When beauty has us shudder
Whose heart did not sink when the first photos of Grace Millane became public? She was lovely. That very realisation, in itself, diminished the collective sense of hope that the missing backpacker, travelling alone, might be okay. Of course it’s hideously unfair that it should be so. But it’s a reaction calibrated against many unhappy, high-profile experiences. And the mounting sense of dread was deepened by reports that she was last seen with a man in central Auckland locations.
We can rail against the massive injustice that attractiveness increases the risk of predation, just as it’s wrong that predation should be a risk in the first place, for any traveller, or woman, or anyone. But a fat lot of good such lamentations do us, let alone Grace.
And look at us now. Pessimism dismally validated, hope cruelly extinguished, struggling to look her family in the eye.
International media have picked up, rightly so, on a sense of national shame that another young tourist, come here with life-enhancing ambitions, as we so ardently encourage people to do, has fallen pray to homicide.
(Her body has been discovered in circumstances that demand that description. Homicide is the killing of one person by another. Not all homicides are murders. Murder is the charge now laid against a 26-year-old man, though as things stand he has been convicted of nothing. The case against him has not been tested. The fact remains that someone killed her.) Comparisons have been drawn between this death and tourist killings such as Dagmar Pytlickova, Karen Elizabeth Aim, Birgit Brauer, Kayo Matsuzawa, Margery Hopegood and Heidi Paakkonen, travelling with fellow victim Urban Hoglin.
Boosters of New Zealand’s international image might highlight that this list reaches back to the late 1980s and should be balanced against an awareness of how many young travellers have moved among us safely and happily during that time. There may also be a generic caution against travelling unaccompanied, as Grace Millane was.
Maybe so. But neither should we forget the less publicised disgraces of non-lethal assaults and abuses that have been inflicted on tourists during this time. For all that we so often get right when it comes to how we treat tourists, we are a society with a violence problem. And we surely know it. Yet we’re more comfortable warning our own young people about what a dangerous world it is out there, than we are cautioning visitors about what a dangerous world we can be, right here. We’re certainly more often to be heard issuing grave messages about the care needed by those who foray on to our mountains or into our parks and waterways, than we are about taking the same care in human interactions – in urban settings just as much as hitchhiking on lonely highways.
As for visitors’ personal responsibilities, it’s like they say: making good decisions tend to come from experience, and experience tends to come from making bad decisions.
Visitors like Grace Millane – young, adventurous, in celebratory life-tasting mode after completing university – won’t always make good choices and cannot always be protected from danger in our midst.
But what we can do, and must, is work harder and more effectively, on making our midst less dangerous. We grow too many predators.
That, right there, is our main problem.
We grow too many predators.