Maybe it was because pandemic locksmiths made women cling to everything left over from their access to public space. Maybe it was because the police and society after more than three years of the #MeToo movement are still telling women to sacrifice their freedoms to buy some temporary security.
It all came to the surface when 33-year-old Sarah Everard, who disappeared when she walked home in London on March 3, was found dead a week later after doing everything she had to do. She took a longer route that was well lit and populated. She wore bright clothes and shoes in which she could run. She stopped by her boyfriend to let him know when she was leaving. But that was not enough to save her life.
The reaction of British women to reports that the police were going to tell door-to-door women in the suburb of South London, where she had disappeared, to stay inside for their own safety, thus became an outburst of anger and frustration.
It has created a social movement that feels different from those that have come before: women from all walks of life who demand security from male violence – and demand that the police, the government and men collectively those should be what should carry the burden. to ensure this.
‘Arrest your own’
“Hey, sir, pull my sister down!” the crowd chanted as police arrested women as they tried to distribute the night watch on Saturday night to Ms Everard, a marketing manager, in a park in Clapham, south London.
“Arrest your own!” hundreds shouted, a reference to the police officer charged with the murder of Ms. Everard. “Police, go home!”
While officers trampled the flowers laid at a temporary memorial to Ms Everard and wrestled shocked young women to the ground, Metropolitan Police in London could hardly have given a better example of what women are protesting if they deliberately decide to do it.
In the days after the disappearance of Mrs. Everard has announced a group calling themselves Reclaim These Streets that a vigil will be held in a park in south London on Saturday night. The occasion would be partly to mourn and partly to protest the police orders to women to stay at home for their own safety and rather demand safer streets.
But ‘the Met’, as the London police are known, again told women to stay home. Police have cited the restrictions on the closure and are threatening fines if the vigilantes are not canceled.
Eventually, the organizers capitulated and cut off the opportunity, in part because they could not bear the thought that their fines would subsidize the police they were protesting, Mary Morgan, a writer and bodybuilder focused on body politics, said one of the original organizers of the event. “It makes my stomach rot,” she said in an interview.
Whatever the Met’s internal reasoning was, the message it sent to women across the country was that the police were restricting the freedom of women instead of men’s violence.
‘@metpoliceuk they really want women off the street, don’t they? Anne Lawtey, 64, wrote on Twitter after organizers announced the cancellation of the event. She was shocked, she said in a telephone interview that it was closed. “We can not guard? People standing still, wearing a parka and masks? ‘
A large crowd turned out anyway with candles and bouquets, crocus balls in glass jars and flat pan seedlings to add the flowers.
Without sound equipment, women climb on the Victorian tape stand that has become an impromptu memorial and use a human Wall Street-style microphone: the crowd repeats what has been said so that it can be heard in the back.
“The police are trying to silence us, the police are trying to oppress us,” hundreds repeated in unison. “Police have said we can not be vigilant in remembering Sarah Everard. The police have the nerve to threaten us. The police have the nerve to intimidate us. ”
Then, louder: “US. SAY. NO.”
A bad bargain
To be a woman is to be ‘in a constant state of negotiation’, author and columnist Nesrine Malik wrote in her book, “We Need New Stories”.
Me. Everard’s disappearance draws attention to the terms of a security store that is so common that many women would never be able to consider it in such terms: that they should make the “right” choices to buy their own security against male violence. And that if a woman does not do it, her fate is her own fault.
Online, women shared the details of their side of the bargain. What they wore. Where they walked. Who they went to drop in with before they left, and after they got home. When they would go alone, or with other women or with men.
Some reflected on their own close calls. Nosisa Majuqwana, 26, an advertising producer living in East London, said she told her friends: “Thank God I wore coaches, thank you for carrying a backpack” that evening when a strange man approached her on a deserted road, put out a knife and told her to be quiet. “You will never walk home in London.”
But the death of me. Everard led Majuqwana and many others to reject the bargain completely.
“It doesn’t matter what women do,” she said. Morgan said. “We can be extravagant, we can follow all the precautions we were taught from an early age.”
The murder ‘shocked people because they accepted it was normal’ to make these compromises, said Anna Birley, a researcher in economic policy and local politician in south London who also worked to promote the Reclaim These Streets event. organize, said. “Every woman can see herself in that situation.”
Who should sacrifice?
Why does the burden of women fall on women rather than on the men who are most of the violence against them?
“Women’s freedoms are seen as disposable, as disposable – much like women, sometimes tragically,” said Kate Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University and author of two books on the way sexism shapes society, in a interview said. “There is an immediate assumption that men’s lives will not be significantly affected by this,” so they cannot be asked to make sacrifices to change it.
As women’s role in public life grew, the differences became clear and painful. The #MeToo movement has revealed that many women have quit their jobs or their entire industries to avoid predators like Harvey Weinstein – with the result that their abusers could continue to harm other women for decades.
Women in abusive relationships are often told that they should just leave their violent partner, but they should actually face the worst violence if they try to do so.
Sometimes the calculation is more subtle, but the combined impact is still significant.
In an essay by Girija Borker, a researcher at the World Bank, it was found that women in India are willing to go to much worse colleges and pay more tuition to avoid harassment or abuse of their daily commuters to classes. The impact of that ‘choice’ on one woman may be difficult to measure – but among the thousands she has documented in her research, it can be expected to have an impact on earnings, economic power and social mobility.
But the anger of British women is beginning to shift the assumptions about who should make sacrifices for safety.
Jenny Jones, a baroness and partner of the Green Party, suggested in the House of Lords last week that there should be a curfew for men after the disappearance of me. Everard. She later explained that it was not a serious proposal and told Britain’s Sky News: ‘Nobody makes a fuss if the police, for example, suggest that women should stay at home. But if I imagine it, men are in arms. ‘
Asked about the proposal, Wales Prime Minister Mark Drakeford said in a BBC interview that a men’s curfew rule ‘would not be at the top of our list’ but appears to be under consideration in some circumstances can be. (He later explained that the Welsh government was not considering such a measure.)
Focused on policing
The demands for men to make changes have become more prominent. But the public outrage also came heavily among the police. And as photos circulated of women being held and treated by police officers after the Clapham night vigil on Saturday night, anger increased.
“There is so much anger in the fact that this is not the first time that the Metropolitan women have let women down on such a large scale,” she said. Majuqwana said.
She said she also spoke from personal 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 turned down his progress. But when police arrived there, they said they could do nothing unless she also wanted to be arrested because she admitted that she had repulsed her 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 rally on Sunday, this time outside police headquarters.
“The police are perpetrators of individual and state violence against women – as testified last night,” the group said wrote and added on Twitter, “16:00. New Scotland Yard. ”