Wilma McCann: Peter Sutcliffe victim is a modern day Joan of Arc - Christa Ackroyd

Positioning the attention where it deserves to be with those destroyed not the destroyer.

This woman loved deeply, she is loved deeply now by those she was taken from., yet in death she was judged and those who loved her had to suffer the consequences of that. They are still suffering now.

They ask themselves why? They tell themselves how different their lives could have been. And they pray and hope that she didn’t die in vain.

This week I am here to tell them she didn’t. Though she shouldn’t have died at all.

This woman was to start a change the world needed. This woman was to shake the very core of society and the way it views women. All women.

She and 12 others like her, and almost certainly more, began a movement so great and so important that it is still going on today. Because the battle is far from won.

This woman didn’t know she was in a fight for change, but she was an unwitting and unwilling catalyst in that change. What happened to her and to others was so despicable it took your breath away, as it did hers, forever.

But what was written about her was equally so. How she was described and categorised and divided into innocent and presumably guilty, as that is the antithesis of innocence, caused me and later thousands upon thousands like me to demand an end to how women are blamed when bad things happen to them.

To demand our voices are heard without judgement.

Because this I know, she was one of a group of women caught up in horrific tragic circumstances who lit the flame.

The reason women began to question attitudes towards them and in turn took up the baton to prove they were and are worthy and equal. All of us.

This woman is Wilma McCann.

You may recognise her name but wonder where you have heard it, or you may know who she was and how important she still is.

To me, to those who loved her and yes to every woman who now dares to call out disrespect, misogyny and worse, she is a modern day Joan of Arc. And she died on October 30th 1975.

Fifty long years ago in Yorkshire. She was the first.

In the five years that followed her death she was described as many things. Mother of four. Party Animal.

She was given other labels too, labels which in my view were unfounded and unproven but labels which stuck when they should have never been pinned to her or any other woman in the first place.

She became part of the judgmental attitude that abounded, and sometimes still does, and she forced me to ask the question what do you mean ‘innocent’ or otherwise and for the first time to raise my head above the parapet and look authority squarely in the eye and ask them to explain themselves. I was 20 years old.

I was considered a joke by those who asked why I was even there asking my silly little questions when I fought hard, really hard for a seat at the table as the ultimate crime against women was investigated and reported on by mostly men.

‘What are doing letting totty in’ one police officer was heard to say as I walked in the room where three years later the sickening toll of killing reached ten. And from that moment nothing or no one in authority ever frightened me again.

From that moment on Wilma McCann and the 12 other women who were later to make up that grim list, accompanied by their grainy black and white photographs, became my sole purpose.

They symbolised everything that woman had to go through; being labelled, being questioned and above all being blamed when it came to the actions of others.

That in some way it was their fault if something happened to them. That they should have known better to wear this or go there.

That it would be easier for everyone if they simply stayed at home as they should or their safety could not be guaranteed. Wouldn’t that be easier for all concerned. And for a while it worked .

Women who had fought for freedom in the sixties now sought protection from the men they had believed to be their equals.

They gave up on their dreams and ambitions, left universities or never went at all and were driven to work or leisure by partners or protectors. They were told they were not safe and somehow it was their fault if they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Those who lived through it know what I say is true. Those who didn’t can scarcely believe it was so, but that was the message. Don’t go out. That is the only way we can keep you from harm.

Then slowly but surely something switched in our collective brains. Women took the streets demanding if there was a curfew it was for men not women as a man was the perpetrator and the women the target. All women.

Wilma McCann was the first. She was the first part in the change that followed when women refused to be put back in their box.

She is part of the reason Doreen Lawrence was listened to when she fought for justice for her son.

She is why Claire Throssell won her campaign this week after a decade of refusing to be silenced after her sons were murdered by her violent ex husband as she knew they might be and why presumption of parental rights will no longer be the basis of custody and visitation rights.

She is part of the reason why victims of grooming walked out on the so called inquiry into what happened when they realised they were still being silenced and those in charge were not individually but collectively part of the problem when their pleas for help went unanswered all those years ago.

There are many more examples. The box is well and truly opened.

Please note in deference to Wilma’s son Richard, a dear friend of mine, I have not mentioned the moniker given to his mother’s killer.

He will always be Sutcliffe to us, a weak cowardly man who preyed on women who had one thing in common, they were vulnerable because they were out alone.

Wilma McCann was 28 years old when she died. She left four children who went out looking for her and waited for her to come home.

But no Richard your mum did not die in vain.

She lit a spark in you, a six year old child, to tell her story and a spark in women everywhere that demands our stories will not go unheard, that attitudes towards us now and then are often unacceptable and will continue stand tall until justice is done.