Six strong drinks in ten minutes, a vile murder and a troubling truth young women MUST confront
SHE was a stunningly attractive, vibrant, middleclass girl with laudable aspirations to become a paramedic. India Chipchase seemed to have it all — a wide social circle, a handsome boyfriend, a loving family.
The privately educated 20-year-old’s mother described her as ‘beautiful inside and out’: she cared about people, hence her hopes of following her doctor father into the medical profession after a diploma in health and social care.
But, like most girls her age, India loved to party. And it was that, tragically, India set out to do when she headed off with friends to Northampton nightclub NB’s on the evening of Friday, January 29.
At 12.15am the following morning, she was filmed on the club’s security cameras having downed an astonishing six megastrength Jagerbomb cocktails — more of which later — within just ten minutes.
Put plainly, she was drunk — and terribly vulnerable.
Having become separated from friends, she decided to go home and staggered outside, where she made the fateful mistake of accepting a lift from a stranger, who claimed he was a taxi driver and who assured her: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you home safely.’ By 3am, India was dead. This week, predatory fantasist Edward Tenniswood, 52, was convicted of raping and murdering India, who had suffered 33 injuries to her face and head.
The death of this innocent young woman following a night out with friends has shocked everyone who read the details of her brutal killing.
That Edward Tenniswood, who has been sentenced to life imprisonment, is a man of untold evil is without question.
But behind the horror of the night that claimed an innocent girl’s life, there is also a series of troubling questions.
Not least how and why a much-loved, clever young woman with a glittering future ahead of her could have put herself in mortal danger by drinking to such excess in the first place.
A friend of hers broke down in court this week, describing how India appeared ‘very drunk’ and had started ‘walking wonky’ before vanishing from the bar.
Her friends searched ‘everywhere’ for her, but assumed she had gone home. She was, they said, ‘steaming’.
The sight of inebriated young women falling, often literally, out of nightclubs up and down the country has become a depressingly regular one in recent years. After all, in a world where women can and do compete with men on every level, they will be damned if they are left behind in the drinking stakes.
BuT unlike young men who may get into drunken fights or stumble out in front of a car, it is a wretched, but unavoidable, truth that women who have drunk themselves into an almost comatose state are in a much more vulnerable position.
Let me be completely clear: I’m not blaming the poor girl, nor her friends who got separated from her, nor her devastated parents.
India — though tragically wrong — probably felt safe as she left the club. After all, it wasn’t far from her home in the upmarket Wootton area of Northampton where she lived with her mum, brother Harry, 18, and sisters Pia, 15, and Lou Lou, 12.
But how did we, as a civilised society, sleepwalk our way into a situation where dangerous levels of insobriety are now the norm among our young women?
How have we come to the point where downing highly potent drinks such as Jagerbombs — a mix of Jägermeister (a German digestif containing 35 per cent alcohol) and Red Bull, an energy drink with high levels of caffeine, which accelerates the feeling of inebriation by both slowing and then accelerating the heart rate — is part and parcel of a night out, even among educated women?
And when, exactly, did we step away from our moral duty to warn these young women of the true dangers of excessive alcohol consumption? That the consequences of a drunken night out can be infinitely more terrifying than a head full of throbbing regrets the following day.
The fact is that women should be free to dress as they please and to drink what they like. But with freedom and equality comes the need for self-responsibility.
And it is a depressing and too often forgotten fact that there are all too many inadequate, violent, predatory men actively seeking to take vile advantage of the vulnerable and defenceless.
On one level, a great deal of blame must lie with the pubs and clubs that so greedily offer ‘buy-one-getone-free’ deals in an attempt to lure in customers.
Incredibly, the nightclub where India spent the last hours of her life is still brazenly promoting its range of cheap drinks, offering a discount card called the ‘Wild Card’, which it promotes with the slogan ‘unleash your wild side’.
With this, customers can buy three Jagerbombs for £5 or a £10 Cocktail Fishbowl, in which a large bowl is filled with a bottle of spirits and straws, which, its website says, ‘you can share with friends’.
It continues: ‘We’ve got cocktails that will put a smile on your face, shots that you’ll regret straight away but you’re guaranteed to always come back for more.’ Tragically in India’s case, she didn’t.
Among those on the receiving end of the carnage that follows nightclub offers such as these are the country’s mini cab drivers.
THIS week, I spoke to a London taxi driver about India’s murder. A father of two teenage daughters, he regularly sees women in various states of alcoholic disarray. ‘I’ve lost count of the number of girls I’ve seen coming out of nightclubs alone in Leicester Square at two or three in the morning so drunk they can’t even tell you where they live, let alone their names.
‘I don’t just worry for them, I worry for my own daughters, about the whole drinking culture. I worry about the trouble ahead for me and my wife.’
That taxi driver is right to have concerns. In 2014, a study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that British girls are more likely to get drunk than those in almost any country in the Western world.
The OECD examined 27 nations and found that the uK was among just seven nations where teenage girls were more likely to get drunk than boys of the same age.
As any city centre on any weekend of the year can testify, the evidence is all around us. Class or intellect is no barrier here.
Even the most celebrated universities actively encourage extreme drinking from the outset. Freshers’ week at many universities is awash with lewd drinking games that leave many newly-joined undergraduates barely capable of speech or movement.
Meanwhile, Oxbridge colleges hold matriculation dinners for their freshmen and women, which are as drink-sodden as they are formal.
Every year, the list of young women maimed or killed after drinking too much grows longer.
Last November, Caroline Everest, a science undergraduate in her first year at Sheffield Hallam university, died on her way home from a nightclub where she had spent the previous hours drinking up to 30 shots of vodka.
Like India, Caroline, 18, left the club alone in a state of ‘extreme intoxication’. The inquest heard how she ended up sharing a taxi
with a man she had never met. In this case, he is innocent of anything that followed.
CCTV footage later showed Caroline sitting on a wall before walking into a shallow brook. Her body was found in the river two days later.
The causes of death were hypothermia and immersion in water, with acute alcohol intoxication. Caroline was more than three times the drinkdriving limit. The coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death.
Of course, more common are the girls who live to tell the tale — or rather who would, if only they could remember it. For there is a deeply worrying rise in the number of young women whose claims of rape are being dismissed by courts on the basis that they had drunk too much to remember what actually happened.
Shortly before her retirement in 2014, Judge Mary Mowat criticised rape victims who drink too much, saying that rape conviction rates would not improve until women stopped drinking so heavily.
A circuit judge of 18 years in Oxford, Judge Mowat admitted that she expected to be ‘pilloried’ for linking drunkenness with rape.
She duly was, with feminist campaigners branding her views as ‘outrageous, misguided and dangerous’. Yet quite how her wise, if politically incorrect, words of warning could possibly be more dangerous than the fates that befell the young India and Caroline escapes me.
Only last month, another judge was forced to criticise the drinking culture in the Armed Forces after a naval cadet was cleared of raping a drunken colleague after a military ball.
So how did this sorry state of affairs begin? Yes, women of my generation — these girls’ mothers, aunts and friends — drank too much at times. But never with such a sense of mindless nihilism.
A cheap bottle of white was our ‘poison’, but in the mid-Nineties the spirit industry grew wise to the rise of young women who were not sophisticated enough for wine yet too calorie-conscious for beer. The result was the ‘alcopop’ — and it took the nation’s nightclubs by storm.
At the same time, images of women drinking on TV and film became all the more prevalent.
From Bridget Jones getting hilariously drunk on her own to Sex And The City’s Carrie Bradshaw, bar and bed-hopping after a few too many Cosmopolitans, suddenly all the poster girls for female emancipation had a glass in their perfectly manicured hands.
How quaint those drinks seem now when compared with today’s poison of choice among the young — the sickly and lethal Jagerbomb.
JAYDE DINSDALE, 19, from Yeovil, Somerset, nearly died from a Jagerbomb session in the summer of 2014, after three heart attacks left her collapsed on the bathroom floor and needing to be resuscitated with a defibrillator.
Like many young women, her binge was the result of a local bar’s ‘two-forone’ offer.
But while it may be easy to blame the excessive drinking of today’s young women on exploitative bars and nightclubs, there are other culprits, too.
For, as uncomfortable as it sounds, perhaps it is time for the older generation to look at themselves and wonder if they, too, have not been found wanting.
Last December, a YouGov survey found ‘Empty Nester’ mothers were at the forefront of the middle-aged drinking epidemic in Britain, with 28 per cent of women over 45 admitting they drank as much or more than their grown-up children.
Is that really a shining example to be setting? Not so much ‘do as I do’, but ‘do what I say’.
Or perhaps, in many cases, today’s parents are turning a blind eye to their daughters’ drinking, believing it to be essentially harmless, a rite of passage.
All that we can be sure is that India’s loving upbringing offered no protection against recklessness: her private education made her no wiser to the dangers of drinking to oblivion.
This is, of course, no comfort for her devastated father Jeremy, who so poignantly said her family had been robbed of a lifetime of precious memories. As indeed they have.
He will never see his beautiful daughter married, never ‘walk India down the aisle’.
Yet her heart-rending death might just yet serve to remind us all that, even at the mature age of 20, our daughters still need tough love.
We must tell them when they’re behaving stupidly and dangerously — however unwelcome or unfashionable that might seem.