Grace Millane's death should be a wakeup call for men, not a warning to women

No woman could hear about the death of Grace Millane without feeling a wrench of empathy, a wave of panic and a jolt of fear. Grace was a recent graduate travelling around New Zealand. She went missing the day before her 22nd birthday, disappearing from a hostel in Auckland. A body, believed to be Grace’s, was discovered in the Waitakere Ranges on Sunday.

New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern was clearly affected by the tragedy. She gave an emotional speech, apologising to the Millane family. She said: “There is this overwhelming sense of hurt and shame that this has happened in our country, a place that prides itself on our hospitality, on our manaakitanga,” (manaakitanga is a Māori word for welcoming others).

“So on behalf of New Zealand,” she continued, “I want to apologise to Grace’s family – your daughter should have been safe here and she wasn’t, and I’m sorry for that.”

There was something slightly surreal about watching Ardern, who, in so many ways, emblemises how far we’ve come in terms of women’s rights, while simultaneously being reminded that New Zealand is still an incredibly dangerous place to be a woman.

According to the New Zealand Family Violence Clearinghouse, the country has a very serious problem with domestic violence. In 2016 there were 6,377 recorded male assaults against women in New Zealand. That same year, 5,461 applications were made for protection orders, 89 per cent of which were made by women. One in three women who had had a domestic partner during their lives reported experiencing physical and/or sexual violence. These statistics are part of the landscape of a country in which women are not made to feel safe.

New Zealand has been making an effort to address these issues. This year, the government implemented “domestic violence leave”, which gives victims 10 days paid leave from work, helping them to escape from their partners, find new accommodation and protect themselves and their children. This was a hugely necessary step, but Grace Millane’s story is a reminder that the country still has much further to go.

It’s very important that we look at what happened to Grace as a social wakeup call, rather than a cautionary tale. Tragedies like this invariably arouse our protective instincts, and it’s tempting to tell our daughters, sisters and female friends to live more cautiously.

But the reaction to male violence should not be to curtail the intrepid and curious instincts of women. To do so would be an insult to Grace’s memory. We should continue to value the admirable qualities that she embodied.

So, instead of telling our daughters to be more careful, we should be telling our sons to be more caring. Rather than discouraging girls from dating, travelling and partying with gusto, we should be teaching boys how to create unchallenging environments for women. Instead of using this tragedy to impede female liberation, we should be talking about what men can do to help ensure the safety of the opposite sex.

We know little about Grace Millane’s attacker – there have been reports of a disrupted family life. But that doesn’t change the fact that deaths like Grace’s are not isolated incidents; they’re part of a social landscape in which women, statistically speaking, are in danger.

This reality needs to be urgently addressed – not by limiting female horizons – but by changing a culture that facilitates male violence.

We need to think about the ways in which education, legislation, and socialisation might conspire to create an unsafe environment for women. Hopefully New Zealanders will be motivated by this tragedy to look at the ways in which, as a country, they might improve on all these fronts.

The rest of the world should be thinking about what they can do to ensure that women can fledge, explore and discover without fear.