Monday, August 29, 2005

This Isn’t Cricket, But Then They’re not English

 
BMW JackrollThere’s a new sport in Northhampton, England. It’s an imported game. All it takes are a couple of cars, a little strategy, and some timing.Jackroll Fiat

The timing first: wait for the bars to close. Watch to see which women are alone and lurching home.

Having spotted your prey use two cars to close the street, blocking her getaway.
Then grab the woman and off you go, in caravan, to some secluded spot. Do your business — however many of you there are to have business to do — and then drop her back where you found her. Or not.

This violent pasttime is called “jack rolling” and it’s from South Africa, where apparently it is well-known.
     Jack rolling became notorious in South Africa during the 1990s, when gangs of youths in cars blocked off streets and raped every woman caught in their net.
Three women have been grabbed from the street and raped since July 31, while two more have escaped in a town where “stranger rape” is almost unknown. A climate of fear has taken hold since the latest rape, which came to light when the 30-year-old victim was found with head injuries near a housing estate in the early hours of Monday.
Please note the one important variable: available women.
     Four of the five victims were initially approached in and around Northampton’s rowdy pub and club quarter. Drunk women can be seen drifting home on their own in the early hours of most mornings, according to Helen Grattan, the manager of The Auctioneer’s pub on Drapery.
“I wouldn’t walk around here on my own at night,” she said. “There’s a lot of dark alleyways that girls could be pulled down and a lot of shady people hanging around on street corners.
No doubt about it; this is a vile and violent crime. But ignore the feminists who will scream about “unfairness” and “male violence.” This is limited to a very few criminals, but it is open season on a woman foolish enough to (a) go to a bar alone; or (b) walk home alone in the wee hours, even if she’s leaving Grandma’s after a night of whist with the old folks.

Fear is a normal human response. It is an especially handy survival skill for women to develop. Not fearfulness, but common-sensical appreciation for the probablity factors in any given situation.

Teach your girls that they can’t “have it all” nor should they esteem having everything as a worthwhile goal.

The violence in the world grows apace as the globe becomes a village.

Hmm...why do you think that is?


Hat tip: Mangan's Miscellany

5 comments:

linearthinker said...

First reaction: They need to loosen up their right-to-carry concealed weapons laws.

Second reaction: Oops. Their guns have been confiscated.

linearthinker said...

pd111
Expanding on the vigilantism thought, given the m.o. of the jack rollers, "Having spotted your prey use two cars to close the street, blocking her getaway."
Visualize this: A Northhampton sports club plants a decoy to lure the jack rollers into an ambush. Once they've commited, two cars full of soccer fans block the escape of the rollers, and suddenly from all three cars a mob of angry football fans confronts the would be assailants.

I wouldn't advocate vigilantism at this gentle site, either. Take this as conjecture.

Regarding your last thought, the state has already failed to protect the public by the restriction of firearms. The subsequent increase in battery and home invasion assaults in the UK correlates to the implementation of their restrictions on private gun ownership. Check it out.

Akaky said...

I agree with pd. Vigilantism should not be encouraged, but it is the end result of a process wherein the people who are supposed to enforce order do not do so. This sort of action on the part of the people shows clearly that these punks were counting on no one upsetting the old rules of the game in order to get away with their crimes; once they understood that the old rules were over they stopped.

Dymphna said...

peedeeoneoneone--

Your warning story is spot on. If the law does not protect us, then those who are hard-wired to protect the women will do so.

I'm old-fashioned, neurally speaking. I don't think the women should engage in the necessary action. Just as I don't think they should stagger home from bars.

Vigilantes existed in the American Wild West because there were no municipalities to protect the commonweal. It seems to have reached that point in the Wild English city so such behavior may perforce (to coin a phrase) return out of necessity.

However, if you read the full story, the police are using public feedback, surveillance cameras, etc., and think they will shortly have apprehensions...I mean have apprehended them! Now there's a Freudian slip!

Dymphna said...

DeePee --

The situation you describe has made me a reluctant supporter of capital punishment, just as extreme situations have made me a limited supporter of abortion. Both very limited.

In a perfect world, we would lock up the really evil ones -- e.g., the pedophiles -- and throw away the key. But we don't.

In a perfect world, impregnation would not occur when a child is raped by her father...or brother, or uncle, or step-father. But it happens. And the murky problems with that are hard to sort out: there is a breast cancer- early abortion connection that the abortion biz and the BRCA biz both refuse to acknowledge. So interrupting early pregnancies is a problematic issue. What to do when our fallen human nature disrupts the chain of events of maturation?

This is one of those tipping pointy things: only because families are so disrupted are there not more viligante episodes in the cases of child murders, etc. I am always amazed that parents are willing to abide by the law and let "justice" be done.

How do they do it? How do they remain civilized? We are truly amazing. Or insane.