Minicab Rapist by Julia Wayne

About

The posters began to disappear from the streets some years ago, when they gave up trying to sell the local papers and opted instead to sell the readers. I didn’t buy the papers but was often diverted by the sensational grammar of abbreviation – sometimes funny, sometimes astonishing: one could learn too much from a handful of words. I didn’t expect to find such an object indoors, or to find it enlarged to such a size, the enormity of its compressed inscription – that is to say the inscription and normalisation of violence against women – standing there, like an art work, defying commentary. MINICAB RAPIST MADE VICTIMS PAY FARE. As if any decent rapist would not have collected the money. It didn’t surpise me that this one was one of many the artist collected more than ten years ago. And, though the urban media landscape has changed, it isn’t as if the stories have gone away. They’ve gone from being visible in public to arriving via ever more personal media amid a pseudo-feminist editorial stream designed to bind women as consumers.