Victim status

I was riveted to read about Ione Wells, an Oxford student, aged 20, who was savagely attacked on a London street. She then wrote about the experience for her university paper and has now hit the national news, prompting other students to write about their experiences too. Ione has kick-started her career as a journalist, and discovered that a woman reporter can often do well by cannibalising her own life, as long as she is a good writer, which Ione seems to be.

Her story was interesting to me because in 1982, just after I came to London, I was attacked while walking home in south London. It was a violent assault; the perpetrator tried to strangle me before attempting rape. Like Ione, I was rescued by a local person.

I was attacked by an Afro-Caribbean youth at a time when mugging and assaults on women were rife in south London. As a new arrival, I was astonished and dismayed by the violence on the streets around Brixton and Stockwell. The main difference is that when I wrote my piece, which appeared in the Guardian, my first feature in a national paper, I said my attacker was black, and speculated on the reasons that young men in that community were so violent.

Ione, perhaps reflecting the culture which now surrounds the young, did not say what nationality her attacker was. Neither the BBC, nor the national papers, nor even the Daily Mail alluded to the attacker’s ethnicity at the time, though we now know him to be a 17-year-old Somalian.

Wells is probably wise to have written such an allusive, oblique piece. After my article was published, I was reported to something called the ‘Race Today Collective’, a Brixton-based Marxist group dedicated to militant anti-racism, or as the Americans called it, Black Power.