Sabina Nessa: why are women still not safe?
At Rushey Green Primary School in Catford, where Sabina Nessa taught Year One, she was “fondly known as the most glamorous teacher, and one of the kindest”, said Fiona Hamilton and John Simpson in The Times. Since the revelation of Nessa’s sudden death, shocked former colleagues have been struggling to comfort her distressed pupils. The 28-yearold was attacked and killed on Friday 17 September, on her way to meet a friend in a pub just five minutes’ walk away from her home in Kidbrooke, southeast London. Her body was found by a dog walker in nearby Cator Park the following day: a delivery driver, Koci Selamaj, has now been charged with her murder. Hundreds attended a vigil in a nearby square for Nessa last Friday, where her sister Jebina declared: “our world is shattered”.
“When will women feel safe on the UK’s streets,” asked Lisa Bachelor in The Observer. The roll-call of victims goes on: Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, the sisters stabbed to death in a northwest London park last June; Julia James, the PCSO killed while walking her dog in Kent. Only in March, similar vigils were being held for Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old murdered by a serving Met Police officer. Those protests seemed like “a watershed moment”.
But six months on, the “anger and frustration” is clear. Has anything actually changed? It’s starting to, said Rosie Kinchen and Madeleine Spence in The Sunday Times. From this autumn, police forces will record misogyny as a hate crime for the first time. The Government has pledged to tackle the “woeful” rates of prosecution for sexual assault, and police are trialling a range of strategies to tackle the perpetrators of domestic violence – which accounts for a far higher proportion of fatal attacks on women than those by strangers. Yes, the statistics are bleak: “on average, one woman is killed every three days by a man”. But there’s a chance this might be “a moment of lasting change”.
I’m not so sure, said Sophie Gallagher in The Independent. No sooner had news of Nessa’s murder broken than yet more “street safety tips” were being handed out to women in the area. Yet even when women stick carefully to these edicts for self-preservation – travel in pairs, walk in well-lit areas, take a taxi – violent men target them anyway; Nessa was walking a short distance from her home at only 8.30pm. As long as women’s safety is seen as “conditional” on their sticking to “the rules” – and not on violent men changing their behaviour – this “cycle of tragedy will never stop”.