Fiona MacKeown wanted to settle down in Goa and run a pony-trekking business. I may not exactly approve of pony-trekking but I can imagine the circumstances under which a 43 year old woman with nine children from five different fathers and living on welfare in south-west England in a down and out caravan would like to migrate to a sunny beach where the winters are not so harsh and the people are warm and welcoming.
Yes, Goa is paradise on earth. Without doubt. But there's this dark underbelly of Goa that Remo sings of and people talk about in hushed whispers. Of drugs, rave parties, undisclosed rapes, murders that go unreported because the cops are so easy to buy off. There are whispers about Russian mafia buying off vast tracts of land, Israeli drug dealers, Uzbek prostitutes, and Chinese criminals trying to muscle their way in to sell their own dangerous cocktail of crime, corruption, cheap products. No one knows how much of this is true but, yes, one sees a lot of firangs around, having a good time and wanting to settle down on the sun drenched beach, forever. Just like Fiona did.
Scarlett's dead but what saddens me is that instead of catching her murderer, everyone (including the Goa politicians, the cops and the British media) are more anxious to discuss Fiona's parenting lapses and how free living British mothers have no business complaining when their kids get into trouble. Reports claim Scarlett did drugs. Fiona denies it. The cops first claimed she died ODing. Then, when Fiona refused to give up, they did another autopsy and found she had been brutally raped and left to die. There's an eye witness too, another tourist who's too scared to come back and testify.
What should be under public scrutiny is the crime—the brutal murder of a 15 year old. Not her life style. Nor how many lovers her mother had. This is typical of the way we treat every rape and molestation case. This is the way sex crimes try to escape the law, by casting vulgar aspersions on the victim and making rape and molestation look inevitable. The idea is to make us believe that a girl who does drugs or has underage sex is a deserving victim. Why? Why do we want to deny a woman who is not virtuous in the conventional sense the right to choose who she has sex with? Surely even a whore can decide who she wants to sleep with. Raping a middle aged woman of easy virtue is no less a crime than raping a teenager—the difference is only in your mind and mine, a difference that defence lawyers and corrupt cops try to exploit.
That's what's happening to Fiona. The spotlight is being nudged away from the crime to the victim's personal life, and her mother's hapless background. So what if Scarlett smoked hash? So do millions of other youngsters, including possibly your children and mine. Some ruin their lives by doing so. But most give it up after a few tries and go back to living a perfectly normal life. So what if Scarlett had sex at 15? So do millions of other kids everywhere. It doesn't make them any less virtuous. And it certainly doesn't mean any thug can have a go at them. So what if Fiona left Scarlett with a friend to go off to Karnataka with her other kids? Does careless parenting, even assuming this was such a case, mean that Fiona deserves what she got? So what if she lives on welfare back home in England, in a caravan surrounded by mounds of empty beer bottles and filth? Does it mean she lives a reckless life and her children are unloved, uncared for? So what if Fiona had many lovers and nine children? Does it really matter what her personal life is or was or could be? What matters is that Scarlett was killed in cold blood and the cops tried to hush it up.
What annoys me and should annoy us all is this constant moralising that goes on around us. Everyone is judging everyone else, usually for all the wrong reasons. This is what is leading to such a spurt in crime. All kinds of criminals are getting away.
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