Opinion: Messages about sexuality shift over generations.
I’m in my 50s, part of a generation of women who grew up fearing strangers but thought men with power were – somehow – allowed to take advantage of us.
My three young adult daughters have grown up in a time of #MeToo yet share some of the same “stranger danger” fear I did. One says she’s been spared the experience of being sexually assaulted or harassed at work but fear bubbles up if ever she has to walk alone at night.
The youngest, now 18, agrees walking alone in the dark makes her scared, but so does being “hit on” by “creepy older guys” – and she means those of around 30 – in a bar.
Neither can fathom an experience I shared with them, involving an older guy at work (read on) when I was in my teens.
Maybe being alone in the dark is a primal fear.
Actor Saoirse Ronan garnered international headlines after she silenced a room full of people laughing as Eddie Redmayne explained he’d been taught how to use a phone as a weapon while training for his The Day of the Jackal role as an assassin.
Fellow actor Paul Mescal asked how realistic it was to think of using your mobile phone as a weapon if you were being attacked. As he, Redmayne, Denzel Washington and chat show host Graham Norton guffawed, Ronan pointed out: “That’s what girls have to think about all the time. Am I right ladies?”
The audience cheered; the men looked awkward.
So, I’ve been reflecting on this and recent news stories involving the murders or assaults of women in a multitude of different situations – not to mention the US re-electing Donald Trump, who is, according to a civil court, a rapist. I find myself remembering cases that shaped my view of what it is to be a woman.
I recall biking up a Napier hill with 120 newspapers strapped to the back of my Raleigh 20 when a Mini packed full of teenage boys pulled up beside me. “Hey, pretty girl,” one called out. “Nice legs.”
I was 14 years old. And in my rucksack, emblazoned across the Daily Telegraph’s front page, was a story about a young girl six months older than me who was missing. It was September 1983, and her name was Kirsa Jensen.
Dressed in a dark green Colenso High School V-neck jumper, smiling for the school photographer, she was the local newspaper’s cover girl: what had happened to this fourth former [Year 10] who had gone out for a ride on her horse and never come home?
Our city on the edge of the North Island was gripped by her disappearance. News about Kirsa was played over and over on the local radio station, and she was front page news in the newspaper I delivered for the entire month. “Police hold fears for missing girl,” the headline read.
The boys sped off in the car, engine roaring. I ignored them. I thought they were harmless because teenage males always tooted and jeered at teenage girls – that was a time when sexual harassment hadn’t been identified as a thing.
But I was terrified about what had happened to Kirsa who was last seen with her horse in Awatoto, a rugged, shingle beach with a deep trench and powerful, hissing swell that, we were warned, was too dangerous to swim in.
“No sign of Kirsa – foul play feared,” another headline read.
Kirsa and I were in the same year group. Her disappearance shocked me into realising my burgeoning sexuality as a young woman could be dangerous. My hometown turned from a safe place to one where monsters lurked. And this person who had allegedly taken Kirsa was still on the loose. I developed a habit of looking over my shoulder, startling when I heard soft noises like leaves rustling in the gutter.
The summer holidays came and went, and Kirsa hadn’t been found. By autumn, the Auckland Star reported: “Kirsa’s killer is walking the streets.” My mother was more worried than my father, and she often checked up on me: where was I, who was I with, when was I going to be home?
There were more clues that being a female teenager was threatening. I got a waitressing job, and the married owner gave me a drink to “help me relax” after work one night, leaned against the counter and tried to charm me. His wife had gone home, and he told me I was his favourite waitress.
He was creepy but I didn’t think I could use my voice. He was my boss, and I didn’t think I had a right to complain.
Kirsa still hadn’t been found. I was in my final year of high school when a 6-year-old Napier girl in a red raincoat walked to school and never came home. Teresa Cormack’s alleged killer, Jules Mikus, lived in a cottage with a white picket fence which I walked past on the way to school. Teresa’s wee face with her baby teeth peered out from the front page of the newspaper for weeks as the police hunted for clues.
I was a second-year university student at Victoria University when 13-year-old Karla Cardno was snatched off a Lower Hutt street as she biked home from a local shop. The man charged with her murder, Paul Dally, raped and tortured the teenager.
I took women’s studies – along with other subjects - and I was glued to 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 up by her boyfriend; something we never talked about because we didn’t know what to do. A police safety project resulted from Karla’s murder – one positive, if you could call it that.
Stories of women being raped and murdered were more commonly reported from courtrooms from the mid-1970s and into the late 80s, when newsrooms were packed with court reporters. Masters criminology student Angela Barton studied newspaper reports of rape over four separate years (1975, 1985, 1995 and 2005) for her thesis It’s The Same Old Story: Rape Representation in New Zealand Newspapers (1975 – 2015).
In total, 1053 rape cases were reported during those years and about half were “stranger rapes”. Of the four years Barton focused on, 1985 had the most reported rape cases, possibly because second-wave feminism were making rape crimes more visible.
The stories that were more likely to make it to the newspapers were when an intruder raped an elderly woman or a young girl in her home. They had a “shock horror” tone and perpetuated the “stranger danger” warning which my generation grew up with.
But some stories about murdered or raped girls and women didn’t make it to the front pages and these, too, made an impact on me.
In my first journalism job, I was a reporter at the Bay of Plenty Times in Tauranga, covering the education round and occasionally stepping in to cover crime. In 1992, the police revealed that a woman’s body had been found on a kiwifruit orchard in Te Puke. Lana Anne Procter, a 39-year-old barmaid, was kidnapped by four men, gang-raped and murdered.
When the paper hit the newsstands at 2pm, I was shocked: the lead story that day was not the murder of a woman whose body had been found five days after she had been killed, but one about two men who were shipwrecked and rescued off the coast of Waihi. The men’s bearded faces beamed from the front page as they shared their relief at being found.
Judith Yorke’s disappearance was another story covered by the Bay of Plenty Times when I worked there. A 25-year-old single mother of one daughter and, then only toddlers, Judy went to a party in a Matapihi packing shed, attended by around 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 on, no one has ever been charged in connection with her death despite the case featuring on TV shows such as Crime Watch and Sensing Murder, on podcasts and in newspaper and magazine stories revisiting her disappearance. It remains a missing person case and is still open.
As a mother who has raised daughters in an era where pornography is ubiquitous and stories about date rape drugs abound, I’ve tried to tell them to stay safe without scaring them senseless. But as we worry about “stranger danger” and fear walking alone at night, there’s a tendency to ignore the most prevalent forms of rape: those committed by people who their victims already know as friends, colleagues, partners, and family members.
Most of those raped are silenced because the assault happens within existing relationships or the abuser is known to the woman, such as in the case of date rape. According to the Ministry of Justice, about 34 in 100 New Zealand women will experience sexual assault in their lifetime. Another shocking statistic is that only 10 in every 100 victims of sexual violence crimes report it to police. Of those, according to ministry findings from 2017 to 2022, 42% result in court action within two years, 13% of perpetrators are convicted within two years, (with another 17% pending) with 8% given a prison sentence (another 1% waiting to be sentenced).
Messages about sexuality might shift over generations, but the fear women experience remains constant. If only walking home alone in the dark was the single thing we had to fear.
