S, swimmer at Hampstead Ladies’ Pond

When a person got here bounding into the communal showers on the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond, I had my swimming costume folded right down to my waist. I lined my breasts with my arms and waited for him to go away. When a person in an extended crimped wig walked down the trail and stopped the place I used to be showering outdoors, I made a felony criticism. The voyeuristic and invasive act of this man standing and deliberately letting me know that he was me was demeaning, aggressive, and misogynistic. I couldn’t cowl my bare physique as a result of he was blocking entry to my towel. 

The incident was recorded as a sexual offence. The Kenwood Ladies’ Pond Association stated it could share my considerations with the City of London Corporation, which manages the ponds. But it by no means obtained again to me and nothing modified. 

Going to the Ladies’ Pond was essential to me in getting by a interval of extreme melancholy. It continues to be essential to my psychological well being and high quality of life. Swimming in chilly open water and communing with nature in a secure area away from the male gaze is therapeutic. But I’ve felt apprehensive about going to the ponds ever since I began encountering males who’re insistent on accessing areas the place ladies and younger women are bare, regardless of understanding that for a lot of, in all probability most, ladies, that is non-consensual and skilled as a violation of their security, privateness and dignity.

Like many ladies, I’ve been subjected to sexual harassment all through a lot of my life, and have skilled sexual violence. To hear a person’s voice in a woman-only area registers as threatening to my nervous system. My overwhelming feeling is that my, and different ladies’s, privateness is being severely violated. The therapeutic impact of the Ladies’ Pond has been badly compromised.