Urban professional women are now paying for training in something their grandmothers considered basic survival knowledge: reading a room, tracking exits, noticing when something feels off.

Situational awareness courses, formerly the domain of security professionals and military personnel, are now marketed to civilians—particularly women—as premium safety education. That shift reveals something uncomfortable about how safety has been privatised.

When Instinct Became a Paid Service

Twenty years ago, situational awareness wasn’t branded. It was simply what cautious people practiced: noticing who’s behind you, choosing well-lit routes, trusting your gut when something feels wrong.

Now it’s a curriculum. Apps track your location and send alerts. Consultants teach “threat assessment frameworks.” Self-defence studios offer workshops on “pre-attack indicators.”

The content isn’t new. What’s new is the framing of basic environmental awareness as specialised knowledge rather than something women should already have access to. And the implication that safety is something you purchase rather than something environments should provide.

The Attention Economy Made Awareness Harder

Part of why situational awareness now requires explicit training is that distraction has been engineered into daily life. Phones demand constant attention. Earbuds block environmental audio. Navigation apps replace spatial memory.

This isn’t accidental. The attention economy profits from capturing focus, and situational awareness requires the opposite—diffuse attention that monitors surroundings without fixating.

Women walking through cities while checking notifications, following GPS directions, or listening to podcasts aren’t neglectful. They’re operating in an environment designed to monopolize attention, which directly conflicts with safety practices that require environmental scanning.

Safety Became Individual Responsibility

The rise of situational awareness as a paid skill also reflects a larger shift: safety is increasingly framed as personal responsibility rather than collective infrastructure.

Cities aren’t investing in better lighting, more visible transit routes, or redesigned public spaces that reduce isolated areas. Instead, individuals are told to modify their behavior—take the longer route, don’t wear headphones, carry a personal alarm.

This transfers the labour and cost of safety onto the people most likely to experience harm, rather than addressing environmental design or systemic gaps.

And when safety becomes something you’re trained in rather than something environments provide, the message is clear: if something happens, you should have known better.

What Sovereignty Actually Looks Like

Reclaiming safety doesn’t mean rejecting situational awareness. It means recognising that hypervigilance isn’t empowerment—it’s a tax on women’s cognitive capacity.

True sovereignty includes:

• Environments designed for visibility and safety
• Public spaces that don’t require constant threat assessment
• The freedom to be distracted, tired, or unaware without that being framed as negligence

Situational awareness is useful. But when it becomes a prerequisite for existing in public space, it’s not a skill—it’s a symptom of infrastructure that never prioritised women’s safety in the first place.