Another Lost Daughter, Friend, Sister, Granddaughter, Colleague: How Much Longer?
The murder of Zara Aleena is shocking. But maybe the facts are being missed in the reporting…
A woman walked home from a night out. She did all the ‘right’ things — having a friend text them, family check up on them, even being ‘covered up’, seeing a friend safely into a taxi, the route she took, she struggled and fought back when attacked. And yet, still another woman is unable to go about her business, leave her home, walk home, get home safely.
And I ask the question — how long must this continue? Why do women have to put up with unsafe streets? She was dragged off the street from her walk home in what should have been safe streets (i.e. around a Tube Station in a big city), attacked from behind, brutally assaulted and violently attacked in someone’s driveway (dragged to the ground, kicked and stamped on) and her belongings strewn along the neighbouring road and gardens. She had 46 separate injuries over 9 minutes.
An aspiring law graduate whom the Law has finally protected by putting their attacker behind bars…and yet why couldn’t she walk home. Why does it matter that it was from a night out with friends at bars, at 2am, that she walked rather than getting a taxi, even her age?
Thankfully passers-by did try to help her, but the horror of this interruption to an ordinary woman’s life is too much. She was raped and beaten to death by a man with violent intent who had already tried to stalk several other women for the same purposes. Those women managed to evade him, this woman unfortunately did not — and yet none of this is their faults, it is entirely his. His was the motivation and intent, his the actions, his the evil purposes, his choices, his disregard for a person, a life.
The vileness of the reporting is in putting her age in or in trying to ennoble or humanise the victim — she was a law graduate with lots of potential, destroyed in an unwarranted attack. But more than that — a woman, a much loved daughter, friend, granddaughter, colleague.
And yet, at the end of the day, none of these descriptors should matter. What matters is that a woman, a human being was hurt, injured, attacked by a man with evil intent. Someone who was clearly looking ‘for a woman to attack’. Whilst better reporting than previously, both media and police still engage in victim shaming and blaming, making all kinds of judgements without evidence and making it harder for victims to get justice. Scathing report condemns police in England and Wales for ‘victim blaming’ in rape cases | Rape and sexual assault | The Guardian
Even the Judge in summoning up the case felt the need to say of the victim “Spending her evening with her friend, she had done nothing wrong, taken no misstep, shown no lack of sense…”
Whilst it must be acknowledged that street violence is statistically a huge (and hidden) issue for young men, the fact that yet another woman has tried to walk home safely and not been able to is a terrible indictment of the vicious society we live in. Streets, parks and urban centres need to be safer now, both day and night— not later. And victims need to stop being blamed for having that drink, wearing that short skirt or long skirt or dress or coat, for taking that route, for making that choice to go home by that way— when it is the penetrator who carries the blame, the intent, the malicious ill-intent, the violent actions, who chooses to destroy and harm.
How can women fight back against all this? One man’s actions over the course of a night —
“While inside a pub with a friend, he had groped a woman and tried to molest a female member of staff before he was kicked out, the court hears.
He later followed and harassed other multiple women in the streets of Ilford, including an unidentified woman who he pursued for 21 minutes.
“He deployed some degree of subterfuge, waiting to get her in front and falling behind when she appeared to notice him,” the judge says.
“The woman may well have realised he was following her because wisely she entered a shop and showed her wariness by looking backwards towards the doorway.””
Society needs to change, now. Not women and their behaviour on the streets.
And too in how it views, supports, deals with domestic abuse: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-63992929
