Bogeymen

 Yesterday, I wrote about bully boys (another one resigned this morning - dreadful human being Ian Murray, was called out by Victoria Derbyshire and has now walked or been pushed out of his pram) and today I’m forced to write about their older brothers - the bogeymen.

Fungus - the only nice bogeyman

I’ve been angry for days. Quietly seething about something that I was noticing. 

A few days ago my daughter asked, “What is it about Sarah? It’s huge. Everyone is sharing it!”

I suggested that it was because it didn’t look like your standard missing person case. She wasn’t suicidal and was expected home. 

“We could be looking at another Suzy Lamplugh or there could be another ‘ripper’ ,” I suggested.

She was less than convinced. As a newspaper editor she spends her life trying to get people to engage in the stories that matter. The stories that will make a difference to people’s lives. Missing people stories only do well if the person is a young pretty blond woman. No one cares about the forgetful grandad who has tried to mow the carpet and then disappeared to find his childhood home, which was knocked down and turned into flats years ago. No one cares about the 14 year old black boy who was stolen by a gang to run county lines. No one cares about the Muslim girl that is in hiding from her family because she fell in love with the wrong boy. No one cares about the woman who has been really annoying since her husband moved in with a younger woman. No one cares about the drunk who hasn’t been home in a week. Unless it plays into our favourite narrative of pretty virginal Princess possibly abducted by a bogeyman then we aren’t interested.

As the police started to look for Sarah they issued a warning to all women in the area. 

“ Don’t go out alone,” they said, “The bogeyman is out there. It’s now your responsibility. We’ve told you. If you go missing now, it’s your fault.”

I hate this. Why? Why, does it have to be a woman’s responsibility to avoid the nutters? It should be society’s responsibility to stop the creeps and murderers.

We tell children about the bogeyman, to frighten them. It helps adults maintain control. 

“Don’t go off without me or the bogeyman will get you.”

Adult men grow out of this fear but once a woman reaches adolescence the bogeyman becomes ever more real and present. And women reinforce the idea to each other. 

Now that they’ve arrested someone for Sarah’s murder, women are all over social media telling other women how scared they need to be. We still don’t know about this murderer. We don’t know that he was a stranger to her. He could have been an ex-boyfriend, a neighbour or an uncle. We don’t know if this is a case of our worst fear coming true. We only know that a woman was killed too soon and her family must be in terrible pain.

None of what we don’t know, or even respect for what we do know (her family’s pain) will stop us from repeating the narrative.

What was she thinking? Walking home alone at night? Probably drunk? What was she wearing? You can never be too careful. There are men out there on every corner, in every bush, waiting to jump out and rape you. 

It’s a story we tell each other, again and again. It helps us feel less scared. Women know that men are stronger. We know that we are vulnerable and so to counteract that we tell ourselves stories about how we can stay safe.

The problem is that it’s a lie. There’s nothing we can do. If a man decides to rape and or kill a woman then no amount of care about what you wear, where or when you walk, how many self defence classes you’ve done will stop that happening. It’s dumb luck. Bad luck. 

Every woman has been taught, by society, that if something bad happens to them then they are partly culpable. This doesn’t happen to men. Men are killed out on the streets. They are attacked, beaten up, stabbed while walking home from the pub on a regular basis (more often than women are raped by strangers). No one suggests to men that they shouldn’t walk home from the pub in case some idiot wants to fight them. No one suggests that it was because the were wearing a hat in a particular way that angers attackers. It is just accepted that they were unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. No one’s fault, except the idiot that was out for a fight.

The obvious difference is the idea that a man could protect himself against an attacker and a woman couldn’t. Again, it’s a lie. But it’s a lie that society is happy with because it fits with our favourite stories. 

Social media is full of angry women. They are listing the reasons that men are bad. They are listing all the things women do to protect themselves. 

I wish it wasn’t like this.

I wish I could say that I’ve never walked in fear or that a man has never been creepy, threatening or inappropriate but I can’t. Like most women I have had frightening encounters with creepy men and also been frightened by perfectly innocent men acting normally. The problem with telling us that we need to protect ourselves is that we don’t know who we need to fear. 

My mum was part of an art group. These intelligent, creative, deeply thinking women met once a week and painted together while discussing every topic imaginable. One day when I was a teenager they were discussing the Yorkshire Ripper case. I could taste the fear. It was like the sourest of lemon sherbets sucking at your tongue.

“You don’t walk home through the park on your own, do you?” They asked, sucking their teeth at my admission.

“You should take self defence classes,” they told me before being sidetracked about how they wouldn’t mind if Brian from the Judo school cornered them in a dark alley.

It was during this conversation that someone showed me how to hold my door key between my knuckles when walking, so that I could permanently damage any future attacker.

I took them at their word. Of course I was going to be attacked. Of course it would be my fault if I had walked in the dark, aroused a man’s ardour and not been holding my key properly.

They were trying to help but making the bogeyman real keeps women trapped as children. It stops us living our whole lives and that is a tragedy.