Human beings have many shields against the darkness. A woman is raped, or murdered, and the old cry goes up. What was she doing out on the street alone in the middle of the night? Women shouldn’t take short cuts through parks on their way to work, or go running along the riverbank with headphones on. These official warnings drive women crazy because they seem to proceed from an enraging assumption that the public space belongs to men, and that women have no claim on it: we broach it at our peril. But I’ve come to think that the subtext of what the politicians and police chiefs are saying, in their clumsy, poker-faced way, is this: no matter what the political rhetoric is, please do not assume that because you should be safe in public spaces you will be safe. There is no way that we can police the world and guarantee your safety. We are as helpless as you against the darkness. Why are we ever surprised by the scorched earth around a broken family? Our laws and strictures and conventions have no purchase on the dark regions of the soul into which we venture when we love. In the Farquharson trials, people would passionately protest, ‘But he loved those boys!’ Again and again it surfaced, the sentimental fantasy that love is a condition of simple benevolence, a tranquil, sunlit region in which we are safe from our own destructive urges. But everybody knows that love is brutal. A thousand songs tell the story. Love tears right through to the centre of us, into our secret self, and lays it wide open. Surely Sigmund Freud was right when he said, ‘We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love.’
Helen Garner
