Getting Spiked: A New Social Contagion? October 20, 2021
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite , trackback
Introducing Spiking
Zara a nineteen-year-old fresher at Nottingham Uni (UK) had, 11 October of this year, an extremely unpleasant experience. After entering a nightclub in the city Zara had a ‘complete blackout’ and the next morning she could, on waking, remember nothing of what had happened to her: ‘It’s not a blur of memory, it was almost like I wasn’t there’. She did have, though, pain in one leg and when she examined her body she found a needle mark. Zara had been ‘spiked’.
If you don’t know that word, then you have little contact with young British women. A growing number up and down the country described, in October, themselves or acquaintances being ‘spiked’ in nightclubs. An unseen assailant put a needle into their bodies, with some form of drug and they suffered memory blackouts afterwards. ‘Spiking’ is particularly associated with university cities: Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool and, the epicentre of this new terror, Nottingham, where several cases have been reported to the police.
The experiences follow a pattern. The needle-pricks are discovered retrospectively: usually the next morning when the victim wakes up feeling unwell. There is often pain. There is, as noted above, memory loss. What happened in that period of ‘blank’ is difficult or impossible to reconstruct. In the case of Zara her friends were able to confirm that she had been with them most of the time, so hopefully she came to no harm. Accounts of wooziness are sometimes shared on social media with a photograph of a needle mark.
‘Spiking’ is rapidly becoming a social phenomenon: there is #spiked on twitter, where accounts of night-club trauma have briefly colonised a hashtag more normally dedicated to cardiology. Young women are changing their choices in evening wear to stop the needles getting through: jeans and tough fabric are favoured. There is also talk of boycotting clubs until they start taking spiking threats seriously: searching everyone going in for these hidden weapons is touted as a solution. Parents back home are, meanwhile, outraged by the inaction of the authorities.
Explanations
So what is happening in British night clubs? There are two ways to explain the present flurry of cases. First, a secret cabal of several dozen individuals has decided to act simultaneously. These monsters have spread themselves around university cities and are going out to night spots, with hidden needles containing an, as yet, unidentified substance. They, then, inject the substance into their victim without the young woman noticing and wait for the effects to kick in.
The second explanation is that there are not dozens of individuals with syringes who have started searching out victims at the same time. These non-existent individuals do not have a skill (unbeknownst to doctors) of injecting a substance without the victim noticing. Nor do they have easy, unaccountable access to this extraordinary drug that removes chunks of memory. We have, instead, social contagion, one that has gone from a few reported cases in early October to scores, perhaps hundreds of cases by the middle of this month.
Social Contagion?
Nor should we be surprised if this does prove to be contagion. Put yourself in the position of a nineteen-year-old British woman. You are part of a generation that already is less likely to drink, date or have sex than your parents when they were your age. You have spent the last year and a half in lockdowns of varying severity with severely reduced social contacts. You are arriving at university with less night-life savvy than your peers from three or four years before. The healthy if semi-legal apprenticeship in night-clubbing that many adolescents experience from 15 to 18 has not necessarily been available to you because of COVID-19.
What is more, you have watched, in the previous months, terrifying clips on the television and on social media about male violence against women. You learnt of the death of Sarah Everard. Her appalling murder has made the media far more sensitive to male-on-female violence and means to you perhaps that your protectors the police cannot be trusted. This all too common kind of violence has been reported again and again just as you are leaving your nest and flying off to university away from your loved ones.
Then you are part of a generation who is most likely to get their news from uncontrolled sources on social media. A young woman from another city reports that she has been ‘spiked’ and the news spreads rapidly; word-of-mouth has nothing on Twitter and Instagram. Crucially news of these assaults also comes from family on Whatsapp groups, giving fear a parental imprimatur.
You are understandably terrified and our accumulated dislike of needles, in a year when we hear constantly of vaccines, does not help. Indeed, fear comes up again and again in the comments of young women learning of being ‘spiked’ on social media: ‘these injection spiking stories are scaring the shit out of me’; ‘people are more scared than ever’; ‘fucking terrifying’; ‘I can’t tell you the absolute fear that went through me when I heard that spiking through injection was a thing’; ‘cases of spiking by injection… makes me feel so incredibly scared’.
Nothing New Under the Sun
But this fear is not new. There is, as it happens, a long history of episodes where localised groups of women reported being attacked in public areas by men with needles. The London Monster, in the late 1780s, pricked women in his reign of terror in the capital: many historians believed that no such man existed. In 1819 there were some four hundred cases in Paris of (for the most part) female Parisians being assaulted by a piqueur. In Trieste in 1932 the deviant with the needle became known as the ‘wasp man’. Italians always have better terminology. There were then in the 1980s lots of stories about HIV-infected needles in dining and dancing venues, adding a new point to an old story.
Some of these social contagions may have started with genuine assaults, but quickly multiplied with large numbers claiming that they had been ‘spiked’, numbers far beyond the ability of a single malefactor to carry out. Most of those who claim to have been ‘spiked’ will, as in the case of Zara, have been truthful about their experiences. But in most cases, in the 2021 iteration of spiking, the ‘experience’ is nothing more than a black out and a retrospectively noticed tiny scab, explained by the victim as a needle mark. The overarching narrative of dozens of prickers (supplied with a high end opiate and injection skills) suddenly appearing in nightclubs is, instead, incredible.
This is not to say that there are not a couple of morons skewering people with pins in the middle of energetic dances: one aspect of social contagion is ‘copy-cats’ with low IQ taking up legendary slack. A moron may even end up in court. But no one, I predict, will be prosecuted for surreptitiously drugging someone in a nightclub by needle in 2021 or 2022 and new cases will quickly melt away. The psychological damage to the young caused by lockdowns, school closures and the fear of violence will, sadly, have a much longer life.
PS Folklore
PS can’t resist including this Twitter derived spiked story, which is atypical and pure folklore: ‘An 18 year old girl I know was out with friends in the club and went to the toilet feeling dizzy and sick. She was violently sick and lost the use of her legs, arms and struggled to speak… She was then removed from the club as being too drunk. When outside she was confronted by a women in her mid thirties who grabbed and kept saying ‘stop being a cry baby, your just drunk not spiked’ and was trying to get her away from her friends, but the eventually managed to get her in a taxi and went to A&E, where it was confirmed that she had been spiked by injection on her arm… The chilling thing is that when she came round she noticed a silver metal ring on her finger that had ‘Cry Baby’ on it.’
PPS More folklore. Several social media posts talk about spiking victims testing positive for HIV, plugging into an urban legend that dates back to the 1980s.
Responses
Not just social contagion? Other examples: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com Happy to put contrary opinions if offered in good faith.
