When I saw the first headline about Sarah Everard – “Woman missing” – my stomach sank. Not again, I thought. At first, the story was buried under the endless speculation about Harry and Meghan Markle. But as it started to climb up the news feeds and dominate conversations among friends and colleagues, all I could think was: it shouldn’t have taken a case this bad to make people sit up and take notice.
And yet, it does. Violence against women is nothing new. According to Plan International UK, a charity that champions the rights of girls, 51% of girls in this country have experienced sexual harassment since June 2020. While 80% of parents worry that their daughter will experience sexual harassment in her lifetime. This is an “epidemic”, Labour MP Jess Philips said on the radio this morning.
I think it’s only recently that we have started to acknowledge just how differently women and men move through the world. Sarah, a 33-year-old woman, walked home from a friend’s house at 9:30pm on March 3. She wore bright clothes and went down well-lit streets, and yet she disappeared.
A man doesn’t think twice about heading home alone after a night out. A woman avoids certain routes and keeps her keys threaded between her knuckles and her finger poised on her phone.
Solace, a women’s charity based in Islington, made this statement following the news about Sarah: “Women should be safe to live their lives without fear and not to have to make constant adjustments in terms of staying safe.”
The fact that Sarah Everard could go missing in the middle of London at 9.30pm – not all that late, when you think about it – is a reminder that when it comes to women’s rights, and more importantly, the way we treat women’s safety, #MeToo barely scratched the surface. “This is an everyday occurrence for all women,” Solace said, “and this needs to change.”
In 1977, Reclaim the Night started in Leeds as part of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Women marched together to demand greater freedoms and security when moving through public spaces at night. Forty years on Reclaim These Streets are hosting an event in Clapham on Saturday to highlight women’s safety on the streets.
Since Sarah’s case was made public, women of all stripes have been coming forward and sharing their stories on social media: stories of groping, of taking the better-lit route home, of being threatened by men in the middle of the street. Obviously, not all men engage in this behaviour, but there are patterns of behaviour in our society that are perpetuated by gender discrimination. We need to think about the structures and “norms” that allow female victimisation to continue.
Colleen Krenzer, who has been a part of Highbury Fields Park Run since 2014, says running as a woman isn’t always straightforward.
“Islington feels safe, but I also take precautions, if that makes sense,” she said. “I try not to run at night. If I do run at night, I try to run with a friend. I won’t listen to music at night, I’ll have my keys ready. I’ll change my route to be in more of a well-lit area… you hear, you know, a woman who is on a route she normally runs is attacked, you hear a story of a woman who went out for a run in the countryside and gets attacked, so you just think, ‘Okay, that’s maybe one more place you should think twice about going to’.”
Antia Grant, from Islington for Women, said: “This will be triggering for many women and girls who will be thinking about experiences they have had where they haven’t felt safe.
“My social media is filled with people feeling horrified and scared about the world outside and the fact that a policeman is implicated underlines the sense that even if you do everything you can to protect yourself you are still extremely vulnerable.”
Ultimately, the media’s treatment of Meghan Markle and Sarah Everard are both sides of the same gruesome coin: the one where we don’t take women seriously enough. If we want to see any of this change, we need to improve the way we educate our children about gender equality and we need our politicians to pass laws making it easier for women to access help or condemn attackers.
We need to invite both men and women into an uncomfortable conversation about how we perpetuate falsehoods surrounding gender and what we can do to make society a safer, more equal place.
Additional reporting by Rosie McCabe.
