About two weeks ago a young woman, Sarah Everard, was reportedly kidnapped while walking home in London by a serving police officer and then murdered.
She was, to those who didn’t know her personally, an ordinary young woman, yet the reaction to her fate has been extraordinary. Sadly, she is not the first female to be murdered in recent times. According to the BBC in the year to March 2020, 207 women were killed in Great Britain. Whether the reaction to Sarah’s murder is intensified because the suspect is a policeman (reportedly aided and abetted by a woman) or because lockdown has begun to ease, which should mean more not less freedom, or because it’s the straw that broke the stoic camel’s back, I don’t know.
The vigil the other night that ended in heavy-handed police tactics, and the public protests the next day, were hijacked by trouble-makers spoiling for another fight with the establishment. They were the ones holding placards supporting BLM, SWP, XR, and other ‘police de-funders’. You name it, they were there, their own agendas more important than women’s safety.
Even discounting the anarchists’ opportunism, I suppose I’m finding the extent of the ‘Sarah reaction’ surprising because I grew up in Yorkshire Ripper territory when that monster was terrorising the region. Not long afterwards, I went to Cambridge Uni, when memories of the Cambridge Rapist were still raw, so maybe the concept of violence against women is no great shock to me. I’m not saying I’m complacent; it’s just that violence against women is not unusual or worse than it used to be.
Obviously, despite great strides towards equality, our world still isn’t civilised and women are not safe to walk home alone. Why’s that? Most men are not violent towards women. But it only takes one to destroy an innocent life, one who’s pumped up on steroids from the gym, or seen too much pornography that’s warped his mind, or perhaps he's been a victim of violence that has damaged him psychologically. What are the causes? What are the solutions?
I don’t know all the answers to either question, but I’m going to throw a few non-PC thoughts into the mix to headbutt the dominant arguments, so fasten your seatbelts.
The feminist idyll is a world where women are equal to men. Women can do any work a man can do. Women are independent, strong, equal.
• So women, we are told, don’t need men to protect them except, after Sarah’s murder, the politicians and police and men in general are being criticised for not protecting women.
• When our forebears fought for equal rights for women, including equal access to jobs, I doubt they had the porn industry in mind. But that’s what happens now; women readily strip off and cavort for the camera, thinking that it’s acceptable, even liberating, because it’s Hollywood or the BBC, the Red Carpet or being an ‘Influencer’. Wake up, Girls! Your ‘liberation’ was poor Sarah’s unintended consequence. You can’t blame porn for men attacking women if you’re making a fortune from it yourselves.
• And women, apparently, should be treated the same as men. However, Met Police Commissioner Cressida Dick is being urged not to resign because she’s a woman in a prominent role. Had the Commissioner been a man, not resigning or not being sacked would have been unconscionable.
• Violence against women is abhorrent, but many more men than women are murdered, and if I were a young man of colour in London, fearful of being knifed every time I stepped into the wrong postcode in broad daylight, I’d be a bit miffed that the murder of one white woman was getting so much attention. Some commentators have said that comparing violence against women, by men, with violence against men, by men, is “unhelpful”. Unhelpful for whom? You’re only going to alienate, even more, the young men of colour and their grieving families if you are seen to lessen their plight because of their gender, or indeed their colour.
It is a fact of life that many men are physically stronger than most women, and those who are warped will use that to their advantage when they find an opportunity. We can educate, legislate and fund all we like but, as I said earlier, it only takes one to slip through the various safeguards to cause carnage.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t press for a solution to a sickening problem. But we might find our message easier to convey if we stop trying to have our cake and eat it too without opening the bag of flour in the first instance. That really is taking the biscuit.
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