Content Warning: This newsletter discusses the recent murder of Sarah Everard.
The last time I saw her, I had to walk my hairdresser to her car.
“Thank you for doing this for me,” she said, squeezing me in as her last appointment before a prolonged national lockdown. “It's just that there was an incident recently right outside here the other day, where this man grabbed an old lady to the point where she fell down.
“He said he was just asking her for something and she hadn't heard him but it shook her, and it really scared me. I've asked my other half to be here at the end of the day since then but he can’t be here this time.”
This conversation kept running through my head as news broke of Sarah Everard’s murder this week. As many have said, Sarah Everard did everything women do to keep themselves safe: bright clothes, sticking to a route of main roads, keeping a conversation going with a friend. She was still so brutally murdered that the news described what was found as not a body but human remains.
I've walked so many women home, even if it's meant a significant detour from my own. I've let friends stay at my house overnight to ensure they don't wind up in a dangerous situation on a walk home. I'm friends with women who've shown me how they keep keys between their knuckles when they walk alone, and who’ve made conscious choices to change outfits because of the unwanted attention they’ve received from men for the crime of wearing clothes.
We live in a society where men are happy to violate the personal space of anyone who isn’t a man, to quietly change the conditions of sexual consent, to kidnap and murder a woman for the hell of it. They’re happy to do it because they know society empowers them to treat women — especially women of colour and trans women — like garbage, that their fellow men will let it all slide, and that the systems ostensibly there to protect victims are just as complicit in violence against women.
We have to do better. If we have to spend our lives challenging violence against women in the same way we should challenge violence against people of colour, then so be it. We have to not just see women as mothers, daughters, and sisters, but as actual fucking human beings.
We have to destroy the notion of locker room talk, of the idea that men don’t really mean the disgusting stuff they say about women in private, or that they do to them in public.
We also have to radically change the shape of our justice system, so it’s less concerned with people who deface statues of racists and more concerned with the systematic murder of women and minorities.
But above all, we cannot let this keep happening. Enough is enough. There cannot be one more name.