How we love to turn women from victims into villains

What does a woman whose boyfriend has just been murdered in front of her look like? Not like Joanne Lees, if you believe those who relentlessly victim-shamed her following the death of Peter Falconio – and have continued to do so for almost two decades.

Even now, with Bradley Murdoch behind bars, there are those who still point the finger at Lees. Why? Because we like our victims to look and behave in a certain way and Lees didn’t fit the mould. She wasn’t distraught enough. She wasn’t broken enough. She didn’t weep on cue. She wore a T-shirt with an “inappropriate” slogan on the front.

The tears didn’t come easily, she was called “cold”, “distant” and “superior”. Or could she have been traumatised; frozen in a state of survivors guilt?

The Australian police, having treated her with suspicion from the start, monitored her phone calls and offered scant victim support. Little wonder she was curt with the press. Or that she was reluctant to tell her version of events to the cameras. As actress Joanne Froggatt, who played Lees in a 2007 television film, put it: “No wonder she got a bit bitter.”

How quickly “Poor her” can become “She’s hiding something”. How rapidly we turn women from victims into villains. It’s a pattern that has been repeated time and again, with Madeleine Mccann’s mother, Kate, subjected to 13 years of baseless accusation that she had a hand in her daughter’s disappearance, because she failed to show a “suitable” level of emotion at the time.

It’s a feeling Lees must know well. In the end, she was pushed and pushed until, during Murdoch’s trial, she was asked to recreate her escape – kneeling on the courtroom floor, with her hands bound behind her back, while the man who murdered her boyfriend looked on. She then appeared “distressed”, reporters noted.

Yet she wasn’t the one on trial and never has been. Her only “crime” was to have survived.