March 2023
Hello and thank you all for coming to join us this evening. This is the 20 th time we have met here now, every month since September 2021. I must admit WE have been giving some thought recently about if and how to carry on with these vigils, but we have decided that we need to keep going and in fact they need to get bigger and better. To that end we have raised some money and we are going to invest it in better promotion of these events. So you can expect crowds three deep next month! Obviously we need to keep going because we haven’t achieved what we set out to achieve – better awareness in the media and by politicians of the issue of Violence against Women and girls. But there are two specific recent prompts that have made us realise just how far away we are… FIRSTLY We’ve been looking at a recent crime report for the Richmond Borough, covering the period of February 2022 to Jan 2023. Now don’t get me wrong, Richmond is still a relatively safe Borough to live