The Vanishing Triangle

by Claire McGowan

I don’t remember advice to be careful, or not any more than the usual warnings that girls are given as soon as they can walk. Don’t take a lift. Don’t trust strangers. Don’t wear that. Like it’s your own responsibility.

Things don’t always have meaning, they just happen and we don’t know why.

We live with the not-knowing.

Why, in so many of the cases, the same excuses were made for a disappearance: she’d been depressed, she must have killed herself; she’d had an abortion, she must have been unhappy; she’d had boyfriends, she must have gone off with a man.

I wanted to find out why men who hurt women are so often protected and shielded by institutions.

some Irish men reportedly were planning to vote no in the abortion referendum, just to ‘get back’ at women in general. Think of the depths of hatred that invokes. To say, I want you, a stranger, to have to carry an unwanted baby or make the trip back from England, bleeding and sore, because I am angry a famous man I don’t know was accused, and not even convicted of rape.

In some ways this must be the cruellest thing of all – the terrible persistence of hope.

the weekends and days off can be desperately lonely when you don’t know many people.

reached out to someone she didn’t know that well. It’s what you do when you’re trying to meet people and make friends. You know it’s potentially dangerous, but you’re lonely so you take the risk.

a female crime expert casually remarks that ‘of course’ Annie shouldn’t have gone walking alone in the countryside. Watching in 2019, I bridled: why shouldn’t she have? Shouldn’t a woman be able to go wherever she wants, whenever she wants?

That these tiny decisions, these split-second differences, can alter the course of our lives, is tough to accept.

Women travelling alone around country lanes, walking through parks at night, hitching lifts with strangers. Ending up missing or dead. But if we judge them for their choices, what are we saying – it was their fault?

ultimately it’s down to these men not to attack us.

I include this case to show how dangerous it is not to heed the warning signs when men hurt women.

Imagine knowing your rapist was out there in the world, not because the conviction fell through, but because no one had even bothered to look at the evidence yet. Such lack of urgency sends a clear message to victims – you don’t matter.

To me, these two cases, Eva’s disappearance and Marie’s murder, say a lot about how we deal with mental illness in Ireland. That we can’t see there’s a big leap between suffering from occasional depression and killing yourself over a small family row.

Why shouldn’t women be allowed to walk anywhere, talk to anyone? Why should this mean they get murdered?

We tell young girls to look out for the stranger on the way home, hiding in the bushes or slowing down their car to offer you a lift, or, when you’re younger, sweets or a stroke of a puppy. We don’t tell them how to avoid getting into relationships with men who will break their bones and bite their flesh, leave them too terrified to escape.