Rapes and abductions are very rare but every woman lives with the fear that they could be the next victim
APETITE young woman is walking along a quiet country road in broad daylight when a black car jolts to a stop beside her. A burly man leaps out and grabs the woman. He bundles her into his car and drives away at speed. Horrified witnesses get a good look at the man, and make a note of the car’s model and registration plate before it disappears.
Later, another driver sees a distressed young woman in the back of a passing car. It sounds like the same car, and the driver fits the description of the young woman’s abductor. When police trace the car to an address, the man’s wife is utterly perplexed: He is a father of two, a building contractor, and who told her he was going out to meet friends that evening.
In a leafy suburb, police are searching for a 14-year-old girl whose parents raised the alarm when she was just a few hours late coming home from an afternoon outing to a nearby park. It would be reasonable to believe the girl is perfectly safe. Teenagers often lose track of time when they’re hanging out with their pals. It was still daylight when the alarm was raised, after all, and she might not have noticed that it was almost eight o’clock.
And there are all sorts of reasons why youngsters don’t answer their phones: They don’t charge them, they run out of credit, they put them on silent in the classroom and forget to switch the sound back on, the phones get dropped or lost or stolen. And then, searching a ruin that’s become a popular meeting place for local teens, they find the girl’s naked, battered, bloodstained body.
A blonde, 18-year-old German girl, backpacking alone, takes a ferry from Scotland to Larne. A strikingly pretty young woman in a floral dress, she is excited about coming to Ireland, and plans to take a Dublin-bound train from the ferry terminal. But she never makes it as far as the platform and, two weeks later, her body is found in a forest in Antrim. She has been viciously assaulted and her neck is broken.
Any one of these scenarios could be the plot summary for a forthcoming threepart drama or a best-selling crime thriller. We’ve all read outlines just like these on the back of the latest page-turner, or on the television pages flagging up the hottest ‘must see’ box set. Recently, the controversial feminist author Germaine Greer caused a storm when she suggested that this entire genre is driven by female demand, that the audiences are mostly women fascinated by sexual crimes. ‘Female victimisation sells,’ she said. ‘What should disturb us is that it sells to women.’
What should disturb us most of all, though, is the reason why such grim tales attract a female audience, and it’s not the one that Greer suggests. We don’t view these things out of some erotic enthralment with violence against women. We watch them because they tap into our deepest anxieties.
We watch them because we are brought up to be aware of our vulnerability, and to be alert for threats of a sort that never cross a man’s mind. We are conditioned to know that the simplest situations or misunderstandings can turn menacing in the blink of an eye.
Terrorised
We watch them for the same reason we tell our daughters to take the number of the taxi whenever they send a friend off alone after a late night out, and encourage them to text us if they need a lift home, whatever the time. We watch them for the same reason that every town in Ireland needs a refuge for terrorised and battered women.
We watch them because, while we know it is rare and we know that the overwhelming majority of men are decent and gentle, violence against women is not a fantasy. Fictitious though they might sound, none of the three above scenarios were written to sell a novel or promote a television drama: All three are currently featuring in headlines in this peaceful, safe, law-abiding country, and they feature real girls and women, all young, trusting, vulnerable, and all victims of crimes that are far too close for comfort, quite literally, to the fiction that compels and terrifies us.
Perhaps reading of such crimes allows us some control over our fears, and affords us the reassurance of justice when they are solved in the end. Because, rare as such crimes are, the reality is not always so reassuring.
It is 30 years since Inga Maria Hauser went missing off that ferry. The police had their suspects at the time but, in those pre-DNA times, no hard evidence to convict. So it was just yesterday, three decades on, that the first breakthrough was made in the case: Two Antrim men, one 58 and the other 61, were arrested in connection with Inga Maria’s murder. The cases of 14-year-old Anastasia Kriegel and Jastine Valdez, aged 24, have cast a pall of gloom over the nation. For the past few weeks the country has been wracked with grief and recriminations over the fate of other young women, who were failed by our health service, and tens of thousands of women have been left fearing for their lives and wellbeing as a consequence. But the fear that the fates of Ana and Jastine provoke is of a different and more visceral calibre entirely.
It is the sort of fear that ought to be the stuff of nightmares, or confined to the shivers of a fictitious read, but their stories remind us that every now and then our worst imaginings cross over into reality. And, rarely though it happens, the truth is such a possibility is something no woman puts completely from her mind.
My three daughters, by coincidence, are almost exactly of an age with Ana, Inga Maria and Jastine. And, not surprisingly, they have been following the last few days’ grim news reports with a very personalised dismay and horror. Here were ordinary young women just like themselves, going about their ordinary lives in broad daylight, catching buses, taking holidays, hanging out with friends. They’d have been careful, just like my own girls, not to put themselves at obvious risk, even in those scenarios that hold no threat for men, but nor would they have wanted to live their lives cowed by fear of random and remote dangers.
It is not out of any prurient fascination, whatever Germaine Greer says, that my girls are reading about these crimes. They are not struggling to distinguish them from the plots of the television shows we watch or the thrillers they read. They know these awful stories make the news precisely because they are so uncommon, whatever the recurring themes of popular fiction might suggest. But they know, too, that as females they are vulnerable in a way that their brothers are not.
These crimes won’t stop them going out with their friends, or taking buses, or even holidaying alone. But they will make them that bit more careful, or so I hope, that bit less trusting, which is a pity, that bit less free in what they do and where they go. They will be a bit more wary of strangers, more attuned to changing moods and atmospheres, a bit quicker to get themselves out of situations that look like turning nasty, a bit more alert when a car slows beside them.
Most of the time, I know, we worry for nothing and we jump at shadows. But the truth, as these stories remind us, is that women must navigate their world, and curate their freedoms, in a way that men cannot imagine. And that is not a function of hysteria, but of experience and common sense.