This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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Sarah Everard's disappearance is a time to talk about male behaviour, not women’s

By:   []

Date: 2021-12

The disappearance of 33-year-old Sarah Everard has dominated the conversations of my girlfriends’ group chats for days. And it has haunted me, even before yesterday’s arrest of a Metropolitan Police officer on suspicion of her murder and the grim discovery of – at time of writing, unidentified – human remains.

Sarah went missing shortly after 9.30pm on Wednesday 3 March while walking home to Brixton from a friend’s house in Clapham. My housemate and I have sat up at night ruminating over those last moments between Sarah and her friend, imagining how they might have parted.

“Get home safe”, “Text me when you get home” are the habitual but sincere farewells of all the women I know. We think about the absence of the consoling text.

We think about the fears instilled in us from childhood. That if any strange men offered sweets – a tangible edict for Haribo-loving five-year-olds – we were to say no and if needed, scream for help. That we should ensure any regular walking routes were often changed up, too. I think about the terror I felt when Joanna Yeates was murdered in my hometown of Bristol when I was 12 years old, and how that feeling that has lived with me ever since.

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We think about the strategies we deploy on our walks home. How we keep our phone’s ‘find my friends’ feature switched on. We carry keys between our knuckles. We call someone – just as Sarah did, reportedly chatting on the phone to her boyfriend as she walked home, not long before she disappeared. We change our route to a busier or brighter one. We cover-up our limbs, wear our bags tight across our chests and panic at the sound of a leaf blowing in the wind. We take Ubers if we can afford it, and then worry about the safety of doing that, too. We leave earlier or later than we would like, if it means we have a companion to get home safely with.
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/sarah-everards-disappearance-is-a-time-to-talk-about-male-behaviour-not-womens/
[2] url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/

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