Caroline O'Donoghue: 'It’s not our gender or our genitals that unites us. It’s our fear'
'Sarah Everard’s name has been passed between me and my friends so much that a random text saying ‘I can’t stop thinking about Sarah’ has only one possible meaning.'
Last week, I took my dog out for an after-dinner stroll: it had been raining all day, so she hadn’t had much of a stretch. It was half eight, and I took her around a park near my house where people often jog and walk their own dogs. I was out for half an hour, on the phone to a friend for most of the time. I stood at the edge of the park, under a streetlamp, and noticed a man across the road. He seemed to be waiting for someone. He made eye contact with me.
It lingered. I broke away, chatted louder into the phone, told my friend exactly what I was doing and how I would be “home in ten minutes”. Then the man crossed the road so that he was behind me, and he was walking fast. I spoke louder: “No idea where the dog has got to!
Sylv! SYLV!” I started to panic. And then I felt stupid for panicking. The man had only crossed the road after all. He had a right to. In any case, the dog suddenly bolted out of the park and ran at top terrier speed down the road. It was an extremely strange thing for her to do, totally out of character, but I was grateful. Grateful to have an excuse to run away and scream “you stupid dog!” as I did it. She stopped outside a corner shop, and I gathered her into my arms, holding her tight and thanking her for being so clever. I felt a bit dopey about it all night.
What did I really think was going to happen?
The next day, in a different part of London, Sarah Everard went missing while walking home from a friend’s house.
Sarah Everard’s name has been passed between me and my friends so much that a random text saying ‘I can’t stop thinking about Sarah’ has only one possible meaning. There are no other Sarahs at the moment. Just her.
I tell you about the incident with my dog because I can’t think of anything else. My phone is full of friends who are doing the exact same thing: relaying, in great detail, the near-misses or ‘weird vibes’ we’ve chastised ourselves for experiencing. Even now, in the wake of this horrible case, we add caveats. We say things like “and it was probably nothing”. We state the facts of our experience as if giving a statement to the police. One friend said what we were all thinking: “I just didn’t think, at thirty, I was still in the demographic to be snatched.”
In 2017, the news about Harvey Weinstein popularised the #MeToo movement – started by Tarana Burke in 2007 – and led to a global moment where we reckoned with the myriad ways in which women are manipulated, exploited, and assaulted at work. I worked at a feminist online magazine at the time. We talked endlessly about the subtleties of exploitation, and how the kind of assault that is most talked about – the idea of the ‘stranger in the dark alleyway’ – is extremely unlikely. Most victims are assaulted by people they know well. Then something like this happens. And it shakes us. It rattles. You walk around with a combination of fear and incandescent rage.
We can’t believe we still have to put up with this. We can’t believe that the space between International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day has been occupied by one of the most terrifying crimes against a woman who had taken the exact level of risk that any of us would be comfortable taking. We can’t believe that we are being told to never walk without a man so that he may protect us from the instincts of other men. We can’t believe people can victim blame, and we are furious. We say “women shouldn’t walk alone? Maybe men shouldn’t assault them, how about that?” But they do, comes the answer. But they do.
I remember joking to someone on International Women’s Day that I could never get into it, as a holiday. Women are too disparate a group, and lots of them end up excluded by International Women’s Day marketing pushes. “But what if I hate some women,” I said, facetious as you like, bored of emails from bra companies telling me that it was 10% off all styles this Women’s Day. I was taking the piss, of course. But three days later, I look at my social media and my Whatsapp and I think: oh, this is the real International Women’s Day.
The days where we come together, our nerves jangling, our stomachs sinking, our fingers raw from the places where we have bitten away at the skin. And I realise that it’s not our gender or our genitals that unites us. It’s our fear.
