April 2022

 

Hello my name is Jude Tavanyar from the Womens Equality Party and a big warm welcome to you on this chilly Spring evening, thank you so much for coming here for a few minutes tonight to support our vigil this first Monday of every month.

 

Looking around, I see some familiar faces.  People who have come along to be with us every single first Monday of the month night since our vigil began, back in September 2021.  Thank you for coming along again to spend a few minutes with us.

 

Or, if you just happen to be walking past, and wonder what a group of women and men are doing gathered together on Twickenham Green alongside the bench commemorating Amelie de La Grange, who killed here on Twickenham Green back in 2004 by a man completely unknown to her.  Thank you too, for stopping to hear what we have to say.

 

We are the Women’s Equality Party, we have been in existence since 2015, and we have been meeting here  by Amelie’s bench since September last year, to remember her, and other like her - women whose tragic deaths may make the headlines – like Sarah Everard back in April 2021, like Sabina Nessa 6 months later in 2021 – and women whose murders make at the very most a brief passing mention, a few lines of text in a local newspaper somewhere.  We come here to honour those women, and to remember them.

 

What I want to say, and silence = death

I want to say something this evening about just a few of those women killed by men in the last few weeks.  I also want to invite us to think about why we hear so little of those tragic ‘behind the scenes’ deaths, the ones that never make the national headlines.  I used to work in the HIV/AIDS field many years ago, and at that time, there was a hard-hitting slogan about the importance of transparency and openness about that epidemic, and the fact that it actually could and did affect anyone, not just ‘high risk groups’.  That slogan was ‘Silence = Death’ – some of you may remember it – and if I may  make the comparison, I believe the same principle applies to the murder of women by men in the UK every year, the significant number of women whose deaths barely receive public attention.  We have to talk about them, to keep them in our national consciousness.

 

Sarah E and Sabina N and what happened afterwards

We all remember the appalling murder of Sarah Everard on 3 March 2021.  A young woman who placed her faith in a police officer, got into his car at his request and was abducted and murdered the same night.  We may recall that the press ran the story for several weeks.  How politicians were outraged.  That big promises were made.  The promises looked at protection of women – better street lighting, an investigation of policing methods – but little – very little was actually said about the attitudes behind such an attack.  We all remember Sabina Nessa, whose death followed 6 months after Sarah’s. 

She was a young teacher on her way to meet some friends in a local pub some 5 minutes walk from her home.  She never got to the pub, she was brutally murdered by a man she didn’t know in a park on the way there.

 

We will probably never forget about those two young women, Sarah Everard, Sabina Nessa, because they were talked about, they were written about, they caused a national explosion of grief and anger.  We know how greatly their own families and friends have suffered, and continue to suffer, at their loss.  Sarah’s mother spoke about how her daughter was disposed of, like, she said,  ‘a piece of rubbish’. 

 

But -  despite all the public outcry, the promises, the sad reality behind these well-known murder cases is that very little has actually changed on a national scale since those deaths made national news.  A significant number of women continue to be murdered by men every month of the year.  Numbers haven’t declined –  indeed, they have held steady. 

 

We have to ask the question.  Why is that?

 

The hidden story and the statistics behind it

There is a largely hidden story here, this one less newsy, And that hidden story has been going on for years, under -reported and largely ignored.  It is very definitely not new, but does that have to mean it is not newsworthy? 

 

So here it is.  When Sarah Everard was murdered, you might have assumed from the fuss made – and rightly made – about her murder that she was perhaps the first woman to have been killed by a man in the last 10 years.  But that is not the case.  She was not the first, but the 28^th UK woman killed by a man in a single year. 

 

And I know you will find this hard to hear, but by the end of last year, by the end of 2021,  the number of women murdered by men had reached 139  – in just that one year alone.  Just in the 6 months between Sarah Everard’s death and Sabine Nessa’s murder there were over 80 murders of women by a friend, partner or family member.  Just in those 6 months alone.

 

Statistics

Was 2021 an exceptional year?  No. 

Professor Karen Inghala Smith and her colleague XXX set up the Femicide Census which briefly gives the stories of those women, their names, ages, who killed them, and how. The Census has been running since 2009 and attempts to provide data to look beyond individual incidents and seek out connecting patterns.  And since it started, we see that every year, around 130 women a year continue to be killed by men in the UK.

 

Which means that in 2021 alone, every 3^rd day of the year a woman was killed by a man. Every third day.  And again, we must ask – if we didn’t know that statistic, WHY didn’t we know it?

 

Profile of the murders

What else do we know about under-reported femicide?  Unlike in the cases of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa, these under-reported murders were not committed by strangers, but by a someone the women usually knew pretty well, sometimes very well.  With whom they had a relationship, in whom they had placed their trust.  Or else from whom, they did not believe they could escape.  In over 50% of the cases in 2021, the murders were committed by a spouse, current or previous partner.  Women of all ages, all backgrounds, from all kinds of families, with all kinds of lives.  Ordinary women.

 

Let’s take a moment to hear their names, and if you will bear with me because it is not easy listening, a little bit about them.  I’m not going to read out every story, I’m going to share just four stories in the briefest of details, it’s upsetting anad it’s shocking but please bear with me.  Let’s take a moment to honour them.

 

Women like Katy Harris, 44, who died at the hands of her husband at home in Derbyshire in February 2022. 

Lesma Jackson, 84, who was found with a number of injuries at her home in Enfield.  She died shortly afterwards, her son has been charged with her murder.

Ashley Wadsworth, 19, who was found stabbed to death at her boyfriend’s home in Chelmsford.  She was visiting from Canada.

Marena Shaban, 41, who was stabbed multiple times at the entrance to her home in Birmingham by a man known to her family.

 

Going back to the beginning of this year, some other names you probably never heard of, all women killed by men known to them.

Mandeep Singh, Angela Tarver, Valerie Richardson, Mihrican Mustapha, Sammy-lee Lodwig, Denise Keene-Simmons

 

These women’s deaths all took place in or before March this year. We are still waiting for an up to date list of names of women killed by men this year until the beginning of April, and we will read out those names at our next vigil on May.

 

A terrible, gutwrenching litany of names and stories.  And again, it is down to the work of Karen Inghala Smith and others like her that we are able to share these stories and mention these women’s names to you tonight.  Because their deaths were not reported at national level, their murders were not deemed to have more than passing local interest. 

 

There are some tough questions here, and we must keep asking them.  Is it really that these women, named and nameless, don’t matter?  Are we as a society so ashamed, so appalled at the dreadful regularity of these murders of women by men that we prefer to sweep them under the carpet and disguise them as ‘one off incidents’ by individuals in the domestic setting and therefore to be disregarded, nothing to do with the rest of us, just ‘not a thing’ in news terms? 

 

No.  Let’s join up the dots. 

 

Because violence againsat women is not a one-off, occasional incident that attracts national press interest every once in a while. 

It has been described as – not a phrase we can use lightly –a social epidemic on a national scale.

 

We gather here every month to remember ALL of the women who have been killed by men,

and we will keep doing that until there is no longer any reason to meet here every month.  How we long for that day.

 

 

 

In the words of karen Inghala Smith:

Men’s violence against women and girls is ...not reducible simply to individual acts perpetrated by individual men.  It is supported and normalised by institutions, embedded attitudes, social norms and values.

What can you do? Talk about it.  Make politicians know you care. Make politicians know that men’s violence against women is an issue that could lose them votes. Make sure that every woman counts.

 

How can you do that?  Richmond Council has achieved White Ribbon status – showing its commitment as an organisation to end male violence against women, taking actions within the local community to achieve that.  follow that campaign, keep the pressure on, make it meaningful.  We have local council elections coming up – make this an issue you care about enough to call politicians to account on it, to push them until they stand by their promises.  Come to our vigil.  Look at Karen’s blog, look at the Femicide Census, inform yourself, tell your friends.

 

Femicide can be ended.  If we care enough, if we shout enough, and keep shouting, never stop until there are no more Sarahs, Sabinas, Katies, Mandeeps, Lesmas, Ashleys, Marinas -  ever again.

 

Thank you for coming and please stay and have a chat if you would like to know about this vigil, what the council is doing, what WEP is doing, what you can do to stop the epidemic of male violence against women.  Goodnight.