Perhaps because the pandemic blockages have left women clinging to all that remains of their access to public space. Perhaps it is because after more than three years of the #MeToo movement, the police and society are still telling women to sacrifice their freedoms in order to buy some temporary security.
It all came to a head when Sarah Everard, 33, who disappeared while returning home to London on March 3, was found dead a week later, after doing everything she should. She chose a longer, well-lit and populated path. She wore bright clothes and shoes that she could run with. She talked to her boyfriend to let him know when she was leaving. But that was not enough to save your life.
Therefore, the response of British women to reports that the police were going door to door telling women in the south London neighborhood where she had disappeared to stay indoors for their own safety has become a wave of anger and frustration. .
This sparked a social movement that feels, in some way, different from those that came before: women from all walks of life demanding security from male violence – and demanding that the police, government and men collectively be responsible for bear the burden of ensuring it.
‘Arrest Your Own’
“Hey, sir, take my sister’s hands off!” the crowd screamed as the police grabbed women as they tried to disperse the vigil on Saturday night for Everard, a marketing executive, in a park in Clapham, south London.
“Hold yours!” hundreds shouted, a reference to the police officer accused of the murder of Mrs. Everard. “Police, go home!”
While the police stepped on the flowers placed on an impromptu memorial to Mrs. Everard and threw the shocked girls to the ground, the London Metropolitan Police could hardly have provided a better example of what the women were protesting if they had intentionally decided to do so.
In the days after Everard’s disappearance, a group calling itself Reclaim These Streets announced that a vigil would be held Saturday night in a park in South London. The event would be partly to mourn and partly to protest police instructions for women to stay home for their own safety and demand safer streets.
But “the Met,” as the London police are known, once again told women to stay home. Citing restrictions on the blockade, the police threatened high fines if the vigil was not canceled.
Finally, the organizers capitulated and canceled the event, in part because they could not stand the idea that their fines would subsidize the very police force against which they protested, said Mary Morgan, a writer and academic focused on body politics who was one of the organizers. originals of the event. “It makes my stomach rot,” she said in an interview.
Whatever the Met’s internal reasoning, the message he sent to women across the country was that the police were doubling down to restrict women’s freedom instead of men’s violence.
“@metpoliceuk really want women off the streets, don’t they? ”Anne Lawtey, 64, wrote on Twitter after the organizers announced the cancellation of the meeting. She was shocked, she said in a telephone interview, for having been closed. “Can’t we do a vigil? People standing in a park, wearing masks? “
A huge crowd showed up anyway, carrying candles and bouquets, saffron bulbs in glass jars and leaves of pansy seedlings to add to the pile of flowers.
Without audio equipment, the women climbed into the Victorian bandstand that had become an impromptu memorial and used a human microphone in the style of Occupy Wall Street: the crowd repeated what was said so that it could be heard in the background.
“The police are trying to silence us, the police are trying to repress us,” hundreds repeated in unison. “The police said that we cannot do a vigil to remember Sarah Everard. The police have the courage to threaten us. The police have the courage to intimidate us. “
Then, louder: “WE. TO SAY. NO.”
The Bad Bargain
To be a woman is to be “in a constant state of bargain”, wrote the author and columnist Nesrine Malik in her book “We need new stories”.
Everard’s disappearance drew attention to the terms of a security bargain so ubiquitous that many women might never have considered it in such terms: that, in order to buy their own security from male violence, they must make the “right” choices. And if a woman does not do this, her destiny will be her own fault.
Online, women shared the details of their part of that bargain. What they used. Where they walked. Who they spoke to before they left and after they returned home. When they were going out alone, or with other women, or with men.
Some reflected on their own difficulties. Nosisa Majuqwana, 26, an advertising producer who lives in East London, said she said to her friends: “Thank God I was wearing sneakers, thank God I was carrying a backpack” the night a strange man approached on a deserted path, pulled out a knife and told her to be quiet. “You would never come home to London in high heels.”
But Everard’s death prompted Ms. Majuqwana and many others to reject the agreement at once.
“It doesn’t matter what women do,” said Morgan. “We can be hypervigilant, we can follow all the care that we have been taught since we were children.”
The murder “shocked people to accept that it is normal” to make these exchanges, said Anna Birley, a researcher for local economic and political politics in South London who also worked to organize the Reclaim These Streets event. “Every woman can see herself in this situation.”
Who should sacrifice?
Why is the burden of women’s security on women, not men, who are the source of most violence against them?
“Women’s freedom is seen as expendable, as disposable – much like sometimes, tragically, with women,” said Kate Manne, professor of philosophy at Cornell University and author of two books on the ways in which sexism shapes society , said in an interview. “There is only an immediate assumption that men’s lives will not be significantly affected by this,” so they cannot be asked to make sacrifices to change that.
As the role of women in public life has grown, the differences have become clear and painful. The #MeToo movement revealed that many women left their jobs or entire industries to avoid predators like Harvey Weinstein – with the result that their attackers could continue harming other women for decades.
Often, women in abusive relationships are told to simply make their partners violent, but in fact, they often face the worst violence when they try to do so.
Sometimes the calculation is more subtle, but the collective impact is still significant.
A working paper by World Bank researcher Girija Borker found that women in India were willing to go to much worse colleges and pay more tuition to avoid harassment or abuse on their daily commute to class. The impact of this “choice” on a woman can be difficult to measure – but among the thousands she has documented in her research, it can be expected to have an effect on income, economic power and social mobility.
But British women’s anger is beginning to change assumptions about who should make sacrifices for security.
Jenny Jones, a baroness and noble of the Green Party, suggested in the House of Lords last week that there should be a 6 pm curfew for men after Everard’s disappearance. She later clarified that it was not an entirely serious suggestion, telling Britain’s Sky News: “Nobody makes a noise when, for example, the police suggest that women stay at home. But when I suggest that, the men are armed. “
When asked about the proposal, Mark Drakeford, Wales’ prime minister, said in an interview with the BBC that a curfew for men “would not be at the top of our list”, but seemed to suggest that it could be considered in some circumstances. (He later clarified that the Welsh government was not considering such a move.)
Focused on policing
The demands for men to make changes have become more prominent. But the public’s fury also hit the police hard. And as the photos circulated of women being detained and abused by police officers after Clapham’s vigil on Saturday night, the anger grew.
“There is so much anger at the fact that this is not the first time that the Metropolitan Police have disappointed women on such a large scale,” said Majuqwana.
She said she also spoke from experience. A few years ago, she said, a man grabbed her by the arm and then hit her in the face with a glass bottle when she refused his advances. But when the police arrived, they said there was nothing they could do except that she also wanted to be arrested, because she had admitted to responding to the attacker in self-defense.
Sisters Uncut, a feminist group that encouraged women to go to the park even after the official Reclaim Theses Streets event was canceled, also announced a protest on Sunday, this time in front of Police headquarters.
“The police are perpetrators of individual and state violence against women – as evidenced last night,” the group wrote on Twitter, adding, “4 pm. New Scotland Yard.”