More than 100 joggers are to stage a “run of defiance” in a Manchester park where a woman was attacked in the latest in a series of assaults on women in the city.

The 25-year-old woman was attacked while running in Didsbury, a south Manchester suburb, last Saturday.



The woman escaped with minor injuries despite the vicious assault, in which an unknown object was held to her throat and her head was banged repeatedly against a tree.

That assault came days after detectives warned women not to walk alone at night after three women were sexually assaulted in separate attacks in the city centre.



A week after the attack in Fog Lane Park, more than 100 women and men will on Saturday run the same route as an act of support and defiance of crimes of this nature.



A Facebook event called “Run toward, don’t run away” is urging joggers to “take a stand on feeling safe”.



The event’s organiser, Lu Hudson, said: “It happened in broad daylight on a really nice sunny day. You shouldn’t have to question doing that at all.

“It’s scary, it’s unsettling, it’s frightening. But the frustration and anger supersedes that, and I shouldn’t have to stop enjoying what I want to do in my community, and certainly other people shouldn’t feel like that. That feeling overrides it, and the need and the want to do something.”



Hudson, 30, is a freelancer, meaning that joining a regular running club is not possible given her varying hours and location. She hopes the event will give attendees a wider scope of people who they can run with within the community.

The park, formerly popular with single female runners, has seen this change in the week following the incident.

Since last Saturday’s attack, Hudson has returned to the area twice, once on the Monday evening with her partner, and again on Tuesday afternoon with a friend. She admits that she is not yet ready to return to the park alone.

“Even on Monday evening we saw a lot more people in pairs, and people were giving kind of knowing looks and a smile, saying ‘We’re out, we’re running, we’re here.’ Instead of saying, ‘Okay, I won’t go out’, let’s go out together and stand united as a group.

“We will be vigilant and take care, but we won’t stay in. It’s not going to do anyone any favours.”

Greater Manchester police pledged extra patrols in the area after the attack, and last week advised women to take care when alone in Manchester city centre at night after a spate of violent assaults.

However, Philippa Ladd, manager at Manchester Women’s Aid, expressed her concerns at what warnings of these sort would say to the public, worried that they could lead to a culture of victim blaming.

“We are constantly told to readjust our behaviour to reduce risk from strangers or the men we know. The burden is put on us. It’s almost living your life in fear if you can’t go jogging in the park in daylight without fearing an attack.”

Ladd has noticed an increase in the number of reports relating to sexual assaults as of late, with several occurring in daylight and near to main roads.

“It shouldn’t matter if its 5pm or 5am,” Ladd said. “It’s trying to get the balance between reducing the risk of crime, but is it necessarily done by telling victims, or potential victims, of changing their behaviour, rather than tackling the source of the problem which is the perpetrator of the crime?

“And this is not just the police. It’s the punishment given through the courts and how it is addressed at that level, because if this man is caught and then given a suspended sentence, what message does that send out?

“I think it is something that becomes internalised in women, to modify their behaviour in response to a potential attack.”