When Joanna Reynolds was 21, she remembers one evening walking across a carpark in Leeds. Later that same night, Peter Sutcliffe, aka the Yorkshire Ripper, would take one of his victims of a similar age to the same spot. After the murder was discovered, police visited her and other local young women she knew to tell them they mustn’t go out.
Over four decades later, at the age of 65, this was the same instruction she received from the Metropolitan Police when Sarah Everard – a 33-year-old woman raped and killed by an off-duty police officer – was kidnapped at the end of her street in Clapham, south London. Her daughter, a little younger than Everard at the time, was told the same.
“The police were going through all our gardens and everything else, and they told all the women to stay inside, which I absolutely refused to do because I don’t think that’s the right answer,” she told me, under the milky lights of the bandstand on Clapham Common. “It was the same thing as 40 years ago: it shows that the advice hasn’t changed, and police are doing it all over again.”
This was the fifth anniversary of Sarah Everard’s disappearance, and a 100-odd crowd had gathered to lay flowers. They held their phone torches aloft in a minute’s silence; the intricate golden detailing of the bandstand columns suddenly illuminated. There was no sound beneath the hum of rush-hour traffic encircling the Common, and the occasional yapping dog.
Young professional women in their thirties, in anoraks and woolly hats and trainers – just as Sarah Everard looked as she walked down a well-lit street on the last night of her life – headed over after work to lay flowers and cards at the foot of the bandstand. “We never met, but I think about you every day,” read one. Hardly half an hour passed before the mourners trickled back out across the Common, disappearing amid the flicker of bike lights and leafless plane trees.
This muted scene was far removed from the original vigil, which was deemed illegal under Covid rules by police, who manhandled and arrested some of the women who turned up. Photos of the heavy-handed response that night stunned the country, but perhaps they shouldn’t have been surprising. This was, after all, the same police force that advised women who no longer felt safe in the presence of a lone male police officer to try “shouting out to a passerby, running into a house, knocking on a door, waving a bus down”.
The distinct brutality of Wayne Couzens, who had pretended to arrest Everard for a lockdown breach to lure her into his car, exposed a more widespread, casual cruelty at the dark heart of British policing.
The officer involved in the search who sent a violent graphic to his colleagues referring to the case. The police and crime commissioner who said women “need to be streetwise” and that she “should never have submitted”. The colleagues who nicknamed Couzens “The Rapist” and shared disgusting messages with him in a WhatsApp chat. The officers who laughed at a woman who reported him for flashing her years before.
And then there were more.
The two constables who took and shared photos of the bodies of two sisters, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry – who had been stabbed to death in a London park, the same year Everard was killed.
The serial rapist and former Met officer, David Carrick – known as “Bastard Dave” to his colleagues – who used his status as a police officer to commit scores of rapes, and is now one of Britain’s most prolific rapists in history.
Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police chief, talks of “progress” on cleaning up the force – purging 1,500 unsuitable recruits since 2022 as part of his “integrity reset”. But neither he nor his predecessor Cressida Dick have ever accepted the finding by the 2023 Casey Review into Met Police culture that the force is “institutionally misogynistic”.
The post-Everard Angiolini Inquiry into countrywide policing revealed a quarter of police forces in England and Wales lack basic policies for investigating sex offences. Many of its recommendations have yet to be taken on – even the suggestion that officers with prior sexual offence convictions or cautions be barred from policing still isn’t universally applied.
Over the last three years, nine police forces (including the Met) have been in special measures, for reasons including “profound inappropriate behaviour”, not recording domestic abuse and failing to protect vulnerable people.
Women I met at the vigil, staring quietly at the flowers or huddled chatting in groups, seemed weary. Two women in their twenties – one of whom had “family links” to Sarah Everard so preferred not to be named – said they “feel pretty safe” but wouldn’t “walk alone at night”. They prefer sticking to the “busiest areas, with lots of people, like in London” rather than more remote places. While they noted that “there are tens of thousands of police officers who haven’t been bad with the public, that’s no excuse” for what happened five years ago.
“Despite all the statements about change within the police and within society, ultimately, women are still going to the police and getting disbelieved or having their abuse minimised,” said Rebecca Goshawk, who attended on behalf of a refuge charity called Solace. “A lot of people still don’t want to go to the police; there’s certainly not been the step change we’d hope to see.”
Joanna Reynolds, who was a local councillor when Everard was murdered, worried that women’s safety may even have worsened since 2021. “Sometimes I wonder: is it getting harder for women now because of the backlash against women and all the rest of it?”
The only round of applause at the vigil came when she told the crowd “it’s about the men here – we need to make sure that they and boys growing up understand how they should treat women they have in their lives, and the women they see on the streets”.
While little may have changed to repair women’s trust in police over the past five years, a great deal has changed in attitudes towards their rights. We now live in a world where a third of Gen Z men say a wife must always obey her husband, and his word should be final.
Of the handful of men staring stoically ahead at the vigil, one reflected that “it’s more important that men come out to this [than women] and show this matters to all of us… to show our colleagues and friends how it’s not acceptable to behave how some of them do”.
The cultural zeitgeist has shifted from talk of toxic masculinity and everyday sexism to the identity crisis men face. It’s become fashionable to dismiss mainstream calls for safety and respect and representation as the excesses of some wayward flash of feminism that should be parked in the 2010s.
But remembering Sarah Everard, and reading what are essentially the gleeful minutes of a great global meeting of women-haters in the Epstein files, are bleak reminders that any backlash can take you too far backward.
Patsy Stevenson, the red-headed woman whose picture being pinned down by police at the original vigil went viral, has since been attacked online, lunged at by men in public and targeted by the conspiracy theory that she was a crisis actor. When it came to the fifth anniversary memorial, she chose to light her own candle and not to turn up.
[Further reading: We cannot afford another failed government]
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