On October 28th 2017, a 29-year-old woman, Alexia Daval disappeared in France. Her husband said she went jogging in the morning and never made it home.
This started what seemed to be a perfect soap opera for the French media. Everyone from the local and national newspapers, the radio and TV programs, was talking about it. They wrote about how dangerous it could be for a woman to go jogging by herself, and how some women were using an app to go for a run in groups to feel safer. Some media outlets even advised women to never go for a run without their phone and/or a pepper spray. Others were talking about all those predators who had killed women joggers before.
I think this is when I started to feel angry. All I was hearing, “She shouldn’t have gone jogging by herself.” But it got worse. Paris Match thought it would be interesting to interview a sport coach and quote him when he said that the women who run are not “particularly provocative.”
You read that right. “Not particularly provocative.”
If you thought that was upsetting, there’s more. The coach continues, “A woman jogger is often being harassed because she’s scared”. And the journalist concludes: “Isn’t it this ‘smell of fear’ that trigger aggressors to their prey, that excites predators?”
There are so many things that were already wrong with the coverage of this story. The more I read about it, the angrier I got. But sadly, this was only the beginning.
A couple of days later, the woman’s body was found, burnt in a forest near her home. The autopsy showed that there were marks of physical violence.
So the media show continued. Every day, there was a new reason to put the story on the newspaper front page or to air it on the TV. The media was now covering the ongoing investigation. France had a new public enemy #1 — “the murderer of the young female jogger,” and everybody wanted to know who kills women who are jogging at 8 in the morning.
At the same time, in the little town of Gray in Haute Saone, the woman’s family and friends were organising a silent march. Almost 10,000 people joined, more than the number of people living in the town. Her husband was leading the march. “She was my oxygen,” he said to the journalists, who came from all over the country to cover this drama.
