Sarah Everard's name won't be forgotten.
One night a couple of years ago, I got off a bus in South London and began my 10-minute walk home. On the way, I felt the presence of two men behind me and sped up, glancing over my shoulder before lingering outside a shop so they could pass by. They did. |
But I was not in the clear: They knew another route. Their footsteps came from behind, we fought, I lost my purse. |
I've been feeling that walk home more lately. In the end I was fine, if scarred. But Sarah Everard, the 33-year-old woman who was killed while walking home in South London this month, was not. And what makes her killing — at the hands of a police officer, officials say — especially chilling is that it has, as Moya Lothian-McLean writes, "exposed a deadly truth." In Britain, she says, "those entrusted to protect women from violence are actually enacting it." |
The fear women feel is global, and the violence is daily and widespread. In Atlanta this week, one man's rampage led to the death of seven women, six of them Asian. Until things truly change, women everywhere will continue to do what they've always done: walk with keys between knuckles, headphones off, senses on high alert, wondering whether it will happen to them, too. |
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