Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens

A few months ago, I wrote a paper for uni on how the same crime is punished differently by gender. Reading a recent news article about a young woman punished for using a weapon in self-defence reignited that fire.

Innocence is spoken of as purity. But why do so many women’s[1] stories begin at the moment innocence is taken rather than where their lives actually began?

When Does a Body Become a Weapon?

A courtroom asks: What happened?
A nervous system asks: Will I survive the next ten seconds?

Between these questions lives an epistemic blind spot, a place where fear becomes illegible, where disproportionality dissolves into the neutral word “incident.”

We are taught to recognise weapons, objects that trigger an alarm in the mind. They are marked as dangerous before they are even used. Law books categorise them. News headlines spotlight them. Courts measure them.

But what about force that does not come in metal or machinery?
What about mass and Strength?
A body that can pin another body down.
A hand that can close around a throat.
The weight that can trap lungs beneath it.

At what point does a human body, larger, stronger, overpowering, stop being seen as “just a person” and start being recognised as a form of weapon?

A force twice as strong does not become less forceful because it is made of flesh.

If a smaller person fears being overpowered, raped, or killed, and in that moment reaches for an object to survive, what exactly are we judging?

Are we judging the object in their hand?
Or the fear in their nervous system?
Or the fact that their body alone was not enough to resist, to protect themselves?

We often speak of “escalation of force.”

But what if the force was already escalated the moment one body towered over another with intent? Is survival always calm and proportional?

Does justice have a blind spot to size, strength, and the lived reality of physical vulnerability?

Perhaps a harder question: Do we understand violence only when it leaves visible wounds, or are we willing to recognise the violence of imminent threat, of being cornered, of knowing you are physically outmatched?

Maybe the real question is not
“Why did they use a weapon?”
But
“What choices did they believe they had left?”

Virtue is praised in theory. But what virtue is required of the physically outmatched?
Calmness? Restraint? Grace under assault?

© S-Elkie 07/02/2026

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[1] Not only women, but all who have experienced overpowering behaviour based on masculine toxicity, as a recipient.