Reader TTS

Saturday’s vigil has had extraordinary resonance for me, like the hundreds of women who kneeled side by side to mourn Sarah Everard’s death. Yet, even something as seemingly sacred as

women’s solidarity with each other in the aftermath of a collectively felt tragedy has had its chastisers. On Saturday we were told by the police that our grief should be suspended in the

respect of public safety. Our disdain of deference came unexpectedly: women being other than quiet and rule-abiding are still able to provoke shock, and not solely among the _bien-pensants_

and bigots. Our uniquely unthreatening position — we were kneeling on the ground, giving the police our backs, silent and unresisting —  would be too enticing in the eye of any bully not to

be taken advantage of. Thus what started as a peaceful vigil all too quickly turned into an ugly paradox. My implication of bullying should not be taken as police-bashing for the sake of it.

But the contrast between the police’s almost obsequious — and if not obsequious, certainly appeasing — attitude to raging BLM protesters and paunchy Ranger fans and, on the other hand,

their sudden metamorphosis into big boys in the face of vulnerability has been too striking to be lost on anyone with even basic sensitivity to injustice. Yet more chastising has been

propagated by the media, and even from Sarah Everard’s intimate circle of friends, contesting the presumed monopolisation of her death to advance women’s right to walk the streets unafraid.

In her piece for _TheArticle_, Catherine Utley advocated a return to the apolitical placidity of Common Clapham, in which bereavement may be fostered quietly. In a more polemical tone (and

not equally in good faith), Helena Edwards has taken to the press to lament people’s exploitation of her friend’s death to frame all men as misogynistic monsters. “Her abduction and murder

are not, in my opinion, a symptom of a sexist, dangerous society… I don’t think Sarah would have wanted [her male friends], or men in general, to be smeared with the same brush as her

attacker. Most people, and indeed men, are good. They would never wish harm on anyone else, let alone attack or kill someone else”. Now, let’s pretend for a moment not to have noticed the

discrepancy between Edwards’s invitation to neutrality and her own advancement of a very specific political narrative. If we lived in a fairyland, Edwards’s and Utley’s message wouldn’t miss

a beat: death is a universal experience and Sarah’s fate concerns us all. We should not make it a matter of partisan activism. The real world, however, is a much darker place. In this

world, not all men are murderers and assaulters, but most murderers and assaulters are men. We keep telling ourselves that creeps are a minority. Well, we should seriously think about

reevaluating that notion. Creeps are everywhere. The fact that we choose to ignore them doesn’t make them go away. I am 24 and have been the object of creeps’ attention since the tender age

of 12. I don’t exaggerate when I say that non-chauvinistic men have been for me the pleasant exception, and not the other way around. We talk about male murders of women amounting to an

almost negligible number compared to murders of men. But how about rape? Isn’t rape a kind of spiritual murder? Rapes have become so customary that it is rare for them to be publicised to

the same extent as the Everard case — but this doesn’t make the rapes themselves any less frequent. It is enough to google “rape UK” to realise how often men rape women — and that’s just

some of the reported ones. It’s understandable for us to choose not to see them — to do otherwise would be a rather bleak experience. Let’s stop, nonetheless, mistaking emotional

self-preservation with reality. Reality speaks very clearly, and it’s not on the side of women. There is a reason why men do not feel as anxious as women about walking around the city at

night in spite of the statistics. And the reason lies not in the numbers but in the ever-present _potential _for harm. This potential is plural: men may hurt us, rape us, kill us. Yet, not

only are we not given extraordinary powers to defend ourselves, but the law makes it extremely hard for us to do so. Pepper spray is illegal, and so is wearing brass knuckles. Misogyny still

hasn’t been classified as a hate crime. Men’s crimes against women are always a woman’s business. Men who assault and murder women are, for some reason, granted the protection of anonymity,

and if not anonymity, certainly with much more discretion than that reserved for the victims, whose names and faces plaster every corner of the internet, making their plight all about them

and not about the culprits. The alleged offender’s name is Wayne Couzens. The other day two men in a van catcalled me. They had to stop at the light, so I ran after them and heavily hit my

phone on their window three times in anger. Along with expletives that I refuse to repeat, they shouted: “You’re lucky you didn’t break it, sweetheart.” They were right, I had been lucky. If

the police had been called, I would have been the one to get in trouble. Increasingly, women are tired of passivity to threat — some of us have even started to headbutt their assaulters.

But what would we rather see happen in a post-Hobbesian society — the creation of serious legislation against sexually motivated harm, or the triumph of jungle law? Women’s overwhelming

response to the murder of Sarah Everard is not motivated by egotism, nor by a wish to create further cultural division. We identify with Sarah and we are inspired by Sarah. We want the

Sarahs of the world to never have to live in fear of being harmed on account of their immutable female characteristics ever again. And there is, I reckon, no better way to honour someone’s

memory than to make the world a better place in their name. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution

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