn't have to deal with the conflict between the world we want to live in and the world we actually do live in. But we can make the world we want to live in a little closer to reality - we just need to plan for it.