A year on from Sarah Everard’s murder, it’s no safer to be a woman

Today marks exactly a year since Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old marketing executive was kidnapped, abducted and murdered by a serving Met police officer after walking home from a friend’s house in south London. The impact of her cold-blooded murder became a watershed moment for women’s safety and it cast a spotlight on the “epidemic” of sexual harassment, institutional misogyny and violence against women and girls.

In the sombre weeks that followed, women were galvanised into taking action and took to the streets to protest against the culture of misogyny that stopped them from feeling safe. They attended Sarah’s vigil in Clapham Common, only then to be met with police brutality – encapsulated by that memorable picture of Patsy Stevenson pinned to the ground. And then the scale of abuse in education was magnified by the website Everyone’s Invited, which collated thousands of testimonies revealing the extent of sexual harassment. For months, school-aged girls and University students published an onslaught of posts about being victims of cyberflashing, upskirting, sexual assault and rape. It became starkly apparent just how insidious the violence against women and girls in these institutions has become.

More horrific acts of femicide have plagued the headlines since last March. We expressed yet more grief and anger as we read about Julia James, the 53-year-old PCO who was murdered while walking her dog in Kent last April, and about Sabina Nessa, a 28-year-old primary school teacher who was attacked while walking through the park in Kidbrooke, south London in September and more recently, about Ashling Murphy, the 23-year old teacher killed while jogging on a canal path in Count Offaly, Ireland this January.

A year on from Sarah’s murder, it feels as if we remain at square one, where the government and the police are covering up the cracks in society’s fabric with bargain plasters. So many of my friends, myself included, still fear the streets they roam and the officers supposedly monitoring them. They still wait until the sun rises to go for a run, clutch their keys between their fingers for self-defence, carry a rape alarm as a keyring, fake calls to look busy, send their locations to friends and family, and head into the nearest shop if they ever feel a suspicious shadow lurking behind them.

Is it any wonder we are still so anxiety-ridden? Especially when we hear of unsettling statistics that forces in England and Wales have recorded the highest number of rapes and the second-highest number of sexual offences in the 12-month period following Sarah’s death. According to the ONS, in the year up to June 2021, there were 61,158 rapes, up 10 per cent from the previous period, and it is the highest ever recorded annual figure to date.

What’s more, according to the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW), despite record numbers of reports to the police, last year had the lowest number of rape convictions on record with only 1.3 per cent resulting in a charge. The odds are even worse when the victim is Black, or a woman is from a minority group.

How can women begin to have a modicum of faith in the judicial system in light of all this?

Boris Johnson said that police failings to take sexual violence against women seriously was “infuriating” and that the death of Sarah Everard must “unite us in determination” to drive out violence against women and girls. But, a year on, how far have the police and government gone in achieving their aims of making the streets safer for women and girls?

Safer streets and spaces

Last March, the government announced a £25m Safer Streets Fund for local councils and crime commissioners for policies like better street lighting and CCTV. Another measure, announced by the Home Secretary Priti Patel as part of a “radical programme of change” was the online tool StreetSafe which allows people to anonymously pinpoint locations they felt vulnerable walking in and say why. The government also released an additional £5 million for the Safety of Women at Night Fund, which is for supporting projects targeting perpetrators, protecting potential victims, or delivering programmes intended to address offending behaviour.

Critics argued that these measures failed to address the root problem of an intractable society-wide issue. “I think the fact the government has put some cash into street lighting and surveillance shows that they completely missed the point,” stated Anna Birley, the co-founder of the campaign group Reclaim These Streets. “No number of streetlights is going to prevent women getting attacked, murdered, or feeling safe from being harassed.”

During the same month and following a meeting of the government’s crime and justice taskforce chaired by the prime minister, a programme was announced called Project Vigilant, where plain-clothed officers patrol night-time venues to spot men exhibiting predatory behaviour. It has yet to be enforced in major cities like London but has been piloted in Reading, Milton Keynes, Oxford and Windsor. Between July and November last year, 117 men were stopped as part of the project, and ten arrests were made for predatory behaviour including harassing women, making unwanted sexualised comments and loitering in areas where sexual offences take place.

However, Project Vigilant was lambasted for numerous reasons, from the fact harassment is not limited to nightclubs to the fact 90 per cent of assaults are committed by people who women already know.

End Violence Against Women (EVAW) Director Andrea Simon believes Project Vigilant fails to address the underlying causes of violence against women and girls. “The focus needs to be on prevention, and that begins with education,” she said. “How do we fix these problems within society? We need to address attitudes and behaviours more widely of men towards women. This needs to be tackled across all of government including education and health.”

Improving education

Last year, information was released labelling 3,000 schools following claims of sexual harassment, rape and harassment. The organisation Everyone’s Invited, founded by Soma Sara, gathered over 54,000 testimonies revealing the widespread sexism, misogyny, and abuse in our schools and universities. When the government asked Ofsted to carry out a rapid review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges in June 2021, they found that harassment and online abuse had become so ubiquitous that children saw no point in reporting it. The report also found that, of the girls who did report it, 9 out of 10 had experienced sexist name-calling, and 92 per cent of girls had been sent unsolicited explicit pictures or videos.

In response, Ofsted argued for a “whole school approach” so that leaders can create a culture where sexual harassment and online sexual abuse is not tolerated. Including: a carefully planned and implemented RHSE curriculum, sanctions and interventions to tackle poor behaviour and provide support, training and clear expectations for staff and governors, and listening to pupils’ voices.

“The cumulative impact of sexual violence which follows girls through their whole lives into womanhood can’t continue to be minimised,” said Andrea Simon. “Whilst the government has made relationships and sex a mandatory subject, they haven’t equipped schools to deliver it confidently.”

She added, “The very significant problem of easy access to pornography, which is becoming the ‘de facto’ source of sex education, is highlighted in the review as setting unhealthy expectations of sexual relationships and shaping perceptions of women and girls. Upcoming new online safety legislation must aim to address this with better tech safeguards and a focus on digital education.”

Following this review, easy access to online pornography is being addressed since the Digital minister, Chris Philip, believes it is, as Simon touched on, fuelling sexual assault in schools. As part of the Online Safety Bill, currently going through Parliament, adult websites will soon be legally required to verify the age of their users to ensure they are 18 or over.

However, sex education has yet to be strengthened in schools, and the specific recommendations made by the 2021 Ofsted report, have been largely ignored. A new report from the Sex Education Forum, found that RHSE lessons are being inconsistently delivered, and young people are missing out on learning the basics of what a healthy relationship looks like, despite this being a mandatory part of the curriculum for primary and secondary schools across the country and a specific recommendation from Ofsted.

“More than ever, children need schools to play their part in delivering high-quality relationships and sex education,” says the Conservative MP Maria Miller, “with the funding and resources to deliver an inclusive and comprehensive curriculum that Parliament has already put into law.”

Making misogyny a hate crime

According to UN data, over 70 per cent of women have experienced sexual harassment in public, which means a stark amount of women and girls in the UK feel unsafe in public spaces. Campaigners have argued that the law should be expanded so that misogyny carries the same punishment as hate crimes based on race, religion, sexual orientation, disability and transgender identity. That way, the law will target the root cause of violence.

“Treating misogyny with the same seriousness and consequences of hate crimes is a step towards a more equal society,” says the Lib Dem MP Wera Hobhouse. “Misogyny is baked into societal norms and practices. It has been this way for thousands of years and a proper and wholesale culture change will not happen overnight. Nevertheless, everything must change. Recognising the harm misogyny causes is the first step.”

However, as of earlier this week, Tory MPs voted against the move. MPs voted 314 to 190 to remove a Lords amendment to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts bill to make misogyny a hate crime in a bid to offer women greater police protection. The Home Officer warned that attempts to define misogyny would prove “more harmful than helpful.” Kit Malthouse, the policing minister, told the Commons that the move “runs the risk of being damaging to the cause of women’s safety” since the Law Commission had warned of unintended consequences.

The Labour MP, Stella Creasy, condemned the government’s refusal to listen to women, telling Malthouse that he could go home without looking over his shoulder, but “many of us cant.” She added: “The problem for the minister is he says he listens to women, he knows women, he understands this area. But if he understands at all, he should listen to suffragettes who told us it was deeds, not words that matter.”

The Lib Dems also came out against the decision. “By voting against making misogyny a hate crime,” said Hobhouse, “the Conservatives are turning a blind eye to the hatred that fuels violence against women.”

Reforming “cop culture”
Wayne Couzens was a serving Met police officer who remained an officer despite twice being accused of indecent exposure – once in 2015 while working for the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), where colleagues nicknamed him “the rapist”, and again days before he murdered Sarah. The subsequent vigil, held on Clapham Common, was attended by thousands of women, and ended in arrests and allegations of “heavy-handed” policing on the part of the Met.

And then, the official investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) revealed horrific details of officers exchanging messages about hitting and raping women, regarding specific female colleagues, which they dismissed as “banter.” We only need to think of constables Deniz Jaffer and Jamie Lewis, jailed for taking photographs of the bodies of murdered Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman and for sharing them on WhatsApp to grasp the severity of this issue. Coupled with the fact rape and serious sexual offences are at an all-time low, it stands clear that a rotting culture of misogyny runs rife throughout the force and needs drastic reform.

Campaigners like Reclaim These Streets are part of a legal bid to try and force the government to hold a statutory public inquiry to investigate misogyny in policing. Dame Elish Angiolini is leading the first part of a non-statutory inquiry looking at how Couzens was able to continue working as a police officer for three different forces – Kent police, the CNC, and the Met – despite concerns about his aforementioned behaviour. Following this, there are plans for a second part that will investigate the broader issues in policing. The Met has also commissioned its own review of the culture and standards at the force, including Couzen’s former unit – the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command.

“We absolutely continue to demand a statutory inquiry of police treatment of women, not of Wayne Couzens, not of a single person in a single act,” Jamie Klinger from Reclaim These Streets told PA. “We need to understand the deep levels of misogyny within the Met, and they need to be exposed and accounted for [..] this isn’t just one bad apple, and there’s no way to fix the force without rooting all of this out.”

Last month, Dame Cressida Dick resigned from her post as commissioner after the London mayor Sadiq Khan said he had no confidence in her leadership following the cases of sexism and misogyny in her leadership.

Priti Patel has said that the new commissioner must be “focused on the basics, including tackling the abuse of women and girls. “Policing culture and conduct have rightly come under scrutiny,” she said. “Be in no doubt that a new leader must tackle these institutional issues.”

“Enough”

On Tuesday, the Home Secretary launched a £3 million multi-year publicity campaign which says “Enough” to violence against women and girls. The campaign will include adverts, billboards, and social media campaigns, highlighting different forms of violence, from revenge-porn to cyber-flashing, and detailing acts anyone can take to challenge perpetrators of abuse.

“For too long, the responsibility of keeping safe has been placed on the shoulders of women and girls,” said Priti Patel. “The campaign says enough, and recognises it is on all of us to demand societal change. Everyone has a stake in this.”

The campaign is a step in the right direction in sending a powerful message that violence against women and girls needs to end, but raising awareness is only half the battle. We need to detoxify the pervasive misogyny that corrodes our institutions, from police to schools, before we can ever envisage a reality where women and girls can feel safe in public.

Enough truly is enough.