Yay or nay: the anti-rape jacket
Earlier this week we asked whether you'd carry a rape alarm.
There seemed to be lots of reasons not to - it might go off accidentally in your bag in the middle of a shop, humiliating you shrilly as you frantically search through your keys and lipsticks to turn it off.
And if you do manage to locate it and turn it on during an attack, people will pay as much attention to it as they do to car alarms, and leave you to fend off the attacker yourself. Possibly, the best we could hope for is temporarily deafening him.
So what do we think of this anti-rape jacket?
Insulated with rubber and battery-powered, this jacket delivers 80,000 volts to any would-be attackers.
According to the website, the attacker's neuromuscular system would be overwhelmed causing disorientation and loss of balance to occur and of course pain. The pain experienced is non-lethal but is enough to effectively and immediately deter contact with the wearer and provide a critical life saving oppurtunity for escape.
The No Contact jacket has a certain utalitarian aesthetic quality, and it's a bit handier than a rape alarm languishing at the bottom of your bad, but have things really got so bad that our only defence against attack is to go out wearing armour of an evening?
Then again, how different is it to carrying a rape alarm or, in my case, occasionally wearing a big fuck-off ring that could, in a pinch, double as a knuckleduster? Unlike a weapon or alarm, this jacket can't be taken from you by the attacker. And it's been designed to be smaller, with narrow arm-holes, so men can't use it as a weapon (not that this prevents women from going on an elecrtoshocking rampage).
Arming the jacket is where it all gets a bit James Bond: you have to unlock a section of your sleeve, then hold down a button on your cuff to build up the charge.
"The idea is to charge it only in threatening situations or when the wearer feels vulnerable," designer Adam Whiton told technology magazine Wired. A woman might arm it when she's walking to her car at night, for instance.
"By encasing the whole body in this electric fence," Whiton says, "it forms a barrier that people just shouldn't enter into."
And if you feel that this jacket - being a jacket - doesn't cover the entire area a rapist might be interested in, there's always the anti-rape tampon (yes, really) which, in the event of a rape, fold around the rapist's penis and attach itself with microscopic hooks. It is impossible to remove the clamped device without medical intervention.
You can watch a video about the anti-rape jacket, and view diagrams showing how the charge and shocks work, on the Wired website.
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