Just a month ago, 33-year-old marketing executive Sarah Everard, was on her usual route home at around 21:00 when she was kidnapped and murdered, with Met Police Officer Wayne Couzens arrested on suspicion of her death and abduction. What should have been another day for the young woman, would instead be her last, killed for the crime of walking home in the streets of London - a route which hundreds of women take every day. Her death sparked waves of grief for women across the nation and world as Sarah Everard became a symbol – a figurehead, pulling back the veil on the invisible misogyny intrinsic in our culture. 

Blonde haired, blue-eyed and smiling, Sarah Everard looks the picture of youth, aspiration and hope. Looking at the picture of this young woman, innocently staring up at us from a newspaper rather than from a photo-album at home as she should have been, it is unsurprising that her face struck such a chord in the heart of the United Kingdom. Educated in York, Durham undergraduate, and working in London – Everard appears to be a quintessential daughter of the UK. She could have been any woman. And indeed, that is what she became, her murder materialising into a symbol of the everyday sexism women are subject to. In taking on the role of the everywoman, women across the country stared into her eyes imagining their own face in print.  

“It is thankfully incredibly rare for a woman to be abducted from our streets,” stated Met Police chief Cressida Dick. And whilst it is rare to be abducted, partly why Sarah Everard’s case touched such a nerve in the country, in a year where 118 women were murdered by a male perpetrator, her murder is incredibly revealing. As a society, we have made leaps and bounds when it comes to women’s rights, from the vote only 100 years ago in 1918, to the Equality Act of 2010 making discrimination illegal in the workplace and wider society. However, whilst in legislation, it appears female rights are on par with male rights, this does not reflect in everyday life. De jure discrimination is much easier to detect and punish than de facto discrimination, thus rendering cultural change difficult to enact. 

A UN report published only days after Everard’s disappearance shows that 97% of women aged 18-24 have been sexually harassed, with 80% of women of all ages saying they had experienced sexual harassment in public spaces. We are not blind to the irony of this, the report eerily solemnising the murder of another woman, and coming only 5 days before International Women’s Day. ½ of the country’s population revealed that everyday life for them is polluted with the threat of male violence, a statistic many male mainstream commentators found ‘shocking and surprising’ - in comparison to most women who were fairly unsurprised. It is clear that there is a miserably endemic, invisible cultural problem which directly imposes on and threatens female liberties across the country, and one which needs addressing. 

With this statistic however – empirical data whose aim was to clearly put into numbers the extent of female subordination - also came the deniers, those who perceived it as a personal attack rather than a worrying unearthing of the female experience. With the hashtag #NotAllMen trending following the murder, the statistic was still labelled ‘extreme’ by many.  Tweets reverted to the age-old stereotype, branding women ‘sensitive’ and ‘touchy’, arguing that the 97% statistic is untrustworthy coming from a gender who will report a man for ‘touching them on the shoulder’ (a notion actively discounted by the fact that only 15-35% of sexual assaults go reported). In fact, (I emphasise not all men), there seems to be an active effort by some, to deny what was meant to expose the truth. It is brutal that it took a death materialising these findings for the nation to stand up and take notice, and even so, this may too be soon swept under the rug if not more action is taken.   

Of course not all men will harm women, but in a society where sexual harassment is the norm, it should be no shock whatsoever that women have reason to be fearful of all men. In fact, according to the Femicide Census, half of men who kill women will have a proven record of violence towards women beforehand. Wayne Couzens, the officer charged, is living proof of this statistic, accused of indecent exposure only days prior to Everard’s murder. A climate where sexual harassment is so intrinsic it is even denied or dismissed as an unfortunate fact of life, certainly makes for a cosy environment for perpetrators and abusers to thrive. And whilst all men are not cat-callers, and not all cat-callers are rapists or murderers, women are forced to operate in panic-mode, expecting the very worst all the time. When swimming, you are afraid of all sharks in the water, even if not all sharks will attack you.  

Indeed, women have no idea when to expect the worst day of their life, and so from a young age are taught to be wary at all times, to not take certain routes, to not stay out alone after dark, to take taxis where possible (preferably with female drivers), and to text when arrived safely home. It has always been on women to protect themselves, and thus on women when they are assaulted – ‘she shouldn’t have worn that’ or ‘she was asking for it’. Getting women to modify their behaviour might seem an easier option than trying to get men to stop being violent towards us, but this argument’s been made for too long to justify being so useless. Women, women like Sarah Everard who spoke to her boyfriend on her route, wore bright clothing and walked in brightly lit streets, may be victim to attack regardless of the semi-useless efforts they’re expected to make to avoid harm. It is not women vs men, but everyone vs. assaulters and those who enable the culture of misogyny to continue. 

What we need is a shift of rhetoric – one that actively places the onus on men to solve men’s violence against women, not women to protect themselves against a perceived fact of life. As Jackson Katz states in his TED Talk ‘Violence against women – it’s a men’s issue’: “Even the term ‘violence against women’ is problematic. It’s a passive construction. There is no active agent in the sentence. It’s a bad thing that happens to women, but nobody is doing it to them. It just happens. Men aren’t even a part of it!... So you can see how the use of this passive voice has a political effect. It shifts the focus off men and boys and onto girls and women”.  

Baroness Jenny Jones highlighted the fallacy of the female existence as ‘equal’ in her call for an all-male curfew following Everard’s murder, a notion which had many enraged across the country. While this of course, was not an entirely serious suggestion, it did make a point. "Nobody makes a fuss when, for example, the police suggest women stay home. (as they did in Clapham the night after Sarah Everard’s murder) But when I suggest it, men are up in arms" she stated. Women have an unspoken curfew, an unspoken limit on what they can and cannot do, and this should spark as much outcry as the legislative male curfew proposed by the Baroness did. 

When polled on what women would do if the male gender did not exist for a day, the majority stated, ‘Take a walk at night’. When polled for the same, the majority of men stated ‘Play as many videogames as I’d like’. It is clear that there is a gap in realised female and male liberties, leaving women discouraged to partake fully in daily life within in a society that is supposed to offer equality. 

Every woman knows several other women who have been sexually assaulted, yet it seems like very few men know another man who has committed sexual assault. And whilst there has been some progress, with many men taking to Twitter to question what they could do to make women feel safer, and misogyny now being able to be reported as a hate crime, the progress needs to go further and target the roots of this cultural inequality.  

As MP Jess Phillips stated: “I think that we’ve got a responsibility to be looking at the way that we educate, at the way that all of society operates that means women end up being treated as objects on our streets. And it’s not all men, but it is all women. Every single woman I know will have a story to tell about how they were harassed or assaulted on the streets of this country. So yes, we need to be going into our schools and educating boys”.  

Just as criminals can be discouraged from partaking in crime, so can the current enabling culture be shifted to deter males from feeling empowered to objectify, harass or assault women – this begins with education. 

And if you are a male reading this, frustrated perhaps at the association with this violence, remember that unfortunately, bad men will respect your voice more than women’s. It is your responsibility to call out objectifying, sexualising and threatening comments or actions – women cannot do it alone. Long-term, respect needs to be fostered between genders regardless of sex. As criminologist Professor Jane Monckton Smith highlights in her book ‘In Control’, the justice system is “designed to deal with incidents rather than patterns”. In order for society to end the pattern of terrorised women, the pattern of female objectification which empowers men to assault, it needs to recognise how small acts can be the potential first stepping-stones of male assaulters. Every act of harassment, every lewd comment, needs to be reported – not just by women, but by men also, to be kept on file. Far from overwhelming the authorities, it will help identify the patterns of misogyny before the perpetrators can act again.  

Sarah Everard’s death is incredibly exposing. A young, 3-dimensional woman just like any of us who was walking home, was murdered in the streets of London by someone we are taught to trust. What her murder unearths however is an endemic culture which normalises harassment, enabling abusers to act in an environment where they are given prerogative to. It should have never been up to women. It should now be up to men and women alike to help shift the rhetoric and shift our culture to one which grants women safety and security from sexual threat and crime. The issue may be gender exclusive, but the solution needs to be gender inclusive to succeed – the time has come for men to join the fight. 

Penny Zacharatou