Reclaim the streets: How Sarah Everard’s story sparked a movement around women’s public safety

Rear View Of Woman Walking On Footpath At Night
Getty Images/EyeEm

Keys clutched between fingers. Crossing to the road to face the traffic. Sharing a location on WhatsApp - not because it will stop it happening, but because it will make an attack easier to pinpoint when it does.

“We aren’t born doing this stuff - we learn over years of watching women’s trauma play out,” explains one of the thousands of now-viral tweets concerning women’s public safety in the wake of Sarah Everard’s disappearance. The 33-year-old went missing just after 9.30pm last Wednesday and is now the subject of a tragic murder investigation with a serving male police officer at the epicentre.

Across the capital, Everard’s story has sparked a collective sense of grief, fear and rage. Women are speaking up and on Saturday they will gather for a vigil remembering Everard and other violence victims at the bandstand on Clapham Common, they are calling it Reclaim These Streets. And thousands of women have been sharing their everyday experiences of being groped, followed, flashed-at and cat-called on London’s streets - often in broad daylight.

Metropolitan Police commissioner Cressida Dick says the disturbing development has sparked “shockwaves and anger” but those shockwaves have spread far beyond the boundaries of her London police force. Earlier in Everard’s investigation, Dicks’ own detectives came under fire for suggesting women should not go out alone - a comment that was quickly accused of fuelling a long-running culture of victim-blaming.

Sarah Everard
PA Wire

"The long term emotional and psychological harm [caused to women] has been underestimated massively,” the Standard’s Helena Wadia told the BBC’s Newscast podcast this week after sharing her own experience of being sexually assaulted on her morning commute. “Should I not have gone to work?” she hit back at critics saying Everard shouldn’t have been walking alone at night. Yesterday, Wadia was among thousands of women sharing their everyday experiences of being groped, followed, flashed-at and cat-called on London’s streets - often in broad daylight.

Journalist and author Caitlin Moran was quick to point out the creeping undertones of that message for women not to go out after dark. “I am 45 and it is 2021 and I am essentially under a curfew,” she tweeted on Wednesday. Channel 4 newsreader Cathy Newman took a moment to remember the Reclaim The Streets protest she attended at university - now the inspiration for Saturday’s vigil. “That was nearly 30 years ago,” tweeted Newman of the march, a strand of which called Reclaim The Night is organised every year by the London Feminist Network. “It doesn’t feel as if very much has changed.”

Across the capital, Everard’s story has sparked a collective sense of grief, fear and rage. Why? Because Everard made so many of the compromises and calculations women are forced to take on a daily basis. She took a well-lit route, and called her boyfriend to let him know she was on her way home. “Text me when you get home” is a phrase almost every woman reading Everard’s story will have used when saying goodbye to a friend at the end of an evening together. This week was a reminder we say that for a reason.

We don’t yet know the full details of Everard’s story, but what the last days have made clear is that it has spoken to a generation of women who’ve lived their day-to-day lives on high-alert from an early age - and they are exhausted. “We’ve all walked faster. Breathed quicker. Held our keys tighter. Yanked at our clothes to cover any bits of skin. Made a pretend phone call. It’s never enough,” says Suzanne Jacob, CEO of domestic abuse organisation Safe Lives, warning that stories like Everard’s will keep happening if society does not commit to a “massive” change in thinking.

Like Jacob, many women felt sick to their stomachs as the shocking details of Everard’s story came together. For many of them, equally shocking were the conversations with men that came with it: the partners unaware this was their lived experience. The friends admitting the best part of their night was often walk home in headphones. The men (and women) continuing to insist Everard shouldn’t have been walking on her own.

Of course, it is not all men. Many have taken Everard’s story as a chance to listen and to learn, asking what actions they can take to help women feel more safe at night. But the backlash has come from more than just a few social media users who still think they are right to tweet #notallmen and expect “a prize for never raping someone in a park,” as podcaster Tessa Coates put it. On Radio 4’s Today programme, criminologist Marian Fitzgerald called women’s reaction to Everard’s story “hysterical” and told them not to pander to stereotypes. When Camberwell MP Harriet Harman defended women’s right to public safety in the Commons, members of the public told her she was “[naive]” and that it was “unthinkable” women would walk the streets alone at night.

The timing of the backlash has not gone unnoticed. That a week beginning with International Women’s Day should end with hundreds of women gathered in silence to mourn a young woman stolen from our streets by a man has only added to feelings of anger and tragedy. And what that anger makes abundantly clear is there is work to be done. “It’s really important that women’s lives don’t shrink in response to this fear,” says Natasha Walter, author of Living Dolls: the Return of Sexism and founder of the charity Women for Refugee Women.

Domestic abuse charity Solace Women’s Aid believes the problem is rooted in sexist issues such as male privilege and entitlement, which can “escalate” to abuse and violence. Education will play a big part in addressing this, as will a criminal justice system that protects women, it explains in its statement. The charity’s statement also verbalises the most common action-point in response to Everard’s story: that it is not for women to change their behaviours, but for men. “This is a moment for men to ask why this keeps happening, and why the common denominator, over and over, is a man who felt entitled to take something that didn’t belong to him,” says Jacob. She believes men, “whether they’re Sean Smith at number 42 or the Chancellor of the Exchequer”, should ask themselves: “‘If this is happening so often, what am I, as a man, going to do to change it?’

“We want them – including the ones who think they’d never do this – to stand up and be counted and fight for our safety like we’ve had to. Not because we’re their sister or girlfriend, but because we’re 52 per cent of the population and we deserve it.”

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