Stay Inside

CONTENT WARNING: Rape, murder, sexual abuse, DV, the works.

CONTENT REMINDER: This is focused on men hurting women, because that’s the current news focus. I know women can be domestic abusers, I know of Denis Nilsen, I know that transwomen are even more at risk of being murdered than ciswomen. If you want to write those stories, please do!!

I’m a crime historian, specifically researching the investigation of Victorian murder, and I have spent whole YEARS of my life thinking about, reading about, writing about horrific crimes. The psychology, the investigation, the details, in history and in modernity. So, as you can imagine, I have many thoughts about the disappearance of Sarah Everard.

Abduction, rape and murder by a stranger is a really rare crime. That’s why it tends to get a lot of headlines. On the one hand, we should be glad that this is unusual. On the other, it tends to spark waves of debate when it does happen. If you’re on twitter, you’ll have noticed a lot of women talking about the discourse around keeping yourself safe at night, and about the unwanted attacks and harassement they’ve experienced, at any time of day.

Sarah Everard did everything you’re supposed to, as a woman walking in the evening. She texted her boyfriend, she walked in a well-lit area, on a busy street. She was abducted anyway, allegedly by a policeman. Women are taught to go to the police for help. Everyone is taught to obey the police.

Nevertheless, the initial reaction was for women to stay inside, a sad echo of the advice given in Yorkshire when Peter Sutcliffe stopped killing prostitutes and started killing women who were ALLOWED to be victims. 

Most women have been harassed by a stranger at some point in their life. I can count several occasions where men have outright assaulted me, and literally DOZENS of occasions where I have been wary and uncomfortable. Some of these are minor – what woman hasn’t had to carefully escape the persistant guy in the bar who won’t take no for an answer? Some are more severe – the guy who stalked me after I made him a cup of tea at work. And the assaults are just grim, not least because I was in my early teens when most of them happened. 

Being raped or murdered by a stranger is really rare – you’re far more likely to be killed by a partner than a stranger. Staying in to protect yourself from being murdered by a random might even lead to you being murdered by your partner. 

But. Harassment by strangers is not. Harassment by strangers is commonplace. From a yelled comment out of a van window, a flirtation swinging to abuse when you say no to a drink or a date, to being flashed, to being followed, to being groped on the tube. 

Here’s the problem though. Every single man who has raped and murdered a woman he doesn’t know has a history of abusing women. The women are sometimes painted as ‘lucky ones’, the ‘one who got away’, and it’s a tale as old as time. Ted Bundy admitted attempting to abduct women several years before killing the first. Peter Sutcliffe attacked his first victim six years before his first known murder. Robert Black sexually abused children from childhood, as did Frederick West. In 1972, Caroline Owens escaped from the West house after suffering sustained abuse: the Wests were fined £50 and murdered eight women in the following few years. John Duffy, who raped numerous women and killed three in the 1980s, had a history of raping and assaulting his wife, and joked about rape being a ‘natural male instinct’. Ian Huntley beat his wife until she miscarried, and was not charged by the police after two separate accusations of rape. 

The cat-calls, the dodgy jokes, the yelled insult after a rejection, the groping, the refusing to take no for an answer, the flashing: all either low-level crimes or not criminal at all. Domestic violence, which is a common behaviour in terrorists, rapists, murderers and mass-murderers, is STILL not treated as a serious crime, until someone dies (and even then, sometimes totally ignored). 

Women should be able to go outside at night without fear, but women have no handy test to work out if the man cat-calling them is a drunk idiot or a murderer. There’s no way of knowing whether the guy running up behind you is literally jogging home or about to strangle you off the pavement. 

This is compounded by the fact that SO MUCH violence against women is structually and institutionally ignored. When men are allowed to broadcast their misogyny without being held to account, when they are allowed to test out their sexual fantasies by groping women and flashing them, when the police set them free after they’ve beaten their partner again, then they become emboldened. They escalate. Abducting, raping and murdering a stranger is not an impulsive event; it is planned.

We have to start cutting it off before it escalates. We have to start taking violence against women seriously.