ABSTRACT
When visiting the United States in the autumn of 1998, I noticed an advertisement in The Village Voice for a personal security device. The product – Defender DNA – boasts that it is the ‘smallest’ personal protection device. It has the special advantage of combining an alarm with a probe. This probe – when jabbed into the skin of an attacker – collects skin particles, the advert claims, that can be analysed as ‘an identifying’ DNA sample. An enclosed box tells readers that the FBI has opened a DNA data bank ‘to apprehend criminals’. The device was offered ‘on sale’, for $69.95 (or $119.95 for two). Accompanying the text are three pictures of women, two of which depict the same woman with a man – in one picture she is under attack, in the other, escaping with the attacker shown grasping his head. The third picture shows another woman jogging with the device in her hand. Presumably, this device gives her the freedom to enjoy her exercise. Awareness about the potential danger of men’s violence to women has grown rapidly over the past three decades. Its depiction as a potential encounter for any woman has now become normalised. Its solution is commodified in the form of protection devices such as rape alarms or mobile phones, or particularly in the US, handguns.
