Men need to stop trying to be our allies and just listen this time

I live in London, in fact I used to live just around the corner from Poynders Road, where Sarah Everard was last seen alive. And as you might expect of a 25-year-old woman who lives in London, many of my friends are also young women, some of whom still live just around the corner from Poynders Road.

The tragedy of Everard’s murder has been felt deeply. The disappearance of a 33-year-old woman walking home through a typical London neighbourhood is as shocking as it is infinitesimally rare. That an off-duty Metropolitan Police officer has been charged with her murder has compounded that shock and dismay. And, the irony of the aftermath – a vigil on Saturday night descending into violence, best captured by photographs of women being pushed to the ground by the Met Police – is not lost on anyone.

This moment has triggered something in the zeitgeist, seeing men turn their attention anew to gendered violence and the worries it instils in women everywhere. Good

On Sunday a friend and I visited the memorial to Everard on Clapham Common. The bandstand’s entire base was obscured by flowers and placards calling for an end to violence against women. Around it stood hundreds of people – men and women of all ages – in total silence. Some were crying, some wearing that particular blank stare that people have on their face while trying to comprehend enormous tragedy. It was moving and cathartic.

Accompanying the dignity and solemnity of the memorial has been a deluge of women expressing pain and fear across social media. Women tell their stories of harassment or worse, compelling others to do the same. It is troubling to witness this outpouring of personal experience and grief. Not because any of it is shocking – we all know someone with a hard story to tell. But because it needn’t be this way: women shouldn’t have to rehash their pain publicly for men to realise that it is there.

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We know that what happened to Everard is profoundly rare. Women are far more likely to be murdered in their home by a partner or a family member. Men are more likely than women to be murdered by strangers. As someone living in the United Kingdom in 2021 the likelihood of being murdered is lower “than almost any other human in history”, Tom Chivers points out in UnHerd.

But of course that is not the point. Even if a stranger on a dark street is unlikely to hurt us, Everard’s murder is a reminder that if they wanted to they could. And this comes with the knowledge that precautionary measures so many women have discussed in recent days – crossing the street, holding keys between our fingers in the event we may need to fight back – will not make a jot of difference.

The questions being asked, then, is what to do to defeat this scourge of women’s fear? Plenty of well-intentioned men have taken to social media to ask how they can help, feigning surprise at their own privilege. “I walk alone at night all the time and have never felt afraid,” they say. “Who knew women carried that burden of fear with them?” they ask.

Who knew? “Why didn’t you know?” is the only salient response.

This is the problem of the “male ally”: in the wake of tragedy many are seeking to demonstrate a unique self-awareness, a unique ability to centre women’s voices, and a unique empathy to the plight women face on dark streets at night. But these expressions of sympathy and upset ring hollow. The fear of male violence did not begin with the murder of Everard, no matter how many men seem to have only learned about it now.

To every man asking today how they can make things better, I want to scream in response: Why didn't you listen last time we talked about this?

As Twitter is rife with men trotting out platitudes of “listen to women” and speaking of the need to better educate one another, there is no uncertain sense of déjà vu.

It has only been a few years since the peak of the #MeToo movement. And though the subject matter may not be precisely the same, the conversations then struck remarkably similar chords to those now. Men spoke of respectfully listening to women; acknowledging their anxieties and fears; thinking about structural causes; wondering how they could work with women to move forward. It took an outpouring of women’s stories for men to recognise the scale of the problem. To every man asking today how they can make things better, expressing sadness that the epidemic of women’s fear is greater than they ever bargained for, I want to scream in response: Why didn’t you listen last time we talked about this?

This moment has triggered something in the zeitgeist, seeing men turn their attention anew to gendered violence and the worries it instils in women everywhere. Good. But it is a shame it took a tragedy of this magnitude for this to happen. And it is a greater shame that this dialogue will likely dissipate as quickly as it arrived.

The next time something horrifying and tragic happens I dread logging on to Twitter, or opening a newspaper, with my female friends, to read the same sentiments as we have read all week: “What can we do to make you feel safe?” How about you listen now.