I remember staying late at school one wintery night when I was about twelve. My form was giving a dance display for the school’s open evening. We’d given up our free time to earn brownie points, like good little schoolgirls. This meant sporting our regulation PE shorts - iron-grey, baggy, nappy-esque articles, with built-in cotton knickers to preserve our modesty during the high kicks.
When the display was finished we donned our coats against the October chill. We had recently been inducted, via a PSHE session, into the idea that Strange Men might try to touch us, which I think we found both frightening and funny. We took our hair out of dance-appropriate ponytails (too easy to grab) and readied ourselves for our walks or bus routes home. We’d been warned to always take the aisle seat on the bus. You didn’t want some creep sitting next to you and fencing you in.
Our PE teacher announced that we were only allowed to set off if we had jogging bottoms to wear over our shorts. Nobody, she repeated, was allowed to walk home with bare legs. Either you covered up, or you called your parents to fetch you.
I can understand the belief that the night’s streets were not a safe place for a twelve-year-old girl. But either the street is an unsafe place for that girl, or it isn’t. It was safe for all of us to walk home, or none of us. Yet we were being told that our safety was predicated on whether or not we bared our skin. Skin bared for us by the uniform we were required to wear.
That was an early introduction into a logic of the double-bind, the logic of victim-blaming. It is a logic that has haunted so many women since the disappearance and alleged murder of Sarah Everard. A logic that puts the onus on women to protect themselves from male violence by modifying their behaviour.
Over the last few years I’ve made a conscious effort in the last few years to unlearn this bogus logic. I run by the river at night, because the city lights are beautiful when they’re reflected in the dark water. I have a bottle of wine with a friend of an evening and walk home afterwards; I don’t want to waste my money on a cab when the night air is warm and pleasant. I sit next to the window on the bus and lean my forehead against the cool glass. I close my eyes.
And I wear what I like.
I know that this perhaps makes me more likely to be targeted for street harassment or touched inappropriately. That’s - well, not fine, but nothing I haven’t handled before. I believe it’s a price worth paying to embrace my liberty.
I also know that if any of this behaviour were to lead to my being kidnapped, raped or murdered, it would be extraordinarily bad luck.
Placing the onus on women to avoid the unwanted attention of strangers ignores the broader reality of how male violence against women is enacted. The vast majority of women who are killed by men (which is to say, the vast majority of women who are killed) by a man they know. Usually in their own home. Usually their current or ex partner.
Yet we’re taught to fear the stranger in the dark. We’re taught to fear the streets.
There’s a nuance here. It is very rare for a woman to be abducted, day or night, from the streets by a stranger - and I assume, though I do not know, that PC Wayne Couzens was a stranger to Sarah. It’s incredibly common, day or night, for a woman to be harassed, followed or grabbed on the streets. Women correctly discern that streets are unsafe for them, because of their sex. But I’m a little less comfortable drawing a direct line from street harassment from strangers to murder by strangers. Statistically speaking, by far the most effective way for a woman to reduce the risk to hear life would be to not know any men.
Which, I’m given to understand, isn’t really viable.
It was for this reason that, until yesterday, I was unsure whether I felt comfortable politicising Sarah Everard’s death. Not because it isn’t an example of gendered violence, but because it’s far from representative. A devastatingly sad case, but an atypical one.
As for anger - I don’t want to let social media decide for me when I’m going to get angry. I believe that the sort of anger that is useful for activism isn’t the kind that’s easily whipped up, the blinding sort. I believe in the transformative power of what Adrienne Rich called ‘visionary anger’ - which I believe is always slow-burning.
So I wanted to wait until we had a few more facts. PC Wayne Couzens has been charged with Sarah’s kidnap and murder, so it seems likely that there’s evidence against him. But I don’t yet know the extent of that evidence. In defiance of the media representation of feminists of my generation, I believe in due process.
But a new set of facts came into being last night. They are as follows:
1) Reclaim These Streets appear to have made every effort to work with the Metropolitan Police to ensure that the vigil could be carried out in a COVID-safe way. They proposed a socially-distanced, marshalled event with staggered start times, in a large open-air space. They were conscientious. They were trying to do the right thing. If this had been allowed to go ahead, it seems that the vigil to honour Sarah’s memory would have proceeded in a much safer way.
2) The Met denied all these efforts and the original vigil was cancelled. A lot of the people who merely wanted to light a candle and pay their respects stayed home. I stayed home, in respect for Reclaim These Streets’ point that they didn’t want to find themselves fundraising to pay police fines. More radical groups such as Sisters Uncut attended anyway, creating what sounded like a more febrile atmosphere. The police should have known that something like this would happen, which is why their attempts to stop the vigil altogether were so stupid and arrogant.
3) There are reports that the police kettled the women in.
Kettled them in.
During COVID.
On a common where they could have safely dispersed in any direction.
Who’s creating unsafe conditions again?
The police manhandled women. Women who were there because one of the police’s number has been charged with the murder of a young woman.
The lack of humility in this behaviour takes my breath away.
4) The rhetoric that the police have displayed in response to all this disgrace is, it seems to say: ‘this is for your own safety. If only you’d been obedient. If only you’d modified your behaviour, if only you hadn’t embraced your right to assembly and protest.’
That is to say, Look what you made me do.
I don’t really want to write about myself. I don’t like that all writing by women is treated as an introspective excavation. But as a feminist I believe the personal is political, and in lockdown the self is one of the few subjects available. In these conditions, even law-abiding vigils become lonely, atomised demonstrations, confined to the home. Confined, as women so often are.
Last night at 21.30, my partner and I went out onto our doorsteps, holding candles. For a while it seemed that we were the only ones on our street observing the vigil.
And then, here and there, they started to appear. Candles on windowsills, on the ledges of balconies. Pinpricks in the darkness, torches against the night.
We attend mass gatherings, whether online or in person, because we seek out people who feel the same way that we do. But with that seeking out there comes the threat of echo chambers, of only interacting people who affirm your worldview. It was a different thing, a moving thing, to see those little lights shone by neighbours.
As we re-entered our building, I was struck by a flesh memory. It’s been a long time, because of the lockdown, since I unlocked the door to my flat at night after an evening out. A lot of women talk about how they walk home with their keys spiked through their knuckles. I do it too. Purely as a placebo - I couldn’t hit anyone hard enough with those makeshift brass knuckles to do substantial damage. But I thought of all the times I’ve practised inserting my key into the lock, practised turning it smoothly. I practise so that if I’m chased home I can buy seconds for myself. I’m unsettled by unyielding locks or freshly-cut, creaky keys. I always carry the key to my front lock ready, pointing outward like a sword.
We unlocked our door and went inside. We set our candles on the windowsill. It was tempting to see them as little beacons, marking Sarah’s way home.
But there was no lack of street light on that walk from Clapham to Brixton. We know, from the last CCTV we have of her, that Sarah wasn’t showing her legs. Her hair wasn’t in a ponytail. Her phone was charged. She was wearing sensible shoes. She was wearing her face mask, protecting herself and others from COVID’S invisible threat.
Were her keys bunched in her hand?
She was doing everything right. And still he murdered her.
