It has been an awful week for women. As we reel from the news that Sarah Everard’s killer deliberately abused his position as a police officer to trick her into his car, handcuffing her and claiming to arrest her, our screens are also filled with other devastating updates. We learn that Sabina Nessa was murdered in a 'premeditated and predatory' attack involving 'extreme violence'. We read the utterly heart-breaking victim impact statements provided by Sarah Everard’s family, while the families of the woman and three children murdered in Derbyshire speak of their 'indescribable pain'.
The headlines jostle for space alongside other stories of women’s oppression and abuse: Olympic speed skater Elise Christie speaks for the first time about her experience of being drugged and raped, while Britney Spears continues the battle to free herself from a conservatorship many consider to be abusive and unnecessary, imposed by her own father.
Around the world, the chasm of gender inequality yawns: we see women in Texas railing against a new abortion law that has gutted their rights to control their own bodies; girls in Afghanistan prevented from returning to school; a leading Chinese feminist and labour rights activist missing, feared detained.
It is desperately painful for many women to read these stories: to be confronted with the reality of our own oppression every time we turn on the news or look at social media. For survivors of sexual and domestic abuse, the stories may trigger debilitating flashbacks and PTSD. For those thinking of their own ‘near misses’ and experiences of being followed, harassed, flashed at, it is a time of fury, of mourning, of all-consuming grief. We are exhausted by the constant reminders of our lack of safety, the dangers we face on a daily basis. Every woman I know is herself a survivor of some kind of sexual harassment, assault or abuse. An ongoing, unacknowledged, unresolved, collective trauma.
Every woman I know is herself a survivor of some kind of sexual harassment, assault or abuse. An ongoing, unacknowledged, unresolved, collective trauma.
What makes it all much worse is the sense that even now: even as these stories follow each other thick and fast on the nightly news, still we are being told that women themselves are responsible for fixing the problem. Still there doesn’t seem to be accountability or even acknowledgement of the fact that these are institutionalised problems that must have systemic solutions. It is like we are being gaslit on a mass scale.
As the news breaks that Everard’s killer Wayne Couzens was involved in a racist, homophobic and misogynistic WhatsApp groupwhere he allegedly exchanged 'discriminatory' messages with five other officers, still there hasn’t been an acknowledgement from the police that this is a systemic problem, not a case of one ‘bad apple’. Even worse, on the same day this information emerges, police are busy absurdly advising women to try to flag down a passing bus if they feel unsafe in an interaction with a lone police officer and to be'streetwise' about when they can be arrested.
Even now, even in the midst of all this, we are still adding to the ridiculous, endless list of ways in which women are supposedly responsible for ‘protecting ourselves’ from kidnap, rape and murder.
Don’t tell me we should look after each other, or practice self-care, or any other solution that depends on yet more effort and accountability on the part of women. What would help would be the recognition that this is an epidemic. For police never again to describe the death of a woman every three days at the hands of a man as an ‘isolated incident’. An acknowledgement of enormous, structural failings in the police force and an independent inquiry into institutionalised misogyny. A hot bath and a candle isn’t going to make me feel any better. Only accountability and systemic action will.
READ MORE: Until We Admit The Enormity Of Male Violence We Won’t Be Able To Stamp It Out