Cases like Sarah Everard's are not 'incredibly rare' and the police must admit it

Events this week have been a touch paper igniting women’s anger about men’s violence against women and girls and our frustration at the state’s failure to take this issue seriously.

Stranger killing accounts for 8%, or one in 12, of all killings of women by men. Between 2009 and 2018, 119 women were killed by men who were not known to them. Yes, a woman is more likely to be killed by someone she knows – every three days in the UK by a man and every four days by a partner or former partner – but following the killing of Sarah Everard, we are being fed a narrative by Metropolitan Police chief Cressida Dick that it is “incredibly rare for a woman to be abducted from our streets”.

By that simple statement the Met minimised the risk women face from men, and intentionally diminished femicide. ‘“Incredibly rare” should mean much more than very unusual. “Abducted from our streets” is a curious deflection. Strangers do abduct women, but they also kill women on the street, or follow them, or enter their homes. And friends, acquaintances, partners and colleagues also abduct women they know and kill them. It is also far more common to be abducted from the street and raped, attacked or sexually assaulted with impunity.

It is estimated that approximately 85,000 women a year are raped: 90% of women know the man who raped them, so that means 8,500 women a year, 23 a day, are raped by a man they don’t know. This isn’t rare either, then. Only one in 25 reported rapes ends up in court. A tiny minority end up with a rapist behind bars. Most, but not all, of the men who kill women are given lengthy jail sentences, the majority for murder and around 20% for manslaughter. Others kill themselves at the time they kill or just after.

With a dead body, the weight of the criminal justice system gears up. A living victim of rape or physical assault with first-hand evidence of the attack has little chance of securing an investigation let alone a conviction: only in death does a woman gain a criminal justice advantage.

In 2018, two women raped by John Worboys successfully sued the Met over its failure to investigate previous rape allegations against the taxi driver. The women argued that their human rights had not been protected because if Worboys had been dealt with appropriately – if earlier rape allegations had been taken seriously – he would not have been at liberty to rape them at a later date. It is estimated that Worboys raped more than 100 women.

We now hear that the Met is to be investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct over its handling of issues relating to the disappearance of Everard, including alleged failures in responses to a report of a man exposing himself at a fast-food restaurant in south London three days before Everard’s disappearance.

Policing problems are not restricted to the Met. A super complaint led by the Centre for Women’s Justice – and filed just days before PC Wayne Couzens was arrested – documents 666 reports over three years of domestic abuse incidents and offences perpetrated by police officers, community support officers and other staff from 30 of England and Wales’s 43 police forces. How can women trust the police and a criminal justice system when our complaints of men’s violence are so inadequately responded to and when the police themselves are implicated in that abuse?

Last week, the Observer launched its End Femicide campaign, to push for change. It uses data from our Femicide Census, started eight years ago because our government was not properly counting the extent of men’s fatal violence towards women. It still doesn’t. Every year we ask each police force in the UK for their data on women who are killed. The Met is the only UK police force that has never responded to our freedom of information requests. After many years (and, eventually, Dick’s intervention) they pushed back with their own data sharing agreement – though we have yet to agree on it. Our London data is based on the Counting Dead Women project and media searches.

The problem of the state response goes much deeper than incomplete data, however. In reports on government strategy on violence against women and girls for 2010-2015 and 2016-2020, homicide was barely addressed and femicide was not named. In 2010 there was one mention of supporting the introduction of Domestic Homicide Reviews. In 2016 the killing of women and girls is confined to 2 lines, again only focusing on domestic homicide, ignoring the 35% of women, like Sarah, killed by men outside of the family. Has this contributed to the fact there was no change to the rates of femicide in the UK over the past 10 years? In the meantime, the state is failing women and minimising violence by men against women, be it at the extreme end or the countless microaggressions that women live with and never report. In ways that have become second nature to us, women modify their behaviour and choices because of the fear and threat of men’s violence. Not all men are violent but all men benefit from sex inequality and all women’s lives are either directly or indirectly restricted or altered by the actions of men.

Until men stop attacking and killing women, the least we should expect from the police and our government is that they don’t mask the true nature of the problem. The State ignoring femicide should make us all angry for every woman whose life has been ended or diminished by men’s violence and its spectre. We know about Sarah because the media, and social media, picked up on her disappearance, why don’t the killings of all women warrant this attention? The killing of around 50 women we included in the Femicide Census 10-year report, barely warranted a mention, even in their local press. There is a pattern in who is unremarked and who gets national, significant media and state attention. Inequalities of class, race, age, lifestyle and disadvantage even make a difference in death. There should be no hierarchy of dead women.


https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/14/cases-like-everards-not-incredibly-rare-police-must-admit-it