An email from the school headed ‘important news – please read urgently’ was the first I heard about the hideous events of last Wednesday.
It went on to say that there had been a serious sexual assault in the Summertown area at 8.30am “involving a student wearing school uniform.” It advised parents to accompany children to school.
As we walked Bea to school we still had no idea of the enormity of the crime. A “serious sexual assault” is of course just that, but it could mean any number of things.
Not for a moment did we imagine that what had actually happened was that a 14 year-old girl on her way to school had been abducted from one of the busiest street corners in Oxford, thrown into a van, driven to some nearby woodland where she was subjected to a three-hour sexual assault and then dumped a mile away from where she was picked up.
The crime is shocking on so many levels. This was not a girl walking home at 2am alone. Not that that’s an excuse to rape someone. This was a girl on her way to school at 8.30 in the morning. Of course awful things happen during the day as well as the night, but the fact that these people were so brazen they picked on someone in the middle of rush hour just makes you wonder if anyone is ever safe. Hundreds of children walk down that road to schools. I wouldn’t have thought twice about letting Bea and Olivia walk alone there aged 14.
The victim was abducted on the corner of Banbury Road and Marston Ferry Road. It’s about five minutes from our house. Bea walks there every day on her way to school. (Incidentally the girl was not from Cherwell School where Bea is, but from another one nearby.) The corner is just at the end of the shopping bit of Summertown with its Marks & Spencers, Gail’s Bakery, Farrow & Ball, numerous charity shops and Oliver Bonas. It reminds me of the nicest part of Hampstead, but it’s even better, because it’s in Oxford with its fresh air and surrounding countryside, and not London.
If Inspector Morse were investigating this case, he’d say that daylight abduction and rape of minors just doesn’t happen in Summertown. Even the name has a kind of innocence to it.
Sadly this innocence has now been eroded. Bea’s school-friends can talk of little else (many of them know the girl it happened to), no one will stand on that corner again and be able to stop themselves thinking about the moment that poor girl was apparently bear-hugged to make it look like she knew her kidnappers and bundled into the car to God knows what kind of ordeal. I heard from one of Bea’s friends that she managed to text her mother to say she’d been abducted. So for the hours between the kidnapping and when she was found in a traumatic state frantically knocking on doors she was a “missing person”.
This was such an evil crime. I can’t imagine how the victim and her family are coping or dealing with it. Everyone around here is so shocked and saddened. Summertown will take a long time to recover, people will never ever forget last Wednesday.
I can only hope the poor girl it happened to can in some way get over it. And that they catch the bastards who did this.