A night out in Amsterdam this week looked as you would expect it to: lines of young people in fashionable outfits waiting to enter clubs, the sounds of clinking glasses and thumping music inside.
But under the surface, the mood in the city has shifted — especially among young women — since a man stabbed to death a 17-year-old girl who was cycling home after such a night out last week.
The crime has shaken Amsterdam, where the ability to bike safely at any hour is often taken for granted. On Tuesday, a week after the killing, landmarks and nightclubs in the city were bathed in orange lights to raise awareness and to remember the victim, whom Dutch authorities have identified only by her first name, Lisa. (The United Nations uses orange in a campaign condemning violence against women.)
“It felt almost hopeless,” Sophie Lane, 17, a high school student, said of hearing the news of the killing. “Things like this feel like a step back.”
Ms. Lane said she generally felt safe in Amsterdam. That such a murder could happen there, she said, was “terrifying.”
Other young women interviewed in the center of Amsterdam on Tuesday night said they would now think twice about cycling home alone late at night.
“As girls, we know that something can happen,” said Anna Hind, 18, who was at a bar at the Leidseplein, a square that is one of the city’s main nightlife hubs.
On the night that Lisa was attacked, Ms. Hind said she had been out until 5 a.m. in the same area. “It woke me up about how careful I need to be,” she said. The attack, she said, “could have happened to anyone.”
The authorities have arrested a 22-year-old man over Lisa’s murder, but have not released his identity. He was in the Netherlands as an asylum seeker, prosecutors said, a fact that has reinvigorated calls from far-right politicians, including the populist leader Geert Wilders, for tighter immigration policies.
The authorities said they believed that the same man had hit and sexually assaulted a woman on a waterfront in Amsterdam five days earlier.
Lisa had been out with friends in Amsterdam in the early hours of Aug. 20, the authorities said. Around 3:30 a.m., her friends took a taxi home, according to Dutch news reports, but Lisa decided to cycle home to the town of Abcoude — about 10 miles away — because she did not want to leave her electric bicycle overnight.
According to police accounts, she was riding on a quiet stretch without much other traffic when the man attacked, stabbing her multiple times in the neck. She called emergency services, but the response came too late. Her body was found on the side of a road at around 4:15 a.m.
“This is every woman’s and every parent’s biggest fear,” Amsterdam’s mayor, Femke Halsema, said at a news conference with police officials last week. “The safety of women and girls is not self-evident, and that’s a disgrace to our society.”
Freek Wallagh, a city official who works to promote safe nightlife, added: “She was 17; she did exactly what a 17-year-old is supposed to do: enjoy life. Everyone knows a Lisa who cycles home from the Leidseplein.”
Lisa’s murder has dominated conversations over the past week. across the Netherlands, where such violence is relatively rare. The country’s murder rate was 0.7 per 100,000 people in 2023, lower than in nearby Belgium, France and Germany, according to U.N. data. A GoFundMe campaign to pay for advertising that calls attention to the issue of violence against women has raised more than 500,000 euros ($579,000).
“She really did everything right,” Nienke ’s Gravemade, a writer and actor, said of Lisa in a phone interview. She lamented that many conversations about the girl’s killing still asked why Lisa had gone home alone, in effect casting part of the blame on her.
Ms. ’s Gravemade acknowledged that had been one of her first thoughts, too — much to her own anger.
“Where do we get off as a society to continue to make women and girls accomplices to their own disasters, their own trauma, their own death?” she wrote in a widely shared column in the newspaper Het Parool. “I’m claiming the night. I’m claiming the streets.”
Claire Moses is a Times reporter in London, focused on coverage of breaking and trending news.
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