ABHORRENT. Depraved. Barbaric. The murder of Jill Barclay was all of these. She was just on a night out in Aberdeen. She left her friends a little after midnight to walk a mile and a half home but never made it.
Unnoticed, her killer had targeted her. He did not know her. He admitted his motive was sexual. He stalked her as she left the pub, followed her and attacked at an abandoned property. He raped her, beat her and left her for dead in what the judge called a “feral” attack. More than one person heard her screams and pleas but did not call the police.
Her attacker left the scene but then returned to what he thought was her dead body and tried to lift her into his car to dispose of the evidence of his crimes. He did not manage to lift her, so he set her alight. But she was still alive and it was this that killed her.
READ MORE: Man jailed for life for rape and murder of mother-of-two
Nothing can guard against the monsters in our midst, certainly not before they first act. The police acted fast and caught her killer quickly. But incredibly he got a reduction in his sentence because he pleaded guilty and because sentencing guidelines allowed it as he was UNDER 25 when he committed this crime.
Jill Barclay did nothing to deserve her fate. None of the legion of victims do. As in the case of Sarah Everard, police tell us that cases like this are “vanishingly rare”. They aren’t. Statistically one in 12 murders of women is by strangers. But we seem to accept a certain number of women will die. Too awful to dwell on, it becomes easier to put it out of our minds.
Media and even police blame women for the terrible things that happen to them, to us. But it’s not our fault, it’s the monsters who masquerade as normal human beings. We are all outraged by a reduction in his sentence, but not so keen on confronting what made him act this way. We can’t teach the minority of men not to rape and kill. They do it because they like it.
Women aren’t physically as strong as men and are vulnerable when out alone. So women must reluctantly try and ensure our own safety. Don’t travel home alone, don’t believe that Scotland is safe enough to walk about in late at night. Play it safe. Always get a taxi. If your instincts tell you there is danger, listen and act.
If you hear screams outside in the middle of the night, don’t assume it’s high jinks, call the police. It may have saved Jill Barclay. If you’re an employer, make sure you get your staff home safely, because cities are not safe for women, not even particularly safe for men. Cities are designed for cars to whisk us in and out fast.
Until we design cities around people’s safety, we should provide safe and cheap or free transport home. Or women will continue to be vulnerable, and some will die.
RIP Jill Barclay.
Julia Pannell
Friockheim, Tayside
IN reference to Roddie MacPherson’s letter (May 27) on the precarious nature of our fishing stocks in Scottish waters, the answer is not HPMA, nor MPA, the latter of which the Scottish Government has no effective means of enforcing, nor will it have if HPMAs are ever implemented.
As a member of a fishing family, legislation without the means of enforcement only ever makes sense on the desktop PC of the civil service employee instructed to come up with a plan for the commissioning MSP, not out there on the fishing grounds!
Far better to restore the three-mile “no trawl” limit around the entire Scottish coastline and then give nature the time it needs to heal.
Commissioning a couple of high-speed fishery patrol boats with drone launching and monitoring facilities to enforce the legislation might just ensure compliance.
As pointed out by Roddie, it worked perfectly well before that three-mile limit was removed in 1984 by a UK Conservative government, so we need no comments from them. Bold and effective action is required.
John Scobie
Edinburgh
WHAT an excellent article in the Sunday National by Richard Murphy as to how three F words sum up our political situation! I endorse completely everything he writes.
Fear has long been accepted by experts as a corrosive factor in mental health (so much for my naive hope that we were these days learning from that!)
READ MORE: Richard Murphy: The UK's politics give us many reasons to be fearful
Fascism was something I’d assumed had been consigned to history: but recently I have become very alarmed. If anyone thinks I am exaggerating, I suggest they read A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism by Julia Boyd. It is a surprisingly easy read for the topic, and my German friend who lives in a nearby village reckoned it was probably similar in villages like his.
Murphy’s last F word is one I have never used – but I guess his prediction is right!
Let England go that way if they want. Scotland doesn’t need to, when so much of our life is different. I have known many people from 1930s Germany who wished they’d had our opt-out.
Catriona de Voil
via email
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