Why men must pull their weight in protecting the right to protest
On Saturday, like many women across the country, I attended a small local vigil in memory of Sarah Everard, a woman I did not know. The vigil I attended was quiet, socially-distanced, respectful, but seething with anger. It had been officially cancelled earlier that day, but many of us just wanted to be there anyway, to do something to channel the rage and the grief and the frustration we were feeling. I watched with horror later that evening the videos and tweets of the violence inflicted on attendees of the larger Clapham vigil by police. While I watched, I reflected on whether it was a coincidence that the calm and trouble-free vigil I attended had had no visible police presence.
Over the past week, three facts have led to the shackling together of two important but separate public discourses — the right of women to live our lives unharassed and the right of everyone to protest in a democratic society. The first is that Sarah Everard could have been any woman walking home at night. Her story has hit home partly because it is so ordinary; we have all made phone-calls, clutched keys, looked over our shoulders and felt our hearts beat faster in fear as a man follows us.
The second is that her alleged killer is a serving police officer, someone whose job is to protect the public, someone who she should have been safe with.
The third is that the disproportionate violence meted out to women attending the Clapham vigil demonstrated something we already knew — that the police are not going to protect us. Over the years, I’ve been to my fair share of protests. Even as a middle-class white woman in my thirties, I’ve certainly been in situations where it was clear that the police were not on my side.
This combining of two associated, but fundamentally separate issues has led to the situation we see this week where women’s groups like Sisters Uncut and female MPs from Labour, Plaid Cymru, SNP, SDLP and the Greens are leading the resistance to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which had its first reading last week. The Bill’s provisions curbing the right to protest are staggering in their sweeping nature. Part 3 of the Bill strengthens police powers to tackle non-violent protests, including one-person protests, and allows police to impose any condition on a protest for any reason. (To be clear, this isn’t the only concerning part of the Bill — campaigners for Gypsy and Traveller rights have been highly critical of its powers around unauthorised encampments, for example.)
The right to protest isn’t just a women’s issue, nor is it an issue for any marginalised or oppressed group. It affects us all — left and right, liberal and conservative. The women leading the charge against the Bill, under the #KilltheBill hashtag online, are carrying the flag for democracy, and they shouldn’t be doing it alone.
This past week has shown that women across the UK are fed up. We’re fed up of not being able to walk home alone at night for fear of harassment, assault, rape or murder. We’re fed up of being groped on the Tube, of being verbally abused in public places, of being talked over in meeting rooms. We’re fed up of the second shift, shouldering the burden of childcare and emotional labour, particularly during the pandemic. We’re fed up of being overlooked and underpaid. We’re fed up that two women a week are murdered by men, the majority of whom are current or former intimate partners, not strangers. The secondary position of women in our society is a fundamental systemic issue, which has implications for public policy across every government department.
We need the campaigners, women’s organisations and parliamentarians who are expert in these issues to lead the conversation about how we create a society that works for women as well as men. There’s no overnight fix to this — Reclaim the Streets first marched in 1977, and women are still being murdered for walking down the road. But in order to make use of the very real public anger that women and many men are feeling to start delivering some of the changes we need, the conversations about police violence and the rights of women need to be decoupled. It’s time for others to share the burden of campaigning against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, and that means men need to step up too.