Years ago, on an early morning furred with frost, something caught my attention as I passed the local churchyard: a mannequin sprawled on a gravestone. It took a moment for me to realise what I was seeing, a body, naked from the waist down.
The police took a statement. This should have been the extent of my involvement. I couldn’t identify the murder victim or add any other useful detail. Nevertheless, during the following week an officer dropped by my flat several times unannounced to “update me on the case”. On his last visit, he showed me a card he’d made for a colleague as a joke, a post-mortem headshot of the victim with helmet and moustache added, transforming the dead woman, he said, into the spitting image of his boss. As horror robbed me of speech, he asked me out on a date.
I thought about that encounter after the gut-punch news about Sarah Everard’s disappearance, and that a suspect, Wayne Couzens, an officer of the Metropolitan police, was being held for questioning about her kidnap and killing. I thought about it when I read of the “reassurance patrols” deployed in the area from which Everard was snatched, the visible presence of Couzens’ colleagues supposed, somehow, to make women feel safer. Should the Met be investigating or investigated? This question gained urgency with reports that the force faces an inquiry into whether it properly looked into the claim that Couzens had exposed himself at a restaurant, days before Everard’s disappearance.
I thought about it when the Today programme responded to the outpouring of rage and sorrow for Everard by booking an interview with a criminologist called Prof Marian FitzGerald. Many women had taken to social media with their own stories of assault and intimidation. The broadcaster Shelagh Fogarty, for example, tweeted a list of bad things that had happened to her, starting with a man following her home from school when she was 10 and culminating four decades later with a stalker terrorising her for three years.
FitzGerald’s response to similar testimonies, some of which were read at the beginning of the segment, was dismissive: “Perhaps I’m entitled to say as a woman we should not pander to stereotypes and get hysterical,” she said. She advised “the sort of precautions I’ve always taken walking about London late at night, knowing where to walk, where not to walk, how to hold yourself” and rounded off her appearance with the observation that the risk to women “hasn’t changed in a long time”.
This last point was true, but not in the way she meant it. The reason I cannot shake the memory of a police officer’s unwanted attentions and grotesque misuse of a victim’s image is precisely because so little has changed in the intervening years. Back then, in my 20s, I assumed progress just happened without us doing anything to prod it along. Equality shimmered on the near horizon. I understood violence purely as an interaction between individuals rather than grasping its systemic and cultural dimensions and the ways in which the institutions that should combat it too often harbour and enable it. Learning about these dimensions came at a personal cost that underscores my activism and helped propel Sandi Toksvig and me into creating the Women’s Equality party in 2015.
Yes, there are psychopaths, born not socially constructed, but even rotten apples take their cues from their surroundings, with studies suggesting that the behaviours of male psychopaths may differ from female psychopaths along gendered lines dictated by their upbringing and environment. Violence is rarely random, despite the frequency with which this phrase appears. Its targets are predetermined by hatreds that are learned, not inherent.
The ordinary everyday sexism I knew in my youth, the routine sexualisation and dehumanisation of women, hasn’t gone away, any more than have the other ideologies that start from the idea that some humans are worth less than others. On the contrary, these things have found amplifying channels and platforms online and are enjoying a terrible resurgence.
The Crown Prosecution Service is currently evaluating charges against two Met police officers accused of taking selfies in front of the bodies of murdered sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, then sharing those images on WhatsApp. These days women still walk home with keys threaded through anxious knuckles, only to switch on their computers to find death and rape threats. We are supposed to shrug these things off, treat them as normal, rather than normalised.
Well I’m not prepared to do so. Plans for distanced vigils and protests and the continuing tidal wave of personal testimonies suggest that many, many others feel as I do. This is in the face of opposition from the Metropolitan police, which is banning the Reclaim These Streets vigil planned on Clapham Common on Saturday night despite the organisers’ care to ensure adherence to Covid safety. I joined more than 200 women, MPs, party colleagues, charity workers and others to sign a letter pushing for action to tackle violence against women and girls. And such action is long overdue. Women are leading the calls, but it is way past time that men stepped up to the plate.
We can best honour the victims of violence not only by demanding their assailants face justice, but by challenging the systems and cultures that enable violence and pin the blame on victims. I’m looking at Westminster with its failure to tackle its own culture of abusive behaviour – its own 2018 investigation found that one in five people working there had suffered harassment. I’m looking at the media, reflexively denying its own culpability while pumping out stories that diminish, divide and dehumanise. And I’m looking at those tasked with protecting us. I’m remembering a winter morning and all these years later, I still feel the cold.
Catherine Mayer is an author and co-founder of the Women’s Equality party
