Sarah Everard’s murder: No justice for us without radical change

The government has shown time and time again that it will not lead that change, so we must.

I know what it’s like to take your missing person posters down because your girl’s never coming home, so Sarah Everard’s story cut deep. But a lot of our demons are coming out of the shadows this week. Most people and almost all the women reading this will have endured something that means Sarah’s story, the victim blaming and the police brutality that followed, really hit you where you live. I really started feeling it – the horror – on Saturday, when I read that despite a High Court ruling to allow the Clapham common vigil for Sarah to proceed safely, the Metropolitan Police were refusing to cooperate. Knowing this groundswell of grief and outrage was unstoppable, many predicted what was to come. That doesn’t mean the footage of mass brutalisation was any easier to watch, or the Met statement basically saying they had it coming any easier to read. What some outside of this experience looking in have criticised as the “politicisation” of Sarah’s death is something much deeper than that. This is gut and heart politics. This is our survival instinct. This is mass mobilisation in response to a shared experience of existential threat. Sarah Everard, like George Floyd, was a spark – but our lives were already littered with kindling.