It’s been a long week for women and marginalised genders.
In the midst of what feels like a perpetual lockdown, the murder of Sarah Everard was bookended by International Women’s Day on Monday and Mother’s Day today on Sunday. In between these two days of celebration, we had the exposition of institutional misogynoir from within our own monarchy and the (alleged) killing of a woman by a Met police officer.
All of these events and their accompanying discourse have been the perfect storm for anger, sadness, anxiety and exhaustion. Last night’s vigil was so important because we needed this collective moment as women to mourn and hold space for the heaviness that has been brought by what has been for many a very triggering few days.
On Clapham Common, I saw women and girls of varying ages, races, and ethnicities, mothers with their babies and children, friends and couples comforting each other. I saw a solemn, peaceful, respectful gathering. I also saw a completely heavy handed and aggressive response from the Met police once the sun set. The message was clear: shut up, go home and get over it.
I am angry. But I’m not surprised.
It was a Met police officer who (allegedly) murdered Sarah. This was the same police officer who the Met had received a complaint about for exposing himself to a woman in a restaurant just a few days before Sarah’s disappearance — and still continued to serve with apparent impunity.
It was also Met police officers who took selfies next to the bodies of two murdered black women in a park last year and shared those images to a Whatsapp group. Those images were then forwarded on to members of the public. As if that wasn’t horrendous enough, the distraught mother of the two women, Mina Smallman, said she had to organise her own search party after very little interest from the Met upon which the boyfriend of one of the victims found their bodies and the murder weapon.
“I knew instantly why they didn’t care. They didn’t care because they looked at my daughter’s address and thought they knew who she was… A black woman who lives on a council estate… those police officers felt so safe, so untouchable, that they felt they could take photographs of dead black girls and send them on.” — Mina Smallman
Again, this lack of concern for women and women of colour especially is sadly of little surprise. Black women and trans women have been telling the world about this for years, although it feels particularly pertinent that those events occurred in the same summer as the brutalised police responses to the BLM protests last year.
All of this begs the question: What the fuck is going on in the Met? Why does it still continue to employ psychopaths who clearly have no regard for women (alive or dead) or people of colour? And it’s not just the police force. Misogyny and racism are still so deeply ingrained in other British institutions — last week’s Royal interview was bleak example of how both the monarchy and the media also have a grim role to play in the perpetuation of misogynoir, leeching off each other in order to fool the public into allowing them to survive.
Is it surprising to hear of racism and misogyny coming from a monarchy built on centuries of colonialism, imperialism and slavery? Apparently so! Despite the Royals receiving £86.3 million from the taxpayer in the year 2020–2021 whilst two thirds of children in the UK are now living in the poverty, members of the British public will defend the monarchical institution to death. Despite being presented with evidence that a black woman was almost moved to suicide due to racist media and then denied help by an institution that promised to protect her, there is still shock and denial.
This is inextricably linked to the media who arbitrarily pick and choose what (or who) matters and what does not. Many of us have the seen the comparison in headlines between Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton. Even today, I saw images of Kate Middleton’s attendance at the bandstand in Clapham splashed all over newspapers, which frames yesterday’s events in a completely different way. One of the headlines read something along the lines of “Kate Middleton: ‘I TOO REMEMBER BEING A WOMAN WALKING IN LONDON AT NIGHT’” as if somehow now a privileged, rich, white duchess is concerned and sad about this issue, then we have permission give a shit too.
For the most part, the media have been kind to Sarah and her memory. And predictably so. By all accounts she was a ‘good’ victim: a white woman, wearing ‘sensible clothes’, not drunk, not walking at 3am but in a well-lit busy area. There is nothing in her profile that could be weaponised against her. But repeatedly there has been the question ‘would there have been this much coverage if she wasn’t white? If she wasn’t from an area full of middle class white people?’. The question is undoubtedly an uncomfortable one for some. It is in no way to detract from or minimise the horror of the crime perpetrated against an innocent woman who deserved to walk home in peace and return safely. But it is a reasonable one considering the multitude of evidence that the British press is both systemically racist and misogynistic. If you need further confirmation, do you know who Nicola Smallman, Bibaa Henry, Blessing Olusegun, and Shukri Abdi are? Or does it require further Googling?
Another depressing aspect is the response to our anger and sadness as women. The trivialising, the denial, the allegations of man-hating, the label of hysteria that men and even some women are so ready to assign to us when we are grieving and sad and scared. Sarah’s murder by a man is a grim reminder of how the threat of or actual gender-based violence is a constant shadow looming over our shoulder. Other times, it is directly in our face. A lot of the time it is in our homes. The fact that the accused is a police officer is another reminder that this threat can come from even those who are meant to protect us.
And when women want to be together to mourn Sarah and all those lost or affected by male-perpetrated gender-based violence, we are met with more violence.
As a South London native, this hit geographically close to home. On the way to yesterday’s vigil, we walked down Poynders Road, as we have done many times before, where Sarah was last seen, passing tributes and missing posters. Every time I see her face, I want to cry. I want to cry because I see my friends, family members, myself. I want to cry because she deserved to live in a world free from male terror, as all women do. I keep thinking of Sarah’s mum dealing with Mother’s Day today. I think of her family and her friends and how it could have any one of us instead. Most of all, I cannot quell that familiar feeling of rising panic that she must have felt in her final moments. The ease in which it comes and the knowledge that so many other women have felt it too, whether we speak about it out loud or not, is still very disturbing to me.
It’s been a long week. Fuck, it’s been a long 12 months. Right now, I should be having a glass of prosecco with my mum to celebrate how amazing she is but instead I’m sat here writing this blog because my thoughts are running a race with my anxiety and my mind won’t stop until I get it out. I am deeply sad, and I am also extremely angry (and have been for about the last 15 years). But mostly, like everyone else, I am just very tired.
