Women’s Safety: Walking, Wheeling, Cycling and Running

Amanda Martin Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) for considering such an important topic.

I am an avid runner, having taken part in the Great South Run and a 4.5 km MyWay to raise awareness of male suicide. I am pleased that I will also be running with On the Tools 7K and hope to be one of the women MPs running the London marathon this year. It is a brilliant form of exercise for mental health and wellbeing because it gets people outside and clears the mind, but clearing the mind is difficult when worried about safety.

Women and girls should feel safe when exercising in public, yet for so many that is not the reality. When I leave the house, I say jokingly to my kids, “If I’m not back in 45 minutes, send the police.” But that is not a joke. Studies have found that 70% of women have experienced an intimidating incident when running. A rise in social media and online abuse and videoing is making that worse.

Constituents have contacted me out of concern for the safety of women and young girls who run and jog in Portsmouth. They talked of their 15-year-old daughter, who loves going on runs. Despite doing what she felt were all the right things, such as going out only in daylight hours, she had been catcalled and verbally harassed on multiple occasions. The parents were not only distressed for their daughter but worried about her reaction. She was taken aback at first but then insisted on shaking it off, believing that reporting it would just be a waste of police time. Like her parents, I feel that she should not have to put up with that.

She is not alone. Others have reported aggressive behaviour, bunching around them as they are running, stepping out in front of them, throwing things and saying, “Why don’t you just smile at me, you grumpy cow?” We do not want our girls to experience that brazen misogynistic behaviour any longer. It is upsetting but not surprising that women and girls have to deal with such harassment, with the added mental load of worrying about their safety, from such a young age. If we socialise our young girls simply to brush off such abuse, we are harming society as a whole. As we know, low-level harassment of women can be a gateway to more serious crimes. We need to take this persistent and common harassment more seriously. We do not want women and girls to feel that they are unable to participate on the grounds of their gender.

Although I welcome the Government’s strategy to build a safe society for women and girls, using a whole-society approach, and the VAWG strategy’s prioritising of prevention by getting to root causes, such as the normalisation of women and girls’ feeling unsafe while walking, wheeling, cycling and running, it is vital to tackle this by working across Government Departments. We must join up the Home Office, the Department for Transport, MHCLG, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and many others, so that our young women and girls feel safe when they are outside exercising.