'Three years after Sarah Everard's murder, we feel more afraid — not less'
Arabella James still has just as many questions as she did in those first, unforgettable few days after Sarah Everard’s death three years ago, when news that she’d been murdered by a police officer shocked the nation and galvanised a movement on women’s safety.
The south-west Londoner and her housemates still live within a mile of the street in Clapham in which Everard, a 33-year-old Durham graduate and marketing executive, was abducted, raped and killed by an off-duty Metropolitan Police constable in a series of shocking events set to be retold in a bombshell BBC documentary next Tuesday.
James, 29, thinks about the story often, whenever she’s walking at night or tracking her housemates home on her iPhone’s Find My feature. If a police officer stops and asks her to get in his car, what are her options? Will carrying a rape alarm still be the reality for women like her living in London in 30 years’ time? And what will it take to feel like the police are taking women’s safety seriously, then, if not the brutal murder of an innocent young woman by one of their own?
“It’s hard to imagine a news story that could shock us more than what happened to Sarah,” says James, an executive assistant working in the city. “What’s even more shocking is how little it feels has been done since then. The mayor is supposed to be helping make us feel safer, but instead he seems to be spending his money on renaming Tube lines... It’s getting boring now: praying for summer to come around so we feel safer. I think I can speak for all my female friends when I say I feel just as afraid walking home at night as we did three years ago... if not more so.”
James and her and questions are naturally being asked about what, if anything, has changed for women’s public safety. "We're not learning, we're not changing things,” says Lisa Squire, whose daughter Libby was abducted and killed in Hull in 2019 amid reports of a continued stream of violence against women since Everard’s killing — the murders of , , Ashling Murphy, to name a few — and calls for greater vetting of police recruits and work to prevent repeat offenders (Couzens reportedly exposed himself in public, twice, hours before he murdered Everard). “Something has gone horrifically wrong with the way police officers are recruited. Brutes are permitted to join their ranks,” former cabinet minister Nadine Dorries said last week following news that — a serving PC who was appointed after Everard’s murder — had been found guilty of kidnap and multiple rapes, including three against a child, despite having been accused of raping a child before joining the force.
