Sabina Nessa’s murder and the grievability of women’s lives

Race and class continue to determine how much public attention is paid to cases of gender-based violence.

Just six months after Sarah Everard was kidnapped, raped and murdered in the UK by an off-duty police officer, Gabriella Petito’s disappearance while travelling with her fiancé in the US and her now-confirmed death made international headlines. The Everard and Petito stories, though very different, have compounded the sense that gender-based violence threatens women everywhere.

Then, a week or so after the Petito case gained media visibility, yet another woman’s violent death was reported in the UK, that of Sabina Nessa, a 28-year-old teacher who was walking to a nearby pub from her home in South London.

The Nessa case has intensified local fear that women are unsafe on the streets of London. But this fear is a global one. It is nothing less than a reaction to the other pandemic – gender-based violence – that plagues our society, and that COVID-19 has merely exacerbated.