Polly Vernon on why being sexually assaulted won’t define her life

Still. We had a nice enough time, my mate and I. He was, as I recall, an extremely nice bloke. (Hiya, Ed. Sorry you’re so indelibly connected with this episode.) We met at around half three, parted in the earliest evening – 6, 6.30pm at the latest – but it was March, rapidly getting dark. I was stone-cold sober – too broke to booze, I’d eked out a pint of weak tap Coke for those two or three hours – but even if I’d been drunk, I could have walked that 15-minute canalside route, away from the pub and up the main road where I’d get the bus back to my parents’ house. I’d done it many times before. Plus it was the Nineties, so I was wearing DMs, sure-footed as a mountain goat.

Halfway along the path, at the precise point that I was getting maudlin about my break-up all over again, a young man appeared. He was my age at most, and walking in the opposite direction. We passed each other. I barely registered him in my funk; vaguely heard him turn and wolf-whistle me afterwards.

Seconds later, someone grabbed me from behind. I assumed it was my friend from the pub. Who else would be so familiar, so physical? But then an unidentified thigh was inserted between my legs and I was suddenly, mysteriously, lying on the ground face up and someone else was lying on top of me. Someone heavy, and male. The bloke I had just passed, of course; the wolf-whistler.

It’s all a little hazy from that point on. I can remember it only through vivid snatches that rise up from the fug of time and – yeah, trauma, I guess. I remember being confused, because although part of my brain could take a decent stab at what was happening, the rest of it considered it so unprecedented that it was having trouble processing it. Or so dreadful that it didn’t want to accept it.

I remember seeing the moon through the tree branches past his shoulder.

I remember feeling more weak and physically useless than I have felt before or since. When it comes down to it, when civilised behaviour is out of the window and one of you is formed of, built on, more testosterone than the other, there’s not much negotiating with that.

I don’t remember screaming but apparently I did, because I do remember him shoving his hand over my mouth and refusing to release it unless I agreed to be quiet.

I remember his Devonshire accent. I remember him asking if I was a virgin, because he “liked it better that way”. I remember slip-sliding away from his grasp once. Getting up! Running! Only to have him get hold of me again, push me to the ground again, tell me he’d “put me in the canal” if I didn’t calm down: “What would you like better? Rape or murder?”

I remember very fleetingly thinking, I guess if I just let it happen, it’ll be over and I can go home.

And I remember fighting back. Physically (when the police picked him up, a little later, they’d note he had deep scratches all over his face – God, I am still so proud of that) but also intellectually. I remember saying, with the entitled indignation of the crown princess of somewhere obscure or the daughter of a local gangster, “You really shouldn’t do this to me. You have no idea who I am. None at all.” This wasn’t a tactic; it was born of some rising sense that, fundamentally, I was a human being who did not deserve this crap. When his curiosity was piqued enough to ask who exactly I was, I told him my father was the chief of police and he’d come and get him in his helicopter. This was a blatant lie: my father was and still is a furniture restorer and French polisher of some repute. Yet I remember he seemed to buy it, which was the point at which I thought: he might be stronger than me, but he’s a bit dim.

Then – he stopped. Got up. Ran off. I’ve no idea why. Maybe because he bought the chief of police lie. Maybe because I’d fought on. (I have since heard that, in cases of attack, women who fight are less likely to get raped but more likely to get hurt; miraculously, I was neither.) Maybe because he’d spotted two runners on the bridge up where the main road crossed the canal and wondered if they would drop down onto the towpath, where they’d discover us. I just know he went. I stumbled up to those runners, who took me to a nearby house where the cops were called – and I was safe.

They caught him, as I said. That night. They even dispatched a helicopter to those ends, although that wasn’t what did it; it was the woman who spotted some man acting weird in the proximity of her back garden further up the canal. He admitted everything immediately. He was a mess by all accounts, a mess with skin gouged out of his cheeks, some of which rested beneath my fingernails. He’d get a suspended sentence – I forget the details of the eventual charge; I only remember that it wasn’t even close to attempted rape – and was required to pay me £500, which he did, in increments of fivers, which arrived at my university flat every fortnight; ungainly pink-cheque reminders of one deeply shitty night. Me? I was shaken but not destroyed. Sleepless and jittery but unafraid of men on a general basis. Less dramatic, far less criminal things would hurt me much more in the years to come: workplace bullying, an emotionally abusive relationship. So I survived my attack. Not in the sense of I Am A Survivor. I refuse to define myself, or my life, in terms of those… what? Seven, eight scabby, grabby, scary minutes on a canal bank.

It was merely the nadir in my long history of skirmishes with men I do not know. The first was when some bloke nudged his mate as I passed them both; I was 12 and wearing my school uniform. The most recent was a week before Sarah Everard, when this guy kerb-crawled me as I took an evening walk, a 6pm tour round the block, before giving in to another night of Netflix (this time while wearing jogging bottoms).

Given all of which, I must feel like every woman in these dismal weeks since Sarah Everard went missing, a serving police officer was arrested and charged with her murder, and a vigil by which to remember her and all those other women who, like me, have suffered violence at the hands of men, right?

Actually no, I’m not. Of course I feel awful for Sarah Everard, her family and friends, but I am not triggered by this utterly horrific event into more personal grief. I am not moved to post my fury on social media, to call, as Green Party peer Baroness Jenny Jones did recently, for a 6pm curfew on all men. I’m really not.

I’m trying to work out why.

So many women clearly are feeling all of the above. Younger ones of course: the twenty and early thirtysomethings who campaign as a matter of course, because activism is in their blood and their culture as surely as good times and cocktails were in mine at that age; and who also, by dint of their youth and their youthful lifestyle, are more looked at, more in the world, mixing (at least in non-Covid times) with more unknowable factors in more unknowable circumstances, subject to unknowable pressures, more complicated and murkier moralities.

But older women too. Women my age and older yet; women I know, like, love and respect; friends, contemporaries, colleagues and peers, who now talk of their Fear – this epic, boundless, formless fear that makes them cower on the streets and rage online. Female talking heads who speak on breakfast TV of how “the social contract has been broken”, how “women are now afraid of men”. The activists who respond to police assurances that what happened to Sarah Everard is as incredibly rare as it is absolutely awful by saying that rareness simply is not relevant, does not matter. That women still feel terribly, horribly unsafe. My mate K, who told me, “It’s like a switch has been flicked and I suddenly get it. How vulnerable I am. How any man could snatch me from the streets just like that.”

“I’m just so tired of this shit,” at least three unrelated female friends, of different ages and different sensitivities, typed on three different WhatsApp groups. “It’s like a war we didn’t know we were fighting,” one twentysomething woman told me. (“We haven’t spoken for two days because of this,” her boyfriend would tell me later. “We kept rowing. We never row. I kept asking what I’ve done. She said if I don’t know, I’ll never get it.”)

But I don’t feel this. I’m not afraid. Wary maybe, as wary as anyone who lives in a city tends to be. Edgy. I don’t love walking the streets of London alone after dark but nor does anyone I know: man, woman, anyone. When I move through it, even in the day, I am perpetually alert to myriad dangers, aware I could get savaged by an attack dog or mown down on a pedestrian crossing by a DPD van destined (oh, the irony) for my own house, or have some scrote snatch my iPhone from my hand again, as has happened to me three times in the past five years, although on each occasion I have snatched that phone right back. The second time I gave chase to the snatcher – he on pushbike, me on foot – turning the air of north London blue with swear words so vile, I had no idea I even knew them until the point I started screaming them out loud.

Late at night, walking home from the Tube or from a mate’s house, I will always get a little twitchy, a little rapid of heartbeat when I hear unknown footsteps behind me. I might well cross the road to avoid them, certainly breathe a sigh of relief when they pass. But they always have passed, and the fears I entertain in those moments are dictated rather more by the sinister scenes I just watched in some Scandi noir and rather less by my own physical experience of attack – so how genuine a fear is that at all? Also (forgive me, but I have asked some men how vulnerable they feel on the streets after dark), “This idea that after-dark towns and cities are some carefree wonderland through which men skip, free as a bird… That’s just not it,” said Some Bloke, whose opinion I rate. “Of course I get really tense if I hear another man’s footsteps behind me at night,” said another. “I never have my earphones in after, like, 10pm. I need all my senses.”

“F*** them, it’s not the same,” said another friend, a fortysomething woman whom I texted after she posted a reiteration of Baroness Jones’s curfew demand.

How do we know it’s not the same, I ask. How do we calibrate, measure, compare and contrast the fear, the perception of threat? “Because we know it’s not the same,” she replied. “You know it’s not the same, Polly.” But I don’t think I do know.

I do believe that the pornographisation of the world by the internet is having a profound impact on the way young men and women, boys and girls, think, feel and understand sex. How can they do anything else but cause harm? When I started having sex, I did so without ever dreaming my partners were comparing my body with those of porn stars. They weren’t.

But I also believe it does no young woman any good to be told repeatedly that she’s at risk. As of around three weeks ago, contemporary feminism seemed to revolve around two contradictory narratives: “You are a brave, beautiful, strong, empowered woman who can do anything she wants! You could be the first female president of the United States!” Oh, but also: “You are vulnerable, powerless, perpetually afraid; a natural born victim.”

Of course I think that domestic abuse is a stain on us all. Of course I am perplexed and disturbed that rape prosecutions are at an all-time low in this country. I’m also glad that misogyny is newly classified as a hate crime, although I’d be very unlikely to turn my kerb-crawler of the other night in to the filth on account of it. Truth is, I will always shout back at a street harasser. My younger sister messaged me recently to say she’d just read an article on “catcalling”, verbal street harassment of women by men, and realised the first time she’d become aware of the concept was when she was 6 and I was 17, walking through our Devon home town, when some man had lowered his car window and said something to me. On hearing it, I had (apparently, I have no recollection of this, though it does sound like me) flicked my head round like a furious adder and screamed, “Oh f*** ooooooofffff,” before resuming my business as if nothing had happened.

Inevitably I have found myself thinking about my attacker of 30 years ago more than usual over the past weeks. I never learnt his name so I couldn’t google him if I wanted to, but I suppose it’s not beyond the realms of possibility he’s aware of me. That something I’ve written somehow fell into his hands, he did the maths, worked it out: that’s her. That’s the one I tried to rape.

I do wonder how his life panned out. Not terribly well, I’d wager. I say that without rancour; I don’t feel any towards him. It is just all too long ago now. What would he have done after that night? How would he have told his mother? His grandmother? When – or if – would he tell his future girlfriends? I very much hope he didn’t do anything like that ever again. But I’ll never know.