Nov 24, 2019
Grace Millane’s Trial Shows How Women Are Shamed Even in Death
The British backpacker was blamed for her own murder at the hands of her Tinder date
It shouldn’t need to be said — but apparently it still does. A woman is not responsible for getting herself killed.
This was the debate at the heart of the Grace Millane murder trial which has played out like a spectacle across the news media. The British backpacker, on the cusp of celebrating her 22nd birthday and enjoying a gap year travelling around the world, was brutally murdered by her Tinder date in New Zealand. Her body was found inside a suitcase buried in the woods.
The killer has his identity protected by law. But Grace, although no longer able to defend herself, has had the intimate details of her personal life splashed across news headlines. It is bad enough that her parents had to sit in a courtroom and hear an account of their daughter’s last moments — but they also had to witness the parade of ex-boyfriends who testified to Grace’s private sexual history.
Her murderer’s lawyers used a defense of “rough sex” gone wrong — thankfully, the jury didn’t buy it, given that Grace would have been unconscious for a significant period of time before dying. It shouldn’t need to be said, but an unconscious woman can not consent to being killed. Nobody asks to be choked to death.
The idea that a woman can somehow consent to her own murder is unconscionable, yet it is frequently used in courtrooms to justify violence against women. For more information on this, the British non-profit organisation We Can’t Consent To This tracks the increasing use of “rough sex” defences to the killing or violent injury of women and girls.
Grace Millane’s murder trial points to a larger issue about the way that women continue to be shamed — even when they are clearly the victim. There was no dispute about whether this unnamed man actually killed Grace in a hotel room on that night — what was in question was whether she brought it on herself.
The subtext — perhaps not overtly stated but chillingly present in the reportage of her case — is that Grace should not have been in the hotel room with a man she had just met to begin with.
Any woman who has been on Tinder (which currently claims 57 million users worldwide) is acutely aware of the risks that being alone with a strange man poses — in a way that male Tinder users do not have to be. As Margaret Atwood once said, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
When we go on Tinder dates, we put measures in place to ensure our own safety as much as possible. We text our friends to tell them where we are, we meet men in public spaces and try to assess whether they are a potential love interest — or a potential danger. And yes, sometimes we go home with those men. Sometimes we want to have sex.
A male friend recently told me about a casual hookup where he went to the apartment of a man he met on Grindr, the gay dating app. This was a fairly innocuous anecdote, and he was unprepared for my reaction. I was shocked, not by the idea of a hookup but of going to a stranger’s home: “You didn’t meet him outside first? What if he was a psychopath?”
My friend is over 6 foot tall. He is physically strong. He is not concerned about getting killed by someone on a dating app. This possibility never crossed his mind. It did not factor into his decision-making— but is something that women weigh up every single damn day of our lives.
Each time we walk through a park, come home late at night, get into a taxi, go on a date. Am I putting myself at risk?
The thought that the next Tinder date could end in your death — to reiterate, because a man chose to kill you — is obviously horrifying. But the fear is compounded with the shame of knowing that if this happened, your entire sex life could be smeared across the media in front of the whole world. In front of your parents.
This sense of shame is deeply embedded in women and girls from an early age. My first introduction to sex at my Opus Dei Catholic School was when I was taught that it is better to be dead than raped. I’m not exaggerating: in sixth grade, we were instructed to pray to St Maria Goretti who died at 12 years old because she begged her would-be rapist to kill her instead. She is celebrated as a virgin martyr. Better to be dead than “impure”.
While my upbringing was severe, this is just an extreme variation of the messaging that women are bombarded with throughout our lives. I’m not suggesting that Grace was raped — but the defense used had much in common with a rape trial. The notion that her sexual preferences caused her death is a tool to deflect guilt from the man actually responsible onto his victim.
The narrative created around Grace’s murder is not in any way exceptional. In the last few months alone, we’ve seen women, who were killed by men they were intimate with, reduced to the lurid descriptions “sex worker” and “cheating girlfriend” in tabloid news headlines.
As women absorbing these messages, we are constantly reminded that our lives are only worth as much as our sexual choices. When we choose to go to a hotel room with a Tinder date, become a sex worker, have sex outside of a relationship — we are lessening our own intrinsic value as human beings. And thus, we only have ourselves to blame for the consequences.
Shame is a powerful mechanism for controlling women’s behaviour — and the horror show of Grace Millane’s murder trial is evidence of how the justice system and media are complicit in perpetuating shame, even when a woman is already dead.
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