Feb 2023

 

Hello and thank you all for coming to join us this evening.

 

I’m going to keep this short because I know that some of you are heading into town to join the WEP action around former police officer David Carrick’s sentencing.

 

This is the 18th time we have met here now, every month since September 2021.

When Sarah Everard was murdered at the beginning of March 2021 we were hopeful that the ensuing media that meant that at last this social epidemic would be covered by the press and tackled by the politicians every day – not just when there were headlines to be made and votes to be won.

 

But that is still not the case. According to the Counting Dead Women blog, at least 107 women were killed by men in 2022 (or where men are the principal suspect in an ongoing enquiry). So that’s two mothers, daughters, friends dying every week.

 

How many did you hear about in the press or from politicians?


4 of the women were teenagers, there were 8 in their 80’s and the majority were under 50.

 

At least 37 were murdered by their husband, partner or boyfriend – someone they should have been able to love and trust.

 

9 of these women were killed by their sons – that leaves me speechless.

 

And I also have no words for the 2 grandsons who killed their grandmothers, the uncle who killed his niece and the father who killed his daughter.

 

And let us not forget that these women are not just statistics – each is a tragedy on a very personal level.


 

Please join me in taking a minute to give our thoughts to all of those women, and their children, and their parents and their siblings and their friends.


 

We have to believe that this vigil and all the other vigils across the country and all of the other actions and protests will make a difference, someday…

 

So please repeat after me:

 

I

I believe

I believe change

I believe change will come

I believe change will come

Thank you

Thank you again for being here tonight

 

And I hope to see you all again and your friends and your families at our next vigil will be on Monday 6th March.

 

Thank you.

 

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

September 2024

  Hello and thank you all for coming to join us this evening.   We meet here on the first Monday of every month to remember the UK women who have been killed by men, and to honour all of the women who have suffered from VAWG. This is the start of the fourth year of our vigils, and I was drawn to review things… We still use the information from the brilliant Karen Ingala-Smith’s website and Twitter account ‘Counting Dead Women’. We still do that because it is the only source we can find that collates the information.   A woman is killed by a man every three days and yet no government or police body has thought to look at these numbers separately to overall numbers.   Since our first vigil in September 2021, 318 women in the UK have been killed by men. Just about 9 every month, or one every 3 days. We stand here and talk about this every month, but I don’t think I’d stopped to think about how the numbers were adding up.   And we also need to ...
Read more

December 2023

Hello and thank you for joining us on this 10 th day of the 16 Days of Action Against Gender Based Violence. That’s not just something that we have made up locally here in Richmond, it’s an international campaign that runs every year from  November 25 th - the United Nations Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women - to  December 10 th - International Human Rights Day. And it’s right that this issue should be being tackled and talked about on a national and international level, and not just once a month here on Twickenham Green. This international campaign encourages awareness of - and action against - all forms of  violence against women and girls  including rape and sexual assault; domestic abuse; child sexual abuse; child sexual exploitation; sexual harassment; stalking; female genital mutilation; forced marriage; child marriage; sex trafficking; pornography; prostitution; and other forms of commercial sexual exploitation. And it’s important...
Read more

March 2024

  Hello and welcome to our March vigil. We meet on the 1 st Monday of each month to highlight the issue of male violence against women and girls, and to honour the women killed by men. We’ve been doing this since September 2021 when we realised that just 6 months after Sarah Everard was murdered by Wayne Couzens - when big headlines were written, and huge political promises were made - more than 50 other women had been murdered by men and only one of those had made national headlines, and nothing had changed… And still nothing has changed. We gather our information from the same source that MP Jess Phillips uses – a charity called the Femicide Census. Let me stress that – a charity, not a government department or a civil servant, officially this data doesn’t exist.   For the past nine years, Phillips has read a list of women killed by men or where a man is the principal suspect in the UK, and she read the latest list last week. She described the task as an honou...
Read more