WMC Women Under Siege

‘Enough is enough’: The Murder of Sarah Everard and Confronting Male Violence Against Women in the UK

LONDON — Sarah held up a sign in front of the flowery bandstand that read, “It could have been any of us.” The 21-year-old was among thousands gathered in Clapham Common, a neighborhood in South London, for a vigil to honor the memory of Sarah Everard — the 33-year-old marketing executive who went missing on March 3 while walking home from a friend’s house in the evening. Her body was found seven days later in the woodlands 50 miles from London. A Metropolitan police officer has been arrested and charged with her kidnapping and murder.

Everard’s case shook the nation as an outraged public demanded more safety for women against pervasive male violence.

The vigil took place on March 13 near the road where Everard was last seen. While Metropolitan police originally showed support for the vigil, it changed its position the day before and banned the gathering under COVID-19 lockdown restrictions.

(Gaelle Legrand/WMC Women Under Siege)

Officers descended on the crowd, trampling flowers and candles, and “manhandling” women in an attempt to disperse the assembly. Four people were arrested, three women and one man, for coronavirus regulation breaches and public order offenses.

“Enough is enough,” Sarah said with a quivering voice, barely audible under the chants of the crowd. “Last year, I was sexually assaulted while buying a newspaper on a Sunday in broad daylight.”

“Myself, every single woman I know, has been sexually assaulted by someone,” said Sarah’s friend Alice, standing beside her. “It's always on what we can do to protect ourselves. One of my close male friends was knocked off his bike by a guy brandishing a knife at him —horrible thing to happen, but no one ever said he shouldn't have been [cycling] down that street. And no one asked him what he was doing at the time.”

Social messages normalizing violence

After Everard’s disappearance, officers were reportedly knocking on doors and advising women to stay home for their safety.

Meanwhile, women took to social media to share the tactics they’ve used to safeguard themselves in public, such as clutching a key in between their fingers, and being or pretending to be on the phone. The conversation online illustrated the emphasis — and social responsibility — placed on women to protect themselves.

“It is, thankfully, incredibly rare for a woman to be abducted from our streets,” Metropolitan police commissioner Cressida Dick said in a televised statement following the discovery of Everard’s remains, a comment that drew condemnation online.

In response to Everard’s murder, Baroness Jenny Jones of the Green Party suggested before the House of Lords that a curfew be created for men on the streets after 6pm. She later clarified that her comment was meant to be ironic, criticizing the police for advising women “not to go out alone” and no one “batting an eyelid” at the suggestion. Still, she said she received “a deluge of misogynistic emails and tweets. Which rather proves my point about the problem being with men.”

“Calling for a curfew on men is a provocative way of highlighting the lack of enforcement action taken against acts of male violence,” responded Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy through her press office. “But it doesn’t really do anything to ensure men start to take ownership of the problem in their circles.”

Indeed, the erasure of agency is reflected in the language used to articulate male violence against women: for example, the passive voice used in constructions like “she was raped” omits the perpetrator. “Too often, there is a tendency to remove male agency from the acts of violence,” Ribeiro-Addy said.

Media plays a significant role in this tendency, according to The Femicide Census, the organization counting the number of women killed in the UK — and the men who’ve killed them.

In its 10-year report (from 2009 to 2018), the Census pointed to the media’s sympathetic representations of perpetrators, its minimization of perpetrators’ responsibility, and the perpetuation of victim blaming. Headlines like “Father strangled his own daughter as he couldn't let her suffer with her mental health problems” or monstrosity lexicon like “evil” and “brutes” depict the perpetrator as a product of one of two extremes: either compassionate or without moral.

The Census also acknowledges in the report that the use of “racist and sexist, sensationalist language” in media reporting of male violence against women is “evident not only in language used by journalists but also in comments made by police, judges, barristers and other commentators.”

From a judge saying to the pensioner who beat his wife to death that he showed her “nothing but love and affection” — describing his devotion being “quite exceptional” — to a detective inspector describing the killing of a woman by her son with a hammer as a “tragic incident,” the report illustrates a culture of misogyny embedded in the language within the criminal justice system.

Public understanding of women’s safety is so fraught that it’s still not uniformly understood, nor agreed upon. A staggering 2018 survey by the End Violence against Women (EVAW) coalition found that most people were confused about what constitutes rape, with a third of men believing that “if a woman has flirted on a date, it generally wouldn’t be rape, even if she hasn’t consented to sex.” 21 percent of women respondents believed the same.

Police misconduct and community distrust

In 2019, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that law enforcement across the UK had been reported for alleged domestic abuse “almost 700 times” between 2015 and 2018. And documents recently obtained by The Observer reveal a shocking list of sexual misconduct committed by its officers: among them, complaints against an officer who had sex with a rape victim, and another against an officer who assaulted a domestic abuse survivor. Out of the 594 complaints held against Met officers, only 119 cases were upheld.

Even on the evening of Sarah’s vigil, a woman who had attended reported that a man exposed himself to her while she was walking back home. The police allegedly ignored her, saying they had “had enough with the rioters” and would not deal with it.

“The Met Police had plenty of chances to make [the vigil] happen safely and properly with very cooperative organizers. They messed up badly,” Baroness Jones told me.

Earlier this year, five officers of Hampshire police’s serious organized crime unit were fired after they were recorded making sexist, racist, and homophobic remarks: among the derogatory terms the officers used to describe women were “whores,” “sluts,” “sweet tits” or “sugar tits,” “Dorises,” and “a fucking Doris.”

“Police don’t come down from another planet,” Jackie Malton, a former detective, told The Guardian. “They come from society.”

Amid numerous calls for her resignation, the police commissioner received the support of the Prime Minister and said she would not leave office.

Gaps in justice

For the Women’s Equality Party deputy leader Tabitha Morton, the criminal justice system, too, is failing women. While rape prosecutions and convictions have reached their lowest level since records began, “We believe that the CPS [the Crown Prosecution Service] have changed their rules to only prosecute the cases they think are solid and will actually get a conviction. We think this is one of the reasons why we've seen such low rates,” Morton told me.

“The High Court judges looked at this and refused to examine the evidence because they don't believe there’s a problem. I think that says everything.”

In March 2020, EVAW challenged the CPS over changes in its policy to bring charges in rape cases. They argued that the drop-in prosecutions resulted from a secret strategy to adopt an internal conviction rate target of 60 percent of cases charged. In order to reach this goal and boost this rate, the CPS would drop “weak” cases, which they believed would not hold in front of a jury.

The group’s challenge was dismissed in 2020 by the High Court on the grounds that there had not been any change in the policy itself. EVAW launched an appeal, indicating that the new policy was “unlawful,” but it was again dismissed on March 15 of this year as the court concluded that CPS was entitled to apply a “nudge on the tiller” to address concerns of falling rape conviction rates.

Out of the 55,130 rapes reported to the police in England and Wales between 2019 and 2020, only 3 percent (2,102) resulted in prosecutions and 2.6 percent (1,439) in convictions.

Data collection also appears to diminish the true scale of violence. For example, the Femicide Census estimates that between 2009 and 2018, less than 4 percent of femicide victims were from BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnics) ethnicity. The group criticized the blatant lack of collected data, which they say results in incorrect and asymmetrical assumptions based solely on police responses to Freedom of Information requests and campaign for data to be “gathered in an accessible central repository.”

“There’s a lack of faith in the justice system from people of color,” Morton told us. “So many Black women refuse to report to the police because of the racism that they receive. We find that, more often than not, they seek out community-based services and women-led services to support them, rather than seeking a justice route. And that's not right either.”

For Ngozi Fulani, director of Sistah Space — a domestic violence charity focused on African and Caribbean women — the distrust of these women to report crimes is a clear response to the police mishandling of cases involving Black women.

“We're not comfortable sending Black victims to a police force that quite clearly doesn't care about us, doesn't treat us equally, and has so much contempt for us that even in death, we're made a mockery of,” Fulani said.

She cited the stories of Blessing Olusegun — a 21-year-old Black woman found dead on a beach last September and whose cause of death is yet to be investigated — and Siyanda Mngaza, the 21-year-old who was jailed for over four years for gross bodily harm as she defended herself against a racist physical assault.

She also talked of Nicole Smallman, 27, and Bibaa Henry, 46, stabbed to death in a park last June in North London. Two Met police officers have been arrested and suspended after allegedly taking selfies with the bodies of the victims.

Fulani, who also criticizes the term BAME as too generic, stressed that racism exists in the battle of violence against women and girls. Victims of color “are invisible in plain sight,” she said. “We [at Sistah Space] have to be the voices of those who are not being considered, of those who have passed away without justice.”

The inability — and unwillingness — of the police and justice systems to respond to different parts of society goes further. Migrant women and those who were not born in the UK are also disproportionately killed by men. According to The Femicide Census report, 16 percent of femicide victims were born outside the UK, compared to 84 percent of UK citizens, with Eastern European women leading the table.

“If you're a woman in this country and you don't have the right paperwork, you've got no recourse to public funds, so you're just stuck,” said Morton. “If you go to the police, you're at risk of being deported back to a country that you may well have fled because of the violence you were facing there. That's no choice at all for women.”

In our conversation Morton, who is also running for London’s Assembly this year, renewed her appeal to Mayor Sadiq Khan to make London a sanctuary city for all migrant women to access services, support, and housing, calling the lack of recourse to public funds “archaic” and “racist.” This policy was already part of the party’s manifesto in the 2017 General Elections and is a pillar of the Women’s Equality Party’s strategy to end violence against women.

Taking action

Three days after the vigil, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a program called “Project Vigilant,” which includes undercover police officers in clubs and bars as a deterrent for predatory offenders, and an extra £45m in the Safer Streets scheme. Although dubbed as a new concept, the program was originally launched in 2019, and while supported by a majority of Britons, falls short to actively fight institutionalized and cultural misogyny.

“Sarah Everard was not on a night out” when she was abducted, Labour MP Stella Creasy criticized during a radio interview.

The project has also been highly criticized by charities and members of the public as missing the point and “pretty frightening,” with the Good Night Out Campaign — an organization working to make nightlife safer — raising concern for “police intrusion in social spaces.”

The Women’s Equality Party explained that the measure did not go far enough and called for politicians to stop managing violence against women and start preventing it.

“The amount of investment in front-end services that help women rebuild their lives are constantly seen as a cost rather than an investment, said Morton. “That mentality has to change. We didn't see investing in furlough, or the NHS, or test-and-trace as a cost — we saw it as a necessity during COVID-19, and it really was. If we're going to end this pandemic of violence against girls, we have to invest in it.”

A step in the right direction is the Domestic Abuse Bill, reintroduced to Parliament a year ago after delays from Brexit and COVID-19. The legislation would give a statutory definition of domestic abuse, expanding its purview beyond only physical violence to include emotional, coercive or controlling, and economic abuse. It would also transform the justice response through the use of video evidence and ensure victims aren’t cross-examined by their abuser. The new bill would remove the defense of “rough sex.”

“Our political approach to male violence is decades behind where it should be,” Baroness Jones, who is also a member of the House of Lords, told me. “The sheer number of amendments (over 160) to the Domestic Abuse Bill shows how much catching up there is to do.”

The day after the vigil, a protest took place in Westminster to dispute the behavior of the police at the vigil. Participants also demanded the government reject the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts bill, which was introduced in the House of Commons on March 9, which would give more powers to the police on the grounds of public safety, as stated in the government’s policies and commitments. The bill would also reduce the right to protest through the creation of an offense of “intentionally or recklessly causing public nuisance,” and officers would be able to impose conditions on static protests, such as time and noise limits.

The protest, which drew hundreds of people to Westminster, ended with the arrest of four people for breaches of COVID lockdown laws and assaulting an emergency worker.

The Home Secretary Priti Patel and London Mayor Sadiq Khan have asked for an independent investigation of Metropolitan police and their actions during the vigil, but the response falls short of a durable and sincere change in police procedures and culture.

“There has to be an overhaul end-to-end of the justice system,” said Morton. “This includes the police on the beat, the CPS, the judges, solicitors — everyone involved. We need to rethink how justice happens.”

“We have to completely overhaul the system, and we have to make our voices heard to do this,” Fulani said. “If people are not prepared to have conversations with us, how on earth do we expect to affect any kind of change?”



More articles by Category: Gender-based violence, International, Misogyny, Violence against women
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