Time For Women To Stop Fearing The Night

Women’s Voice

Pam Currie

YESTERDAY a newspaper billboard stopped me in my tracks outside Central Station. “Body in garden is Vicky Hamilton”, it read.
Another day, another dead girl - given the high-profile Angelika Kluk murder trial last year, this case will no doubt hold the media spotlight for a few days or weeks before slipping back down the news agenda.
I didn’t know Vicky Hamilton, but that doesn’t matter now. She’s lain dead for over a decade, buried in an unmarked grave hundreds of miles from the West Lothian town she disappeared from in 1991.
Vicky was the same age as me and we grew up some 20 miles apart, in similar small towns in the East of Scotland.
It could have been me standing at a bus stop that evening, eating chips. It could have been my sister, it could have been any one of my school friends.
It didn’t matter - she was simply a nameless, faceless young woman. Any young woman would do.
After her disappearance, the family and police ran a high profile appeal for information.
Vicky’s face appeared on posters, on leaflets in the hairdressers, on milk cartons.
A stark warning to girls and women in Bathgate, in Bonnyrigg, anywhere - you’re not safe.
Stay at home. Don’t talk to strangers. These streets are not your streets.
This case, of course, will have a particularly salacious appeal to the media - an innocent schoolgirl, pictured immaculate in her uniform - an evil paedo, the ‘bad man’ we had already learned to fear.
But the bottom line is that we live in a society where, as Susan Brownmiller wrote in her seminal book on rape in 1975, “all men keep all women in a state of fear”.
We live in a society where, despite the revulsion we feel for men like Tobin, men’s violence against women is normalized and accepted as inevitable.
Murders like Vicky Hamilton’s will attract media coverage because she fits the profile of a ‘good’ victim.
If she was Black, or a sex worker, or hitch-hiking, or in some way ‘asking for it’, then it would be a different story.
Ditto the respectable family man who beats his wife and abuses his daughters - he’s not the bogeyman hiding in the park, to be profiled on Crimewatch and splashed across the tabloids.
Strip away the media spin and it’s the same story: man murders woman. Not, as David Cameron would have us believe, because of the ‘moral slide’ of society, but because we live in a patriarchal society where unequal power relations are about more than just class relations - they are about men’s power over women.
That’s a problem that can’t ever be solved by simply locking up the ‘bad’ men, or even bringing back the death penalty.
It’s a problem that needs a transformation of society - so that women are as free to stand at bus stops at night as men are; so that for once in our lives, we can be free from fear.

London Reclaim the Night March

There was a reclaim the night march last night in London and there is another one in Glasgow on 29th December. Women really do need to re-enforce the idea that we need more done about rape and abuse. We need those convictions to go up in order women feel confident that she will be believed but better than then it would be better if men did not rape and abuse women.

Fighting fear

Until all women stand up together in the struggle against male violence, they will continue to rape, beat and abuse us

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November 23, 2007 4:00 PM | Printable version

To some, feminist activism seems old hat. One of my friends, who has been involved in the women's liberation movement for as long as I have, sneered at me when I asked her if she was coming on this Saturday's Reclaim the Night march through London. The inference was that she had something better to do.

Well there is nothing better I can think of to do on Saturday. If you are planning to watch X Factor instead of marching alongside your sisters, chanting fabulous slogans such as "men off the streets," and "yes means yes, and no means no," consider this. Without feminist activism, rape in marriage would be legal; it would be perfectly acceptable to pay women less than men for the same job and sack them when pregnant; and domestic violence would be considered a normal part of family life. While you open that bottle of wine and put your feet up, more than two thousand of us will be protesting about the atrocities inflicted on women by men and telling men they will not continue to get away with it.

Although it is fashionable to look down on what is thought to be old-fashioned feminism - doing direct action, naming men as the problem, criticising rather than embracing the sex industry - women need to be out on the streets, protesting about sexual violence more than ever.

Despite four decades of campaigning against domestic violence, over 100 women are still killed every year by current and former partners. More rapes than ever are reported but far fewer convicted than the 1970s, and the sex industry is growing at an alarming rate, globally. There are so few convictions for child sexual abuse, it may as well be legal to rape an under-five year old, and sexual harassment in the workplace is still a major problem for women. I could go on.

Male violence towards women and children - yes, male - is pandemic. We must force them to change - to stop raping, killing and abusing us. When I march on Saturday, I will be doing so for women everywhere - even those of you watching X Factor - because sexual violence is the only thing in the world that affects all women, and therefore working towards eliminating it should be something we are all involved in.

Before you start having a go, telling me you have not been raped, or beaten by your partner, or sexually abused, or flashed, let me ask you (women) something. Can you honestly say, hand on heart, that you have never feared rape? Have you never modified your behaviour, even just a little, for fear of being attacked? Remember that time you took a minicab home, alone and drunk? Did you feel relieved the next day that nothing bad happened to you? Or when you walked through a park late at night alone? All women know that if we have not been raped, we are lucky. We are so accustomed to living with the constant, nagging fear of sexual violence that we rarely notice it is there half the time.

So let us stop ignoring the obvious. Until we all stand up together and make ourselves visible in the struggle against male violence, they will continue to rape, beat and abuse us. Let's see you there on Saturday. And men, if you wish to be part of the solution rather than the problem, perhaps you could send the organisers a donation for next year's march? Something tells me we will not have a world free of sexual violence by next November.