Irish Examiner view: Make public spaces safe for everyone

 Sarah Everard's story shakes anyone who takes in even the barest details of that tragedy.

It is not always easy to communicate a feeling properly. It is not always easy to communicate an emotion, a sense in a way that fully conveys its importance or imposition. 

That is especially so if you are trying to share an idea that is beyond the experience of the person you are trying to help understand why you have reached one view instead of another. A grandfather might struggle to explain his love of coursing to a woke granddaughter; a grandmother might be frustrated when her efforts to share her religious beliefs fall on a grandson’s deaf ears.

 Hard and all as it might be to explain those things across the generations it is probably even more difficult to explain to those who lived comparatively harmless lives how fear can today fill such a large space in lives that seem untroubled, and secure from the very worst this world can make real. Then a story such as Sarah Everard’s arrives and shakes anyone who takes in even the barest details of that tragedy.

Everard, 33, disappeared in South London last week. She vanished after leaving Clapham at about 9pm on Wednesday to begin a 50-minute walk to Brixton. Police have found a body and it is feared that it may be Ms Everard’s. That she was snatched from a busy street is harrowing but trying to imagine, or preferably trying not to imagine, what transpired between that moment and the discovery of remains in woodland in Ashford, Kent, is more than sobering. That a policeman, Wayne Couzens, 48, who serves in the Met’s diplomatic protection unit, has been arrested over the murder darkens an already macabre story. Metropolitan police commissioner, Cressida Dick described the kidnap as “every family’s worst nightmare”.

Social media reaction

Those details are specific to this case but the reaction, especially the social media reaction, is not. Thousands of women have shared their experience of feeling threatened if not endangered in urban settings, especially at night. The case has also provoked an intense discussion about the differing attitudes of men and women to personal safety and others’ concerns around what they perceive as a threat. It highlighted the precautions some women feel obliged to take. 

It suggests our world become so feral that an unexpected sound, a sudden shadow on a street can at least disturb if not frighten a woman walking, cycling, or running alone at night. This again underlines how very difficult it can be to convey or embrace, feelings contrary to your own experience. Women facing these fears are not snowflakes.

It would be naive to imagine that the very same issues are not as alive on this side of the Irish Sea. It shows that we, especially men, need to listen differently to those women who say that they do not feel safe in public spaces.

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Though abuse of a slightly different twist, the sharp increase in the number of women or children seeking support from domestic violence services during the first six months of the pandemic underlines that this society is as capable as any of visiting violence on its vulnerable members. Figures late last year showed that an average of almost 2,000 women and 411 children were in receipt of some kind of support from domestic violence services each month since last March. Of those women and children, an average of 575 women and 98 children accessed the service for the first time.

Now that the European Medicines Agency has passed the single-dose Johnson and Johnson Covid-19 vaccine, and that the company has committed to deliver 200m doses to the EU this year, 600,000 for Ireland between April and June, discussions around how we might make a better world when the pandemic ebbs will intensify. Everard’s tragedy and thousands more like it, and the frequent sense of threat felt by women in our public places, point to an obvious cultural evolution that can only enrich all our lives — and show that we understand these fears as any caring person might.

Let’s turn lip service into real change.