I had a narrow escape from Fred and Rosemary West. The sense of being prey haunts me
Creatures that are hunted need survival strategies. I watched a video clip of a cat seeing off a black bear. Despite the ridiculous size difference, the cat flies at the bear – all ferocity and flashing claws. Small animals turn fear into rage, and sometimes – only sometimes – rage saves them.
These thoughts come to me in the quiet garden of my Wellington home. Sexual assaults have increased in this city by 50% over the past five years. In the news, I read about an appalling killing in London. Women protesting, holding vigils and being beaten by the police as “activists”.
All these things bring back memories of the 70s and 80s in the north of England when the Yorkshire Ripper kept women in a state of fear. Back then, we internalised what it meant to be a prey animal, thought about every move we made.
As young women, we came to realise that our world was a very different place from that of our male friends. A week after the Ripper claimed a victim on the Manchester street my friend lived in, I stood anxiously by his door at the end of the evening. I was hoping he would offer to walk me home. The offer never came. He wasn’t a potential victim, so had no insight into my terror.
In the time of the Ripper, women raged and marched to reclaim the streets. In 2021 the rage comes around again. In London, and here on the streets of Wellington, there is anger and fear. There is a sense that many men, no matter how good and well-meaning, don’t really get it. Women know in a visceral way that to some people, we are prey.
The possibility of being remembered as a victim’s photograph in a twopage spread is real. It could happen to any one of us. I was nearly such a photograph. In my early 20s I narrowly missed getting into a car with the serial killers Fred and Rosemary West. I needed a lift. They stopped and offered me one. But when I looked into Fred West’s eyes, his eyes were full of cruelty. It was like a physical assault that propelled me away from the car.
The sense of being someone’s prey has haunted me. So much so, that years after this encounter, I wrote a novel about trying to survive in a world of predators. In an article in the Irish Times in October last year, I observed that “the weaker amongst us are systematically preyed upon ... [and] the task of evading violation requires wit, luck and cunning”.
The blame for this terror lies only with the men who perpetuate these deeds and never with the victims. While we must still fight to fix systems that show women as consumables, and insist that men take the full responsibility for controlling their worst impulses, we also need to go beyond our fears. We need to find the strength to protect ourselves. A cat can chase off a bear. We often forget that we don’t have to be physically strong, to defend ourselves.
As a very small child I was terrorised by a bully, which prompted my Dad to teach me self defence. He taught me how to break his own grip on my wrists, where to apply the pressure of fingertips to stop a man’s breathing, to twist an arm till he fell to his knees. What I learned was what the cat already knows: a bear will run if you fly at it.
The lessons saved me more times than I can recount. Sometimes I used self-defence skills to overcome men much stronger than myself, other times my confidence put men off. Luck and circumstance were also part of the mix. Over the years I have heard too many stories of violence towards women.
Predators feed on fear. Starve them of it by turning fear into rage, like a cat.