Unsafe streets

I know what it’s like to take your missing person posters down because your girl’s never coming home, so Sarah Everard’s story cut deep. But a lot of our demons are coming out of the shadows this week. Most people and almost all the women reading this will have endured something that means Sarah’s story, the victim blaming and the police brutality that followed, really hit you where you live.

I really started feeling it – the horror – on Saturday, when I read that despite a High Court ruling to allow the Clapham common vigil for Sarah to proceed safely, the Metropolitan Police were refusing to cooperate. Knowing this groundswell of grief and outrage was unstoppable, many predicted what was to come. That doesn’t mean the footage of mass brutalisation was any easier to watch, or the Met statement basically saying they had it coming any easier to read.

What some outside of this experience looking in have criticised as the ‘politicisation’ of Sarah’s death is something much deeper than that. This is gut and heart politics. This is our survival instinct. This is mass mobilisation in response to a shared experience of existential threat. Sarah Everard, like George Floyd, was a spark – but our lives were already littered with kindling.

My cousin Gaia was 19 when she disappeared on November 7, 2017. Our search lasted 11 days. We battled through a bogus murder investigation and tensions with the police even before her body was found. Gaia had already been let down once when Dorset Police failed to properly prosecute the known sex offender she told us raped her. Dorset Police have one of the United Kingdom’s worst records on sexual violence. We learned from a Freedom of Information request that in 2020 just 29 of the 2,058 offences recorded were taken to charges and court summons.

I had a front-row seat to how women reporting abuse are treated by the police because I sat with her through her interviews. She was brave beyond the telling of it. Like many, Gaia deserved justice. Like many, she deserved appropriate support when she developed life-changing post-traumatic stress. She was denied both and I believe it killed her.

Though we have to wait for it until April 2022, we have won a full inquest with a jury because our senior Dorset coroner, Rachel Griffin, believes “actions or omissions” by Dorset Police may have contributed to Gaia’s death. But I don’t need an inquest to tell me what I and everyone who gathered at Clapham Common already know: the state is failing survivors and it’s costing lives.

I read an article by a friend of Sarah Everard’s who believes Sarah would be “unsettled by how her death has been politicised”. I wouldn’t presume to know how Sarah would feel and as someone intimately familiar with the complexities and horrors of losing and grieving someone in the public eye, I know “unsettling” is a mild word for that nightmare.

But we need to recognise this upsurge of protest for what it is. It is not, as we do sometimes see, an opportunistic hijacking of one tragedy for political ends. This is real rage, real terror, real pain given voice by a generation of us who feel unsafe because we are unsafe.

Eight years ago the UK government signed the Istanbul Convention for the prevention of violence against women and girls and has failed every day since to implement it. Instead we see a rising epidemic of domestic and sexual violence, amplified by the pandemic and still basically ignored by the government.

Life-saving support services have been slashed for a decade straight, with survivors waiting months and years for support and many Rape Crisis Centres forced to close their waiting lists or shut completely. Meanwhile conviction rates for rape have fallen so far through the floor, you’re less likely to get a conviction today than you were in the 1970s. We are routinely denied justice through the courts, support through the NHS, and respect from the police.

Excerpted: ‘Sarah Everard’s murder: No justice for us without radical change’

Aljazeera.com