Belt and braces approach

'We are not a papers-carrying country.'

Having said all this in various outlets, I knew thanks to my membership of Kate’s friendship group that none of it addresses women’s fear or their desire to be safe. It’s not just getting murdered that women fear. They fear being raped. Men make them feel uncomfortable. Men yell at women as they drive past, or follow them as they walk home, catcalling, whistling, yahooing.

In one interview, I fell back on research done by evolutionary biologists and psychiatrists indicating that women as a class are at the sharp end of a wider problem. That is, a significant minority of men (as many as a third of young men, remembering peak criminality occurs between the ages of 15 and 30) engage in overt behaviour falling short of the criminal threshold that is nonetheless intended to establish dominance over those with whom they interact, particularly in public places.

It’s directed against people who are perceived as weaker, so many men and a majority of women. It’s a form of behaviour that was nearly universal and was also once adaptive. It’s a reminder that we’re still the same homo sapiens we were 100,000 years ago and we’ll be waiting a long time before things change. In the modern world, it’s maladaptive for society in general, women in particular, and arguably the men themselves: masculinity of that type and the behaviour that goes with it is essentially useless. In developed countries, those men are landed with criminal records or otherwise shoved back in their box, often in the form of lifelong unemployment and welfare dependency.

Meanwhile, women are afraid, because they cannot tell which cases will escalate, even if intellectually they know actual violence is rare. Facts may not care about your feelings, but feelings have better lobbyists. And, now, they (we) have two dead girls to which we (they) can point, two graves ringed round not only by quotidian fears, but with rocks, and stones, and trees.