How women’s fear of sexual violence persists across generations

Opinion: Messages about sexuality change across generations.

I’m in my 50s and part of a generation of women who grew up fearful of strangers but thought that men with power were – somehow – allowed to take advantage of us.

My three young adult daughters grew up in a time of #MeToo
Nevertheless, I share some of the same fear of “foreign danger” as I do. One says she has been spared the experience of sexual assault or workplace harassment, but fear simmers within her if she ever has to walk alone at night.

The youngest, now 18, agrees that it scares her walking around alone in the dark, but also being “hit on” in a bar by “creepy older guys” – and by that she means those in their 30s .

Neither can imagine an experience I shared with them involving an older man at work (read on) when I was a teenager.

Maybe it’s a primal fear of being alone in the dark.

Actress Saoirse Ronan made international headlines after silencing a room full of laughing people as Eddie Redmayne said he had been taught how to use a phone as a weapon during training The Day of the Jackal Role as an assassin.

Fellow actor Paul Mescal asked how realistic it would be to use your cell phone as a weapon if you were attacked. As he, Redmayne, Denzel Washington and talk show host Graham Norton laughed uproariously, Ronan insisted: “That’s something girls have to think about all the time. “Am I right, ladies?”

The audience cheered; The men looked embarrassed.

So I’ve been thinking about this and recent news stories involving the murder or assault of women in a variety of different settings – not to mention the US re-election of Donald Trump, who a civil court has ruled is a rapist. I remember instances that shaped my perspective on what it means to be a woman.

I remember cycling up a hill in Napier with 120 newspapers in the back of my Raleigh 20 when a Mini full of teenagers pulled up next to me. “Hey, pretty girl,” one shouted. “Nice legs.”

I was 14 years old. And in my backpack, emblazoned across Daily Telegraph The front page was a story about a young girl six months older than me who went missing. It was September 1983 and her name was Kirsa Jensen.

She wore a dark green V-neck sweater from Colenso High School and smiled at the school photographer. She was the cover girl of the local newspaper: What happened to that fourth grader (10th grade) who went for a ride on her horse and never came home?

Our town on the edge of the North Island has been caught up in their disappearance. News about Kirsa was played over and over on the local radio station, and she was on the front page of the newspaper I distributed all month long. “Police fear girl is missing,” read the headline.

The boys sped away in the car, the engine screaming. I ignored her. I thought she was harmless because teenage men always laughed and mocked teenage girls – this was a time when sexual harassment wasn’t recognized as a thing.

But I was very afraid of what had happened to Kirsa, who was last seen with her horse at Awatoto, a rugged shingle beach with a deep ditch and strong, hissing waves that we were warned was too dangerous for swimming.

“No sign of Kirsa – foul play feared,” read another headline.

Kirsa and I were in the same year. Her disappearance shocked me and I realized that my emerging sexuality as a young woman could be dangerous. My hometown went from a safe place to a place where monsters lurked. And that person who supposedly kidnapped Kirsa was still at large. I got into the habit of looking over my shoulder and was startled when I heard faint noises, like leaves rustling in the gutter.

The summer holidays came and went and Kirsa had not been found. By autumn it will be Auckland Star reported: “Kirsa’s murderer is walking the streets.” My mother was more worried than my father and often checked on me: where was I, who was I with, when would I be home?

There was further evidence that being a female teenager was threatening. I got a job as a waitress and the married owner gave me a drink after work one evening so I could “relax” and leaned on the bar and tried to charm me. His wife had gone home and he told me I was his favorite waitress.

He was scary, but I didn’t think I could use my voice. He was my boss and I didn’t think I had the right to complain.

Kirsa still hadn’t been found. I was in my final year of high school when a six-year-old girl from Napier went to school in a red raincoat and never came home. Teresa Cormack’s suspected murderer, Jules Mikus, lived in a cottage with a white picket fence that I passed on the way to school. Teresa’s little face with her baby teeth was plastered on the front page of the newspaper for weeks as police searched for clues.

I was a second-year student at Victoria University when 13-year-old Karla Cardno was kidnapped on a street in Lower Hutt as she cycled home from a local shop. The man accused of her murder, Paul Dally, raped and tortured the teenager.

I was taking women’s studies, among other subjects, and was captivated by the news and local media when Karla’s body was finally found six weeks later, buried in a shallow grave near Wellington. I knew a student who was regularly beaten by her boyfriend; something we never talked about because we didn’t know what to do. Karla’s murder gave rise to a police security project – a positive outcome, if you can call it that.

From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, when newsrooms were full of court reporters, stories of rape and murder of women in courtrooms were reported more frequently. Angela Barton, a master’s student in criminology, examined newspaper reports of rape over four years (1975, 1985, 1995 and 2005) for her thesis. It’s The Same Old Story: Depiction of Rape in New Zealand Newspapers (1975 – 2015).

A total of 1,053 rape cases were reported in these years, around half of which were “foreign rape”. Of the four years Barton focused on, 1985 had the most reported rape cases, perhaps because second-wave feminism made rape crimes more visible.

The stories that were more likely to make it into the newspapers were stories about an elderly woman or young girl being raped in their home by a burglar. They had a “shock horror” tone and stuck to the “stranger danger” warning that my generation grew up with.

But some stories about murdered or raped girls and women didn’t make the front pages, and these also left a lasting impression on me.

In my first job as a journalist, I was a reporter for the Bay of Plenty in Tauranga, where he covered the intelligence round and occasionally stepped in to report on crime. In 1992, police announced that a woman’s body had been found in a kiwi orchard in Te Puke. Lana Anne Procter, a 39-year-old barmaid, was kidnapped, raped and murdered by four men.

When the newspaper appeared on newsstands at 2 p.m., I was shocked: the cover story that day was not about the murder of a woman, whose body had been found five days after her murder, but about two men who were shipwrecked and lost at sea were rescued from Waihi Coast. The men’s bearded faces beamed on the front page as they expressed relief at being found.

The disappearance of Judith Yorke was another story reported Bay of Plenty when I worked there. Judy, a 25-year-old single mother of one daughter and young children at the time, went to a party at a packing shed in Matapihi attended by about 30 other people and was never seen again.

Her black shoes were found covered in mud in the orchard. Police believe Judy was murdered, but three decades later no one has been charged in connection with her death, even though the case was featured on television shows like… Crime monitoring And Feel murderin podcasts and in newspaper and magazine reports in which she discusses her disappearance again. This is still a missing person case that is still open.

As a mother who raised my daughters in a time where pornography is ubiquitous and rape drug stories abound, I’ve tried to tell them to be safe without scaring them senseless. However, because we worry about “stranger danger” and fear walking around alone at night, we tend to ignore the most common forms of rape: rapes committed by people who already know their victims as friends, colleagues , partners and family members.

Most people who are raped are silenced because the attack occurs within existing relationships or the perpetrator is known to the woman, such as in the case of rape. According to the Ministry of Justice, around 34 out of 100 New Zealand women will be victims of sexual assault in their lifetime. Another shocking statistic is that only 10 out of 100 victims of sexual violence crimes report it to the police. Of these, according to the ministry, from 2017 to 2022, 42% result in a trial within two years, 13% of perpetrators are convicted within two years (another 17% are pending) and 8% receive a prison sentence (another 1%). awaiting sentencing).

Messages about sexuality may change across generations, but the fear women feel remains constant. If only walking home alone in the dark were the only thing we had to fear.