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Masa Vucovic, Jill Meagher and now Eurydice Dixon – three young women who lost their lives in Melbourne. Their headline names are known better than many other, equally innocent victims killed or brutalised for the same reason: they were women. They were daughters, sisters, partners of loving men, each unfortunate to have met their killers in a park, on the fitness run, or simply while strolling home.All were killed by human garbage, bipedal filth whose lusts knew no bounds. Their lives were extinguished for reasons which, to any decent man, are abhorrent, disgusting and inspire only contempt for their attackers. The sooner and the longer they are consigned to prison and left there to rot the better.
I do not wish to be unkind to Victoria Police, but the legacy of former chief commissioners who turned the force into a blue-uniformed social work department — guard dogs re-trained as comfort dogs — lingers like a fog to hide and obscure what should be every law enforcement agency’s primary mission to protect life and property. When push-in robberies see sporting goods stores sell out of baseball bats while senior police convene multiculturally photogenic community summits and burble of outreach to disaffected youths, the public isn’t getting the protection it is entitled to expect and the police force duty-bound to provide.
Not that senior police are alone in refusing to grasp the nettle of their chartered responsibility, for others are equally keen to push preferred barrows. When Jill Meagher was raped and butchered, Melbourne’s Sydney Road was packed with a protesting crowd, most of whose members would have turned out in the belief that such crimes must be stopped and that, unlike her murderer and serial rapist Adrian Ernest Bayley, their perpetrators must not be set free by the courts. What they attended turned out to be something very different — a denunciation of “victim blaming”, which no one had done, and a demand that “men”, all men, be reformed, not just the tiny minority of testosterone-infused monsters who make late-night parks unsafe.
These mass marches and their motherhood statements about reclaiming the night and the streets have no impact except for the psychotherapeutic relief they bestow on those who feel the need to be seen doing something, anything. To whom are their high-sounding words and demands directed? Doting fathers of little girls and loving brothers, normal men in other words? Those males of the species don’t rape or kill women and need no further encouragement not to do so. Is it criminals who are meant to pay heed? They couldn’t care less, which is why they are criminals in the first place.
Our politicians, up to and including the Prime Minister, mouth platitudes and inanities, in large part to cover their own deficiencies of leadership. Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, for example, claims to want a changes in men’s behavior. How glad must he be that such an amorphous, generalised demand squeezes from the headlines any attention to the increasing lawlessness which has marked his stewardship of the state?
Were Mr Andrews serious there is something useful he could do: make legal non-lethal means of self-defense. We have to recognize reality and accord our women a chance of being able to protect themselves. This change of our laws will make sure that our girls are capable of resisting the violence, should the necessity arise. These might be Taser-type devices, pepper sprays, compact tear gas canisters or GPS-connected devices that alert police to hasten to the scene as a matter of the greatest urgency* (see editor’s note below). These devices, while by no means guaranteed to ward off an attack, will increase the chances of repulsing an attacker. Even if safety’s improvement is only minimal, it would still be an improvement.
Please, consider my proposal before recoiling in righteous horror at the notion that every individual deserves not only the right to defend themselves but also the means to do just that. Before you say Mace could be used as an offensive weapon, not just a defensive one, and that it should remain illegal, imagine your wife/daughter/sister being stalked and pounced upon as she walks home in the darkness of a Melbourne winter. Would you rather see her with no deterrent or protection at hand, or would the thought that she had a can of Mace in her handbag bring some comfort? If you are a normal father, son or husband the answer is a foregone conclusion.
Vicious attacks on women will not be vanquished by street marches, politicians’ moronic platitudes, speeches lamenting the “sexist conditioning” of boys, mounds of flowers and regular eruptions of public grief and outrage. Nor will taxpayer-funded TV ad campaigns attributing violence against women to fathers telling their sons not to “throw like a girl.” It is no universal guarantee of safety, but a criminal aware his potential victim might be packing something that will spoil his sick fun might stop such an attack, perhaps many attacks. This a realistic way to keep our women safe, unless we want them to be accompanied by a trusted male everywhere and at all times. If we are serious about the gender equality, we must be serious about the freedom of women to move about unmolested.
Please, Premier Andrews, give our women a chance to protect themselves. You can spout your guff about the better education of boys the next time you address a Labor women’s gathering. After that, with Mace in the pockets, your audience can head home with perhaps a greater sense of safety.
Editor’s note: Michael Galak is kidding himself if he believes Victoria Police would respond with alacrity to a handbag’s GPS alarm and tracker. Two years ago, late at night on the corner of Dynon and Kensington roads in Footscray, a green Hyundai, driven by what was most likely a drug-addled lunatic, missed a turn, bounced off the online editor’s bullbar and stove in the front-quarter panel of the adjacent car waiting beside his vehicle at the lights. The driver then did a U-turn against traffic, forcing another vehicle off the road and almost into tree. He sped off after that, but wouldn’t have gone far as a trail of water indicated a ruptured radiator.
It took almost five minutes before the triple-zero operator patched an emergency call through to North Melbourne police station, where a young constable advised that no divvy wagon would be dispatched to the scene as none were available. “No one’s hurt, right?, and nothing’s burning, eh?”
When the officer was advised that the fugitive driver must be somewhere relatively close at hand, given the state of his radiator, he responded that he was there to take details, not investigative advice, and that if the online editor expected his “help” he had better keep a civil tongue in his head.
Upon being asked if he was former VicPol Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon’s nephew, he hung up.
Such is policing in Victoria.
Any weapon that can be carried by a woman (or a man for that matter) for self-defence, be it a knife, a pistol or a can of Mace is as likely as not to be taken from them by a determined attacker and used against them.
The ridiculous “vigils” and other blatant virtue-signalling displays of mass hysteria will not help one iota to solve the problem of predatory males attacking weaker targets. They have existed since time immemorial and can only be controlled not entirely eliminated as a threat. White Ribbon drivel, more futile self-indulgent virtue-signalling, is still nothing but drivel. Blaming all men for the actions of a tiny minority is simply a measure of the profound stupidity of most radical feminists for which there appears to be no remedy.
The only effective defence against these predators is for women to revert to the habits of their grand-mothers: dress and behave modestly, do not drink to excess or take drugs, and avoid as far as possible walking alone in dark places. Unless the police are given swingeing powers to arrest and detain all men on suspicion of being male, they have no power or authority to prevent these assaults, only to arrest the perpetrators after the crime has been committed. Good luck with that.
Hadn’t read your response before writing mine, but ‘hear hear’.
I was going to say much the same thing. I fear that any weapon I might carry could be used on me.
Generally, a man intent on evil doesn’t need to take any weapon I might be carrying to use against me. He’ll have brought his own.
The greater problem is that we are dissuading toughness in policing, sentencing and attitude and encouraging softness, understanding (that which is not understandable) and forgiveness, ditto.
Most females are discouraged from birth to be other than kind and gentle. Even carrying a can of mace, some will have trouble doing what it takes to be defensive, even the television advertisements portray us as helpless.
Now that Lo just hits the nail on the head.
We all have a right to go about without being set upon.
In the face of powerful and aggressive attackers we are all pretty vulnerable.
To see our politicians lining up at trowel power demos expressing righteous outrage but not doing jack to actually enforce stricter policing of criminality and prescribing tougher Justice through our courts is the real outrage.
When will these fools actually do things that they are supposed to do.
Protect us, that’s what they are paid to do. Everyone of the gutless wonders should resign.
In my opinion, one of the big lies put about by politicians and the media is that it is the role of police forces, ooops, services (more PC nonsense) to “protect” the citizenry. It is extremely naïve to actually believe that such a role is practicable in our modern western democratic societies where fundamental freedoms are constitutionally guaranteed. With the best will in the world and all the resources that our society is prepared to pay police forces to deploy, for the most part crime prevention can only be passive. Criminals can only be deterred by fear of being caught and punished, because there never has been, nor ever will be, sufficient boots on the ground to prevent crime by police presence.
I agree that our politicians have effectively allowed the criminal justice system to atrophy to a point where it is a standing joke. The media has been complicit in this. The blatant criminality of the leadership of much of the trade union movement is effectively swept under the carpet by the media. Certain ethnic groups ride roughshod over.the Rule of Law as if it never existed, because for them it never has existed, and to draw attention to that is to be hounded almost literally to death (viz Bill Leak) as a racist.
It’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better, but the cops are the least of problem.
It’s all an ostentatious proxy for the fact that we are all expected to look away from the fact that the state is not in control of law and order and that through voluntary capitulation to the Left most in the judiciary believe that people deserve to run free (like Elsa in “Born Free”) because they themselves are victims. Distract the masses with symbols and hopefully they won’t notice the first degree negligence of the State. Uh oh; I don’t think so.
I’m glad one of the Quadrant contributors saw fit to comment on Eurydice Dixons’s rape and murder, if only because it allows ordinary members of the public (i.e. non twitter, non Facebook users) to comment.
For a start, I don’t think Mr Galak aids his argument in using excessive language (‘All were killed by human garbage, bipedal filth whose lusts knew no bound’) not that one lacks sympathy for Jill Meagher (in particular) or Eurydice Dixon, but what the hell was the latter doing walking through a park, alone and at night? The fact that she texted her boy friend that she was nearly home ‘safe’ suggests she had some inkling walking through the park might not have been such a good idea.
There has been so much focus on ‘not blaming the victim’ we have lost sight of something called common sense, so much so that police warnings that walking in dark places, where people with common sense fear to tread, is in itself held up to the charge of ‘blaming the victim’.
I may be wrong, but the whole ‘reclaim the night’ mentality is based on a figment out of La La Land. Way back when I was a child (a very long time ago) girls were routinely tutored by their infinitely wiser parents about the dangers of going out alone at night. Go back just a blink in time and you’ll find that women were routinely chaperoned whenever they went out; it was even more rigid in Jane Austin’s day. My feeling is that the times were far from being more dangerous that 21st Century Melbourne, but that society understood women were more vulnerable than men; not as physically strong as men; and therefore more in need of protection as men. Unfortunately the age of ‘equal opportunities’ seems to have lost sight of this.
I’ll say one thing for Mr Galak’s argument, in that he restricts his condemnations for the perpetrators of the rapes and murders rather than men in general, in the way Daniel Andrews and even our sensitive sausage of a prime minister do. The two women murdered were killed by predators, Galak wishes to uses the animal analogy, nevertheless, predators they appear to have been: the vast majority of men are not.
I’d say that since my youth, a lot of the night has been reclaimed. Railway stations are properly lit, PSOs abound, trains are both well lit and well used (indeed, if you’re going to get steamed or robbed or just bothered on a train, it’s more likely to be during the off peak hours of the day) and street lighting is excellent. That’s been the situation for about 30 years, so far as I can recall. I don’t feel unsafe on the train, or walking in commercial streets (often full of restaurants) or well lit semi-main residential streets, and neither, it would seem, do dog walkers and late homecomers of both sexes (can I say that?) and all ages from late adolescence on. But I choose my suburb and I choose my route. Reminding everyone to do that isn’t such a bad thing, and especially when there is a known perp on the loose, telling women, men, children, anyone not to go unaccompanied into the specific area where he is operating is a reasonable and necessary thing for the police to do. No judgment cast on the victim in any case–just words of prudence for the rest of us.
I’d agree with all that you have said, particularly the choice of suburbs and routes. Eurydice, as you no doubt know, walked alongside a park and next to a playing field. I suspect the critical part of her route would have been unlit. Blame the victim? Well . . . no, but what was driving the apparent attitude of invincibility, and then the incongruity of the final word in her text message: ‘safe’?
What does steamed mean?
“For a start, I don’t think Mr Galak aids his argument in using excessive language (‘All were killed by human garbage, bipedal filth whose lusts knew no bound’)” quoth Warty.
Do you have a better description? Perhaps something more nuanced?
Honoured ‘old sailor’. I’m more of the ‘casting the first stone’ ilk. It seems to me that the mob lynchings of previous centuries, were perpetrated by people who regarded those they hanged in similar terms (‘human garbage’ ‘bipedal filth, whose lusts knew no bounds’). I may be mistaken, but I would argue that the more civilised fella would allow the justice system to run its course. Yes, I know, Victoria is rather compromised when it comes to its legal system.
“but what the hell was the latter doing walking through a park, alone and at night?”
Back in the good old days, not so long ago, my children could play outside till 9 pm in the summer holidays and nobody would even think of harming them. The same applied to adults, male or female so, Warty old mate, don’t even think of suggesting that somebody, male or female, should not go here or there at any time of the day or night, dressed in anything you might disagree with.
Les, I think it was the Melbourne Lord Mayor, a woman, who admitted that she wouldn’t be happy going out at night. Janine Perrett said on the Paul Murray Show, a couple of nights ago that there were suburbs and areas she wouldn’t dream of walking through at night. She too pointed out that her family would leave their doors unlocked when she was a child. In the ‘good old days’ there were a good many things a good many of us used to be able to do that we can’t do today. It is this day and age we are talking about, not yesterday, not fifty or more years ago, when the women I knew were a lot freer to move around as they wished.
Now, I am not a muslim, so I didn’t mention anything about the way women should or shouldn’t be dressed: that may have been a slight projection on your part, but I do say that the reality is that there are areas that women ought not to walk alone at night, and this has nothing to do with libertarian issues, just a matter of stark reality. I’d also like to shelve the equal opportunity bit too: I was talking about women, not ‘male or female’ as you imply. The overwhelming danger is with regards to women, because they are more vulnerable.
And the fact that it is women who are more vulnerable, does not mean that men as a whole have to change their attitudes, as Daniel Andrews, Turnbull and a few others suggest. I don’t know where you live, Les, but I could ‘sugges’t dozens of areas around Sydney, where ‘somebody, male or female’ (though I was talking about women) most definitely ought not to go unaccompanied after dark, indeed, even if they were accompanied by anything other than an army of men.
We live in something approaching a dystopian world today: the good old days are the fancies that fill the dreams of older men like me.
“Approaching”? This is you, Warty!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0DusO6ipLw
Are you calling me a transvestite, Jody? The ‘cockeyed optimist’ appears to be a woman.
As for the ‘approaching’, Peter Hitchens wrote an article for the UK Spectator (I was alerted to it via the Catalaxy Files) which would seem to invite all conservatives to collectively slash their wrists; and yet the news coming out of Europe, with regards to the rise of the right, leaves one feeling quite optimistic after all. The fly in the ointment here, is that Australia is still waddling barefooted in the mangroves, sludge squelching through our collective toes, without the wherewithal to drain it.
I can see your point and my point is exactly like yours in that, this country has been degraded by successive, delinquent governments and we, the electors, who send them to their respective parliaments have allowed them to do it. We said very little when John Howard introduced gun control which is, in fact, a disarming of the nation. We are now defenceless in our own homes and are told to behave like good little victims or else. Even now we regard him as one of the greatest Prime Ministers.
Indeed.
I used the money Honest but Foolish John gave me for my 5-shot .44 Magnum semi-automatic to buy a 9 shot lever-action of the same caliber and as those who watched “The Rifleman” know, an expert can aim and fire a lever-action almost as fast as a semi-automatic, and with 4 more bullets, I’d call it a draw. Except I had enough left over for a nice dinner and wine for 2, so I won.
My 5-shell pump-action went, but I bought a coach-gun and another dinner and wine with the money.
HbFJ allowed me to keep my other 2 shotguns and 3 .22s, and top of the list, my Winchester Model 70 .458 Magnum (bullets cost $5-10 EACH, depending on specs), which has a kick like a mule.
They are all still legally in my Oz steel safe.”(A) disarming of the nation”; I don’t think so.
Quote: “When push-in robberies see sporting goods stores sell out of baseball bats…”
In SA it was (and I assume still is) illegal to have a baseball bat, or anything, for the purpose of self defence, even in one’s own home, and at my age it was a bridge too far to claim I played ball, so I bought a pick handle to replace the worn one in the shed, but never got around to doing that, or even taking it outside.
Well before that, around 40 years ago, SA had the “Norwood Stabber”, a lawyer as it turned out, who lurked late at night in the dark and stabbed suitable passing pedestrians – no one every saw him clearly, let alone was able to identify him; he just stabbed once and disappeared. No one was killed, and only the lawyer knows whether that was by intent or luck.
The police issued warnings not to walk at night in the area and the back streets were pretty well deserted – no loopies taking umbrage at sensible advice back then. I lived at Norwood and I’ve always been an outlier, so each night about 10 or 11, I would walk alone for an hour or two, slowly, stepping slightly left to right as if swaying, around the dark areas of Norwood, unarmed but ready, eager and able, hoping to entice him to select me.
Never did, but the police got him; the Police Superintendent in charge of the case was one of my students and reckoned it was a pity I’d not succeeded. Very different times.
> ” … at my age it was a bridge too far to claim I played ball …”
I have a well-weighted golf putter placed strategically inside my front entrance. If I ever have to use it, it will become instantly more valuable than the 1.5 million missed putts in my life.
I can claim I still play golf with a good degree of honesty – just not very well.
Ditto my now best mate (I have more dead mates than living ones), except his is a No 1 iron. He’s 6’5″, or was when we played football, so maybe the extra length is why he chose the iron.
You lucky guys. I liked the idea of a pick handle but decided I would hardly be able to lift it, much less swing it. There must be such advantages to being tall.
Even greater advantages in being strong, fast and confident.
Rustle around in your mother’s/grandma’s “treasures” and see if there is an old-fashioned hat-pin among them. That is what many women used to carry back in the day, and they can easily be worn on the back of a coat lapel or carried in the lining of a handbag. Potentially lethal if poked firmly into an eyeball, and very painful most other places. But, it can still be used against you.
Much more effective to just swing it at the knees or shins. That will disable them.
I myself prefer an M16
While I am a strong supporter of gun control, the idea that mace, pepper spray etc are illegal strikes me as bizarre. Seriously, does anyone think that the likes of Haron Moris are going to use pepper spray for their crimes? Go on a rampage with a taser? Also, these things are easier to use than a gun, and don’t need to be locked away to prevent accidental deaths. Banning them is weird.
I could imagine railway carriage ‘steamers’ using pepper spray to disable the passengers before raiding their pockets and bags. Can blind if too much gets in the eyes, too.
granted, but is that worse than being threatened with a knife?
Tangental in that it’s USA-oriented, but this article by Harry Richardson is the best I read for quite a while.
Extract:
But let us suppose that we are successful and remove the guns from all the citizens in America. For sure, we will now see a reduction in the number of gun crimes. However, this comes at a price. The only gun owners now, will be Government employees such as police and armed forces.
Whilst this may not pose an immediate threat, there is the possibility that the Government will have bad intentions towards its citizens. Since this has happened repeatedly in almost every society on the planet, there is no reason to suppose that it couldn’t happen in the USA.
If the Government goes rogue, the impact on society is far greater than an occasional school shooting, however traumatic that might be.
Senior employees on the US government agency, The FBI, seem to have recently gone rouge, along with individuals in The US Dept of Justice.
Going rouge does not necessitate the use of violence.
I reckon our politicians especially the so called leadership have just abandoned us. They don’t look after any of us anymore. They don’t know how to be effective anymore.
There are some very loud noisemakers that could be used by both women and men that are not illegal and not weapons. My daughter had one hanging on her school bag at one time. A press of a button sounds a very loud alarm which can attract attention and also startle an offender who is less likely to hang around after the noise has commenced.
Another item of use is a high output torch with a flashing beam that could be directed at a potential attackers eyes, however, it assumes the proposed victim has the presence of mind and isn’t taken by surprise, so likely to be less reliable.
These should be a last resort. Although it would be good if we could tell people to walk about on their own without fear of attack, the reality is that it’s not safe to do so and probably never will be. Walk in groups, get a taxi home or make other arrangements, especially late at night/early morning.
I couriered a $10 HY 1315 “stun gun” to my daughter but it was confiscated by Customs, so I brought a couple in via checked luggage with no problem. It has solid and flashing beams which have made everyone I’ve tried it on avert/cover their eyes, and a high voltage discharge when a person is touched with it, which several friends and I have tried on ourselves – it’s no taser, more like shorting out a car battery/coil (for those who used to do their own car maintenance yonks ago), but it certainly severely jolts the person touched, even when knowing what is coming, and gives an opportunity in which to run or maybe smash him in the face with the torch then run. Just discharging it without touching gives a very loud crackle which sends dogs running; may work similarly on some men if pointed aggressively at them, I can’t tell.
A mate’s wife said they, or similar, are available for sale in SA, and if so, I reckon they’d be for sale everywhere.
I don’t think that there is any real solution. Agree with Robinoz. Try not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Better lighting, don’t walk thru darkened/hidden areas alone, always go with company, avoid the late hours, organise a lift in advance. This applies to all, not just the ladies.
Michael,
These crimes cannot be stopped, though ‘defensive measures’, caution and good policing all help. The unfortunate conclusion is that we can only deal with the aftermath by putting the perpetrators away until the day they die – or bring that death forward by executing them when they are caught. A side benefit of the death penalty is the exploding heads of the ‘do-gooders’.
It is time for everyone to do a safety audit.
Our Government has abandoned us.
Our police “service” does not have the resources nor the intent.
The law says you are only entitled to a “reasonable response” should you be threatened and of course this will be determined at a later time in air-conditioned comfort by your bewigged “betters”.
My safety audit considers only worst case scenarios and I have prepared and planned my response accordingly and will argue the toss later.
Of course the following saying is really corny but nevertheless : ” ‘Tis better to be judged by twelve than to be carried by six”
There is, to my mind, no response that is not “reasonable” to a young man, or number of men, who has, or have, entered your home in a hostile manner, but I fear the days where a Gawler, SA, octogenarian shot dead an intruder and my old football mate, the smoking, boozing, gambling DPP Paul Rofe, who never had time for a wife (Google him and sure enough a photo of him with beer in hand appears) refused to prosecute saying there was no reasonable possibility of a jury convicting the old bloke (but to appease his political bosses added that it should not be taken as open house for others to do the same).