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.

Rest in Peace Vicky hamilton

GEMMA FRASER (gfraser@edinburghnews.com)

MURDERED schoolgirl Vicky Hamilton was finally laid to rest at an emotional service today, nearly 17 years after she disappeared.

Family and friends gathered to remember Vicky, who was 15-years old, when she was last seen waiting for a bus in Bathgate in February 1991.

Her remains were uncovered at a terraced house in Margate, Kent, nearly three weeks ago.

An eerie silence fell on the picturesque Redding Parish Church, near Falkirk, when Vicky’s coffin arrived, draped in flowers at around 11am.

On one side the flowers were arranged to say “Vicky”, and on the other to say “sister”.

Michael Hamilton arrived in the first of the family hearses, accompanied by other family members. Vicky’s siblings Sharon, Lindsay and Lee, arrived shortly afterwards in a separate hearse and entered the church arm-in-arm, each carrying a red rose.

Inside, the Rev Geoffrey Smart said a “battle against evil” had been lost on the day Vicky died.

He described Vicky’s murder as a “cruel, callous and evil act.”

He said: “We come to remember Vicky as she was – a young girl with her whole life ahead of her, who was taken from us by this terrible act of evil.

The church was completely packed out with mourners, with all the pews filled and people standing in every available space.

Vicky’s siblings Sharon, Lee and Lindsay were sitting together at the front of the church. Her fatherMichael was at the front on the other side of the aisle.

The church organist was playing a version of I Will Always Love You, by Whitney Houston. The minister continued: “Vicky was a much loved daughter, sister, granddaughter, half sister and niece.

“She has been sorely missed by all these relatives all and the rest of her family and friends over these years.”
Vicky’s family said her disappearance had “ripped the family apart”, but were comforted by the fact they could now lay her to rest.

The minister added: “Her family were robbed of seeing Vicky grow up as all their hopes and expectations for Vicky’s future were taken from them.

“The judicial process will go on and help give some peace to all who mourn Vicky’s tragic and distressing death.

“As Christians, we are meant to have a forgiving spirit, yet forgiveness is a two-way street and we have seen no signs of contrition either for the evil deed or for putting a family through the hell of these last 16 years of uncertainty, worry and fear, which also caused the untimely death of Vicky’s mum.

“So today all we can do is thank God that throughout this time of uncertainty and fear Vicky was safely in His loving hands.

“Yet before this Vicky was forced to face something that nobody should ever have to face, especially a young, vulnerable teenage girl.”

However, he added: “We must not dwell on this today, but try to see beyond its darkness and focus on the light of our Christian belief, which tells us that Vicky is safe and secure in heaven, together with her granny and her mum, in order that God’s gracious love might take from us any feelings which might undermine our own lives.

“When we are able to do this we stop such evil from gaining any kind of victory over us, as we unite in God’s love.”

A young man dressed in full military uniform and ceremonial white gloves stood outside the church to greet mourners, including Vicky’s uncle Eric Hamilton.

Mourners laid wreaths and flowers on the grass outside before entering the church while people stopped in the street to watch.

The minister said: “Today, let us all find resolution and peace as we give Vicky her Christian service and burial in order that you can then move on in your lives.

“Jesus brought the light of God’s love to humanity in many different and powerful ways when He walked this earth, and through His Spirit He still does this today.”

He paid tribute to the “bright bubbly girl” who was a popular pupil at Westquarter Primary School and Graeme High School, and thanked “the people of Scotland” on behalf of Vicky’s family for their support since her disappearance. During the service the mourners sang All Things Bright and Beautiful and How Great Thou Art, and Westlife’s You Raise Me Up was played at the request of Vicky’s father, Michael.

The cortege then passed her old house on its way to New Grandsable Cemetery, near Vicky’s former home on Ward Avenue, Redding, in a plot where her father also wishes to be buried.

At Vicky’s graveside, Mr Smart said: “We gather to commit Vicky’s body to the ground, knowing that after her death some 16 years ago, Vicky’s immortal soul lived on in God’s eternal Kingdom of love.

‘The souls of the innocents are in God’s hands, no torment will touch them, for they are at peace.

“Almighty and ever loving God, Your beloved Son, Jesus Christ longed for us to know how we should live and love and grow, and chose a young person to show us some glimpses here of heaven.

“When youngsters suffer pain and cry and lose their hold on life and die, while we must grieve and wonder why Christ keeps them safe in heaven.

“So we give thanks to God for Vicky, now silent to the world, yet all these years, with her hand in hand in Christ’s, her Lord, and with her mum and her granny, Vicky has lived on in heaven.

“Lord, tell Vicky how we’ll always care, and miss the years we longed to share, until in answer to our prayer, we meet Vicky again in heaven.”

Vicky’s remains were found alongside those of 18-year-old Dinah McNicol, from Essex, buried in the garden of a house in Margate, Kent. Peter Tobin, 61, has been charged with Vicky’s murder.