A week on from the Clapham Common vigil for Sarah Everard that turned terrifyingly quickly into a hideous example of excessive force by police officers, women are still being condemned for expressing their anger, articulating their pain, sharing their experiences, and making the simple demand to be free and safe on the streets. Make no mistake - freedom is safety for any group that has been oppressed. The two concepts cannot be unlinked. If you are not safe, you are not truly free.
And a week on, it is hard to be optimistic.
Plenty of men, aided and abetted by deeply unhelpful women, keep piping up to tell women that street attacks are rare, that Sarah Everard was unlucky, and the "real problem" is being attacked, raped, killed by someone you know, possibly in your own home or workplace.
This is not constructive. All you're really saying is that women are not safe anywhere. Women's safety is not an either/or proposition - the streets need to be safer for everyone, just as more needs to be done about abuse suffered by women at home, at work, on university campuses, in schools and so on.
And focusing on the greater likelihood of women being killed by someone they know rather than a stranger on the street is a distraction from the problem of "less serious" street offences against women being dealt with properly. Street harassment, indecent exposure, kerb-crawling - none of this is taken seriously enough even though it is not uncommon for someone to start their campaign of violence against women with these "minor" offences. It is symptomatic of a broken criminal justice system if there aren't the resources to do a better job of dealing with these crimes before someone is raped or murdered.
Hell, a woman tried to report an incident of indecent exposure as she was leaving the Clapham Common vigil last week and it was not taken seriously at the time. It's not as if there was a shortage of police officers in the area when she was trying to get home around 8pm last Saturday night. My friends and I saw them waiting in vans in laneways in the area from 5pm onwards. It was only after this woman's story received significant media coverage that the police launched an appeal for witnesses and information a full six days after the vigil. We should not have to go to the media for the police to be shamed into doing their job properly.
Equally, it is not helpful to constantly point out that men are more likely to be murdered than women. More than 90% of all murderers and rapists are men. Male violence and aggression is the issue here. If this can be addressed better, men and women are safer. We all win.
For women, statistics show we are less safe at home than men, we are more likely to be raped than men, and if we report rape, the chances of a successful prosecution are staggeringly low. And when we don't report rape because of fear, embarrassment, shame, being unconvinced that we'll be taken seriously, not wanting to make a fuss, not wanting to relive the experience in a court room, it becomes harder for other women and men to come forward and report these hideous crimes against our bodies.
Then nobody wins. Apart from rapists.
And, of course, because every woman's experience of male violence is different, we don't all feel equally safe or unsafe in the same places. My one experience of sexual assault was a street attack by a stranger in Dubai in 2006 but in 2021, I am happily married and feel safe at home. As a result, I am more wary of street attacks 15 years on - perhaps even more so now that the arthritis in my left ankle and knees has worsened and my fear of being grabbed and being physically unable to run away - even if mentally I am ready to run to the next county - is real.
The day after the vigil, I tweeted a picture of my swollen left foot, a legacy of spending about an hour standing in the one spot.
There were some supportive replies - and one arsehole called me a freak and suggested I join a circus, which proves my point that women are not necessarily safe anywhere and can be subjected to vile abuse from a stranger even while resting on the sofa after attending a vigil for a murdered woman.
But that is just my experience - I am not going to use my feeling of greater safety at home than on the streets to diminish another woman for whom domestic violence means she feels safer when she is not home. All the violence needs to be dealt with and a massive part of that is achieving wholesale cultural change. Women will continue to "take care", to do all the things we're told to do to stay safe on the streets, but until we are not viewed by too many men as expendable, as useless, as easy targets, as semen receptacles, as territory to which they have an inalienable right, nothing much will change.
Over in Australia, there were brilliant scenes of angry women marching in multiple locations calling for justice for women after multiple sexual assault allegations were levelled at men in positions of power, including the federal government. Prime Minister Scott Morrison's disgusting response to this was to tell parliament: "Not far from here, such marches, even now are being met with bullets, but not here in this country, Mr Speaker."
Great. So Australian women should be grateful they weren't shot for speaking out. He is not pledging to take any action, he is merely complaining that his words were twisted. He gaslit a nation by trying to make himself the victim. That is how low the bar has been set by a prime minister - and it shows just how far we have to go.
Meanwhile, here in the UK, the systemic sexism continues in myriad ways. Just this week, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that care workers are not entitled to minimum wage for sleep-in shifts - this is a terrible, reductive decision that will disproportionately affect women. In the UK, 85% of direct care and support-providing jobs in adult social care are done by women. Depressingly, it was Lady Justice Arden whose written ruling stated that "sleep-in workers ... are not doing time work for the purposes of the national minimum wage if they are not awake." Sleeping while on call in facilities where any number of emergencies can take place during the night is not the same as a relaxing night's sleep in one's own bed. It is work. And it is predominantly women's work.
And that is just one example. We are fighting battles on multiple fronts. There was some momentum for women's rage this week but it already feels like it is subsiding, that the right to protest will be limited on the grounds of noise and disruption, the very essence of how protests work.
The issues that affect our lives and our bodies every single day will be swallowed up by the news cycle, by ridiculous patriotism pissing contest stories about flags, by divisive vaccine nationalism, by our own sheer exhaustion at it all.
Photography by Heloisa Freitas/Pexels
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