March 2023

 

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

This is the 20th 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 in with lower rates of nearly all crimes than across London and in fact across all of England.

The exception is bicycle theft where our rate is nearly double that of anywhere in London or across England.

 

But the devil as ever is in the detail.   By a staggering 150% the most common crime in the Borough is Violence and Sexual offences…

 

And to be clear the ONS and Police Crime define Violence and Sexual Offences as "including domestic abuse, rape, sexual offences, stalking, harassment, so-called 'honour-based' violence including forced marriage, female genital mutilation, child abuse, human trafficking focusing on sexual exploitation, prostitution, pornography and obscenity."

Now we are doing some more work to try to look into the detail of this and more closely define these as VAWG but…

Watch this space for statements like  “In Richmond you are…”

- 4x more likely to be a victim of VAWG than have your bicycle stolen

- more than 3x more likely to be a victim of VAWG than have your home burgled

- 55% more likely to be a victim of VAWG than have your car stolen

-  more than 70% more likely to be a victim of VAWG than be a victim of another violent crime

I’m not a mathematician and like I said we are getting those interpretations double checked but the facts are irrefutable.

 


SECONDLY – the second recent prompt that means we need to keep going with these vigils - the data on UK women being murdered by men got worse rather than better at the beginning of March – 4 women were killed in 5 days…

1st March 2023: Sandra Giraldo, 46, was found dead at an address in Rotherhithe, south-east London. Her husband Weimar Mosquera, 53, has been charged with murder.

 

4th March 2023: Charlotte Wilcock, 31, was found dead in a house in Blackburn. Anthony Stinson, 30, has been charged with murder.

 

4th March 2023: Jane Collinson, 59, was found dead at a flat in Bernard Castle, Durham. Stephen Patrick Ansbro, 60, has been charged with murder.

 

5 March 2023: Helen Harrison, 59, was found dead at a house in East Yorkshire. Rick Parker, 39, has been charged with murder.

 

Please take a moment now to remember Sandra, Charlotte, Jane and Helen and others who have not yet been named.

 

 

As ever, thank you for your time and I hope to see you all again - and your friends and your families - at our next vigil will be on Monday the 1st of May.

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