Millane reaction: Phenomenon or a deeper shift?
Everyone is talking about Grace Millane. Increasingly, the talk this week has been about why her death should move the whole country. Are we witnessing an inexplicable phenomenon or a fundamental societal shift.
The reaction to Millane’s death is nothing short of extraordinary. Can you imagine marches, candlelit vigils and prime ministerial apologies for the murder of a New Zealand backpacker in England?
Interest and concern is reflected in the insatiable appetite for news about the murder. Although many of our memories in the media are short, we have seen nothing like it. What chord has been touched? Why do people say they are devastated when they have no personal connection to Millane or her family?
The media coverage may have escalated the feelings of loss and outrage but this is a case where the groundswell of emotion has driven the coverage rather than the other way round.
It’s worth asking why other recent murders, especially of women by men, have not led to similar displays of public grief. Since the middle of November, two women have been murdered in domestic incidents, five men have been murdered and one baby has died in a suspected homicide.
Just last Friday, Shiu Prasad, 52, was sentenced for stabbing his wife, Keshni Mala Naicker, as she left the Christchurch rest home where she worked. She died of her injuries in the street.
But like grief, public attention, and therefore media coverage, has a cruel hierarchy. Thousands killed in a flood in Bangladesh may get less attention than a mistreated puppy.
In some ways the dramatic reaction to Millane’s death is easy to understand. Millane is the most sympathetic of victims. Beautiful, barely out of school, educated, adventurous, vulnerable, middleclass and full of promise.
The murder accentuates the vulnerability of young women like her. Thousands of young New Zealanders work and travel overseas before settling down. Thousands more young people use dating apps to meet others in the way Millane did to meet the man accused of taking her life.
The fact she was a guest in a country known for its friendliness and safety also makes her death all the more poignant. As Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said, she should have been safe here.
These obvious explanations, however, fail to account for the various expressions of national grief at her death. Other young tourists have been murdered in New Zealand without much public trauma. We forget their names quickly.
We should also be careful about generalisations and ascribing motivations that say more about ourselves than the communal grief. Perhaps the major factor in the reaction is simple sadness and a wish to share that grief with others.
The murder has tapped into an anger and extraordinary sensitivity about how women are perceived and treated.
The search for the unique factors that have activated the nationwide expressions of grief over Millane’s death must go beyond her relatability. The high emotion is reminiscent of the unexpected British anguish at the death of Princess Diana in 1997.
Some commentators described it as a ‘‘carnival of emotion’’ or ‘‘floral fascism’’, while others saw the outpourings as the healthy expression of sincere emotion that the stoical British would have normally suppressed. One said: ‘‘Britain was not changed by Diana’s death, rather her death revealed what it had become.’’
What New Zealand has become is signalled by another horrific and more recent murder in Australia. In June, comedian Eurydice Dixon was murdered in a Melbourne park by a 19-year-old stranger. Thousands, including Australia’s then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, gathered to mourn her but also to talk about cultural and structural causes of violence.
Although Millane was not a well-known local like Dixon, her death has given similar vent to underlying fury and frustration with violence and other less obvious transgressions against women.
For some her death is an opportunity to express grief at life’s sorrows. Most seem to blame Millane’s death on an endemic male desire for control and dominance.
This conflates sexual harassment, domestic violence and random murder, very different crimes in severity and consequences. But the culprits are overwhelmingly male and I can understand women being sick of it.
It’s not hard to join the dots between other incidents and Millane’s alleged murder. People remember the trials of Louise Nicholas, the girls subjected to the Roast Busters, the young female lawyers harassed at the prestigious law firm Russell McVeagh and the bar in Christchurch in which young women were allegedly drugged and raped.
The murder has tapped into an anger and extraordinary sensitivity about how women are perceived and treated. There is a feeling that despite many gains of the last few decades, the basic right to feel and be safe is still elusive.
Despite knowing very little about the alleged offender in the Millane murder, all men, it is said, are responsible for the environment in which he grew up and therefore share somehow in culpability.
I’m not buying into that but despite this, I felt decidedly uncomfortable this week. I am not going to pretend to feel ashamed for men or devastated at Millane’s death, although with a daughter the same age as her, I feel strongly for her family.
The influences that form a killer, I am sure, do not lie only at the feet of men. But I understand the anger and wonder how you change a society where women continue to feel unsafe.