Solo Travel is a Feminist Issue

ByVictoria Philpott Last Updated:

“Why was she backpacking alone?”

“What was she doing meeting a man on Tinder?”

The victim blaming I’ve seen online this week, for Grace Millane, the British backpacker murdered in New Zealand, has been disgusting. Suggestions that a 22-year-old woman was in some way asking for it, or that it was inevitable, that if she dared to travel and to use the technology available to us now to enrich the experience, she deserved what she got.

We don’t know the exact circumstances of her death, but it wasn’t travel that killed her, or New Zealand, or Tinder, or what she wore – it was, by all accounts, that man.

And now, the case will be used to suggest that women shouldn’t travel alone, for oppressors to say:

“Look, this is what will happen if you travel solo as a woman”.