Sarah Everard: everything you need to know
It must have come up in your Stories this weekend: the post with the WhatsApp message ‘text me when you get home xx’. This post by Lucy Mountain went viral after what happened to Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old woman from London. She was visiting a friend in the Brixton area and was walking home to her own house in Clapham, another neighborhood in this city, shortly after nine o'clock. A walk that was supposed to take about fifty minutes, but Sarah never made it home safely.
She was on the phone with her boyfriend for fourteen minutes, and then it went silent. A doorbell camera captured her at 21:28. The next day, on Thursday, March 4, her boyfriend reported Sarah missing.
A large search followed, with the English police calling for the public's help via Twitter among other platforms. 750 houses were searched, and ultimately, two arrests were made on Tuesday, March 9. One of them is 48-year-old Wayne Couzens, a police officer. He had been with the British police since 2018 and was responsible for securing various parliamentary buildings.
It soon emerged that Couzens had already been accused earlier that week of ‘indecent exposure’, meaning showing his genitals in a public place. This incident is still being investigated by the British police.
But then, a day later, everyone's nightmare became reality: Sarah's body was found in Kent, about fifty kilometers from London. Two days later, confirmation came: Sarah could be identified by her dental records.
Great outrage in England, and actually all over the world. How is it possible that women still cannot walk safely alone on the street? That you have to pretend to be on the phone with someone? That you think twice before putting on that short dress, decide to take a different route because it’s busier, or that you have your keys in your hand just in case you need to defend yourself?
The fact that the suspect is a police officer makes it all the worse — they are supposed to protect us. This is understandably very poorly received by the English public. And what happened on Saturday did not exactly positively influence their view.
On that day, a gathering was organized in London for Sarah. People came together to honor her and to peacefully protest. Signs with texts like ‘She was just walking home’ and ‘We are the 97 percent’ were visible. The latter refers to a recent survey in which women indicated whether they had ever been harassed on the street: 97 percent answered ‘yes’.
Due to the corona measures, the British police decided to stop this gathering. While the protest was peaceful, the police officers were anything but: videos on Twitter and the internet show that they acted excessively forcefully. Four women were arrested without any real reason.
The question that was going around yesterday was: why was this necessary? Why did the police intervene so harshly? Why is there no heavy-handed action taken against them when one of them does something unforgivable? The gathering consisted almost entirely of women, who came together peacefully and had no malicious intent. Is such a police response necessary to go in with a heavy hand?
There is now an urgent call for the resignation of Cressida Dick, the police commissioner. Not only because of her position, but also because she is a woman, shouldn't she understand this and support it? But no, she firmly stands behind the police's actions.
What happened to Sarah Everard is terrible. That many women feel unsafe on the street, alone, is unfortunately a daily reality for many. Will something finally change with this? Or will it, as feared by the English public, be swept under the rug because this is not a good look for the police? I really hope not.
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Image: Instagram @lucymountain
