Concern about women’s safety is at the forefront of the news agenda in 2021, but it is a subject that the Guardian has been committed to for a long time. We are an organisation that already passionately believes that women’s rights are human rights, and have to be valued and fought for accordingly.
I have been writing about violence against women and girls for more than a decade, but I have never witnessed such a widespread public outpouring of shock and anger as I did in the wake of Sarah Everard’s death at the beginning of March. There was a real sense among women that this could have been us: any one of us. There was a real sense that this was a tipping point: that something had to be done to tackle the fear of men’s violence that women live with every day of their lives.
In the days after the discovery of Everard’s body, we published some of the grim statistics around violence against women: in England and Wales almost one in three women will experience domestic abuse; two women a week are killed by a current or former partner; more than half a million women are raped or sexually assaulted each year. In a podcast, I discussed the sense of despair many women, and the men who want to support them, are feeling.
As women’s safety was hitting the headlines I reported that the vast majority of young women had experienced sexual harassment in public places, and soon after I was writing about the thousands of testimonies of sexual abuse – many of them from schoolgirls – detailed on the website Everyone’s Invited.
Speaking to women young and old about the abuse they have faced, and how our systems so often fail them, is a privilege – and it helps us hold to account those charged with protecting us. The desire to help those voices be heard and listened to has led us to speak not only to the organisations that work to end violence against women, but whistleblowers inside powerful organisations who trust the Guardian to expose failings. On many occasions it has led us to simply tell women’s stories, after they had been ignored by many others.
In the Guardian’s Rape: Reported series, we set out to investigate why criminal justice outcomes for women who reported rape were so poor. In 2018, we exposed secret training being given by the CPS in which prosecutors were told to “drop weaker cases” to improve the conviction rate, and a freedom of information request showed that young men were significantly less likely to be found guilty of rape than older men. Another story revealed the extent to which police were demanding almost unfettered access to highly personal records and data from alleged rape victims.
I firmly believe our dogged reporting in this area contributed to the scrapping of these “digital strip-searches” of rape complainants and the government’s decision to carry out an end-to-end review into the treatment of rape in the criminal justice system. The Guardian was reporting on these issues when very few other publications were taking notice, and senior editors have always been incredibly supportive, giving us the time we need for work which is often difficult and painstaking.
As our editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, has said, we don’t just want to tell these stories, we want to be part of the solution – and a recent interview with the police’s national lead on rape focused on what could be done now to improve outcomes.
There is, I think, a growing recognition that sexist attitudes that result in the vast majority of young women experiencing sexual harassment in public places cannot be divorced from the grim figures that show that calls to the national domestic abuse helpline are up 60% or the fact that women have taken on the bulk of the domestic burden during the pandemic, making them fear a return to the 1970s. In the days after the discovery of Everard’s body, the feminist writer and campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez put it like this: “We have to sweat the small stuff too”.
Personally, a desire for greater gender equality has led me to become an evangelical supporter of shared parental leave. I firmly believe that our current system doesn’t work – only around three in seven families are eligible and of those only about 1% have shared any leave at all. The gender pay gap is small (if growing) among young women, but widens dramatically as women hit their child-rearing years and still stands at 15.5%for all full- and part-time workers. We can’t address this – and the many knock-on effects it has – until men are as likely to take time off to look after children as women, and we won’t end maternity discrimination until both parents are seen by employers as potential baby-creating liabilities.
Over more than a decade, my reporting has shown me that the murder, abuse and harassment of women are not sporadic, random acts that occur in a vacuum – they are endemic, and they are inexplicably linked to gender inequality. To mark International Women’s Day this year, the MP Jess Phillips read out the names of 118 women who had been killed by a man in the previous 12 months. I spoke to five experts about the impact of the pandemic on women: personally, I think they are two different parts of the same story.
While reporting on violence against women and girls, and the barriers women face to living full, successful lives, can be heartbreaking and all-consuming, strangely the last month has left me more hopeful than despairing. Women across generations are joining forces to say enough is enough; men who might have thought there was no space for them in this endeavour are saying they want to be part of the solution. And we know our readers want to be part of that too: so I thank all of you for supporting our journalism so that we can continue to do this important work.
