Island has its own sad record of sex assaults
THE pain, anger and devastation behind the tales of sexual assault survivors in today’s news pages make for a harrowing read.
That they come from women in our island community – our friends, sisters, daughters, mothers and colleagues – is both shocking and shameful.
Behind each account lie years of hurt, questions and fear.
Fear that it might happen again.
A common thread that runs through the accounts is the sense that the attackers acted with impunity, knowing that their chances of facing justice were criminally low.
All too often they were proved right. The women – many just girls at the time – were too stunned, too innocent, to know immediately what to make of the sudden, appalling violence.
Only with time, and the reassurance of good friends, can they come to understand what happened and cast off any sense of blame. The fault lies entirely at the hands of men who, sadly, have almost certainly gone on to wreck other lives.
It is difficult for those who have not experienced such arbitrary violence and powerlessness to understand the fear that many women feel on the ‘safe’ streets of our beautiful island home.
Our crime statistics, like those across the nation, do not reflect the reality of what is going on every day in homes, in public, in nightclubs and even in workplaces. All too often the incidents are not reported, and, if they are, it is years later or the evidence is one person’s word against another’s.
The accounts detailed on pages four and five were gathered by our reporter in a few short hours in response to the national outrage at the killing of Sarah Everard.
As such, they represent just a tiny fraction of the island’s grim record.
It is little wonder then that the abduction of the 33-year-old as she walked home from Clapham Common has provoked many island women into wanting to show their solidarity and reject the notion that such casual, repeated and consequence-free violence is just part of life and can neither be addressed nor mitigated.