When I arrive 15 minutes before the vigil for Sarah Everard – the 33-year-old woman who was abducted and murdered by then-serving police officer Wayne Couzens on 3rd March 2021 – there are already around 250-300 people standing in front of the bandstand. Most of them are women, but there are also men. Many hold flowers. We are an intergenerational bunch; there are those in their twenties, ranging to those in their sixties. It doesn’t matter how old you are; all women understand that they are prey. If we don’t feel as scared as we once did, maybe our walks home don’t take place late at night anymore, but we still have to communicate with the girls we love that there are precautions to take, as if we are in any way in control of whether or not we are not subjected to male violence.
The crowd is about 15-men deep, and it’s quiet, bar a baby crying. No one talks, and most seem deep in thought. We are in a state of remembering – we remember Sarah and think of her life and that final chilling journey that she thought would take her home. We also remember every time we felt unsafe, when a man made us feel uneasy, when we felt threatened.
There are three speakers; Klara Fine, who runs the community Instagram page Best of Clapham London and helped organise the event; Rebecca Goshawk from Solace Women’s Aid, London's largest domestic abuse and sexual violence charity; and Joanna Reynolds, who spoke at the ill-fated 2021 Clapham vigil as a local Labour councillor.
“When I spoke at the 2021 vigil, I was overwhelmed looking out as I am now looking at of you all because people were carrying placards with the faces of women they knew who had also been abducted or murdered,” said Reynolds. “We need to reclaim the streets; it’s important for us, but also for our children… This isn’t just about us women. It’s about the men here. We need to make sure you understand – and young boys growing up – how to treat women. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Sarah from the moment she got into that car.”
She finishes by asking everyone to turn on their phone torches, shine them up to the sky and to “remember her and every other woman killed at the hands of male violence”. All 300 of us point our phone torches up into the night. There is no sound except someone quietly crying.
Something shifts and someone walks to the front of the bandstand to lay down their flowers. Before long, tulips, daffodils, and roses encircle the railings. Everyone files down the paths, back to homes, restaurants, gyms or supermarkets. This group of people might have been largely strangers, but in that moment, where phones were shone into the sky, there was a mighty strength. This vigil was all of us; a place for anger, grief, fear, trauma and solidarity.
Sarah Everard was not just a political tool or a case study. She was a young woman, and her life mattered.
Gender-based violence is not inevitable.
