One year ago, Sarah Everard’s death shocked the world. Since then, many more women have sadly lost their lives. Here, Cosmopolitan pays tribute to them
The soft rustling of the wrapping was the only noise. Each bouquet – hundreds of them, all stacked up – was encased in delicate paper that caught the passing breeze. Everything else was still. I was surrounded by people: I should have been able to feel movements; that natural shift that occurs within a crowd. But I couldn’t. It was almost dusk and the light cast a golden sheen over us; it felt like the sky was telling us to listen, to feel.
I have often found that, at funerals or memorials, nature has a way of bringing a mysterious hush – no matter the weather. I guess it’s trying to give us the space to remember, to reflect. A very small respite from a brutal world. That day at Clapham Bandstand, this peace lasted only a few seconds. But it was needed. Because what brought us all there with our shop-bought bunches of flowers – to be placed down amid handwritten signs displaying anger, sadness and fear – was an act of extreme violence. You’ll know the story by now; you’ll have read the court transcripts, the victim impact statements. I won’t repeat it. I won’t repeat his name, only hers: Sarah Everard. A woman who her mother Susan said was a ‘beautiful dancer who… was always there to listen, advise or simply to share with the minutiae of the day’. She was funny, sweet and clever; a woman who went to festivals, did karaoke and had big career plans…
A year on, it’s important we remember this, who she was. What those who knew and loved her think of when they hear her name. As in the media circus that followed, fierce and much-needed debates came to light regarding male violence and women’s safety. It was easy for her to get lost in the noise. Then, in the months that followed, more names began to crowd public consciousness. Sabina Nessa. Nicole Smallman. Bibaa Henry. Ashling Murphy.
These are the names you know, but there are so many others that you don’t. Since Sarah’s death in early March 2021, there have been 124 deaths in circumstances where a man is held as suspect, awaiting trial or would be if he was alive. There’s no national database that captures the official number of women killed by men, but Karen Ingala Smith’s Counting Dead Women project is the most comprehensive, used by charities across the UK. By the time this is printed, there will probably be more.
That you might not have heard about many of these cases is, most likely, down to them being considered ‘unremarkable’. They’re ‘common’ cases that the emergency services and police have to deal with every day. Two women per week are killed by a current or former partner*. These cases don’t tend to make national headlines because they happen so frequently. But why should their deaths
