One violent man is to blame for Grace’s death.. no one else
THERE are parents across the globe right now whose hearts will be in their mouths if their children are on a gap year.
The murder of British traveller Grace Millane in New Zealand is dreadful and the grief it has brought her family is beyond measure.
It is natural that mothers and fathers will now be wishing they hadn’t let their youngsters go, that they could cancel their round-the-world tickets and have them home.
Grace was only 22, a vibrant young artist with the infinite possibilities that youth bring stretching in front of her.
But it wasn’t travelling that killed her… or a Tinder app.
And although New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern made a moving apology, there is no “collective shame”.
One man’s violence is responsible for Grace’s death, nothing and no one else.
The judgment has come thick and fast, the inference that Grace was somehow culpable because she was wandering the world solo.
In fact, she made friends along the way and kept in daily contact with her family and it still didn’t save her.
Young women don’t expect to be chaperoned around Britain and they have every right to assume they have the freedom to travel without a “guardian”.
We have raised them to be empowered, to be independent and not be limited by societal expectation.
Travelling alone isn’t any more an invite to be murdered than a short skirt is to be raped.
Young men are just as much at risk, if not sometimes more than women, yet we wouldn’t frown upon them travelling alone.
Parents love their children so much, they are willing to let them go, to experience the world unfettered, to see, to hear, to smell, to feel the rush and wonder of a foreign land.
Grace’s generation have lived managed lives, of being chauffeured to school and friends’ houses, not playing in the street and staying out until it’s dark, so naturally they want to break free.
It is more important now than ever for children, raised in a world suspicious of the “other”, to see that, as they say in Vietnam, we are all the “same, same, only different”. People are people.
I have spent my life travelling, for work and for fun, and nothing I have experienced has made me happier or feel more alive.
Above all, what a traveller discovers is not that there is danger lying in wait but a bounty of kindness and generosity, because the overwhelming majority of people in the world are good and generous.
In a Europe where we are moving to the far right and immigrants are being demonised, it can only be of benefit if we see them as the people we took tea with, who shared food with us on an overnight bus or taught us how to cook pancakes on a fire in a mud hut.
Young people face so much stress now, the pressure to get straight As, to get the right degree, to find a job, to get on the property ladder early and on that career path.
My generation had room to screw up.
We could live in crappy flats and haul our belongings around in bin liners, knowing we could be sensible later and still have a promising life.
For youngsters now, it is a tougher gig, so they deserve to grab the chance to roam, to be unconstrained by plans and goals, to be silly, fall in love, party and explore.
And we must accept that it is impossible to mitigate every risk and to legislate for the anomaly of a human being who wishes another harm.