‘She was just walking home.’
Five years ago, this phrase was emblazoned across cardboard placards that laid on piles of roses, carnations, and chrysanthemums.
It was a rallying cry in the wake of Sarah Everard’s rape, and murder, at the hands of a Met Police officer, who abducted her as she was walking home from a friend’s house in Clapham, south London, on March 3, 2021.
Sarah’s story prompted hundreds of women to head to Clapham Common to pay their respects, among them the Princess of Wales, and in the following weeks, there were countless calls for policing reforms to make women safer.
But half-a-decade later, we still can’t walk home knowing we’ll make it to our front door unharmed.
Liv Nevill, who was 22 at the time, had watched Sarah’s story on the news in her family home, ‘angry and upset’ at the betrayal of trust from a serving police officer.
‘At the time I thought, this could literally be me, and that’s really scary,’ Liv, now 27, tells Metro.
Then on February 8 at 6pm, Liv was on her way home in central London after staying at a friend’s house, when she says a man followed her and threatened her with sexual assault.
‘All I could think was why have I been the one that’s chosen and targeted,’ Liv says. ‘My mind went into full-on panic mode… I froze.’
She went into her local Co-op for safety but the man waited outside. Liv told staff she was being followed, but claims the man then came into the supermarket, threatening her with sexual violence.
This Is Not Right
On November 25, 2024 Metro launched This Is Not Right, a campaign to address the relentless epidemic of violence against women.
With the help of our partners at Women’s Aid, This Is Not Right aims to shine a light on the sheer scale of this national emergency.
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‘I ran to the back of the shop, but I could see he was looking for me between the aisles, shouting “I need to find her”,’ influencer Liv recalls.
After a few minutes he left the shop, but a male shop worker confirmed he was still waiting down the street, and it was about 10 minutes before he gave up and left on a bus.
A woman, 30, who witnessed the event, walked Liv all the way home. ‘When I shut my front door, my whole body just crashed,’ Liv says. ‘I was processing what just happened, I was really emotional… really scared.’
She returned to the Co-op the next day to get CCTV footage of the incident, then called the Met Police.
‘I reported the incident, I said “I can get the CCTV, this is exactly what happened” and they said they’d be in contact if they wanted it,’ Liv sighs. ‘It felt like “we’re really sorry this happened to you, but not much else is going to be done”.
‘It’s insane to me that that man is probably going around doing the same to other women, and they didn’t say “yes, can we have the CCTV”. Surely you’d want to […] see if they’re a repeat offender. It made me feel invalidated.’
However, once Liv filmed a viral video of her experience and the police response, the Met’s Instagram account commented asking for her case reference number so they could address her report.
‘Suddenly it’s a reputation thing,’ Liv says. ‘Why has it taken a viral video for that to happen? This incident confirmed my worst fears, I wouldn’t call the police if something like this happened again because I feel like I’d have the same experience, which is awful.
‘You’re better off getting your phone, recording it, and making a video.’
‘Sarah was the day the blinders came off’
When Sarah was murdered, Jamie Klingler founded Reclaim These Streets, a women’s safety campaigning group. For her, it was ‘the day the blinders came off’.
‘I’d always thought the police had our best interests at heart… but with Sarah it uncovered at every level, the lengths people will go to not to be accountable, not to make streets safer, and to get things off the front pages, rather than implement change,’ Jamie tells Metro.
‘I remember watching the footage of her come out of Sainsbury’s in a bright jumper, call her boyfriend and say she was on the way home, she was on a busy street. She was doing all the right things but still ended up where she ended up because a man chose to put her there.’
Jamie tweeted about having a vigil for Sarah, which was ultimately banned by the Met Police, so she and her co-founders took the force to court for disrupting their right to pay their respects.
‘The lengths they would go to to silence us for having a moment of silence for somebody one of them had killed was just gobsmacking,’ Jamie adds.
When a vigil did take place, police arrested women, which prompted public uproar, and nearly a year later Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick was forced to step down.
However, the current Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, who took the job in 2021, says the force has since made changes.
‘We have undertaken the biggest integrity reset UK policing has ever seen, doubling vetting failure rates and removed 1500 officers and staff in three years,’ he said in a public statement on the anniversary of Sarah’s death.
He added: ‘This tragic case also brought into sharp focus the need for a national reset in how policing, and society more widely, prioritises tackling violence against women and girls.’
That ‘reset’ included the introduction of Operation Soteria, launched to transform the police response to rape and serious sexual assault investigations, which the Met claims has doubled the number of people arrested and charged with sexual offences since 2022(although this is still a rate of just 9.4%).
But despite some progress, the Government still says we should not legislate to make misogyny (the dislike, contempt, and ingrained prejudice against women — a hate crime), a call which was rejected by Boris Johnson after Sarah’s murder.
And, the statistics continue to be alarming. In the year ending March 2025, 155 women were murdered in England and Wales, just three less than in 2024, equating to roughly one murder every 2.3 days.
These numbers are startlingly similar to the at least 147 women killed by 144 men in 2021, according to the Femicide Census, the year Sarah was murdered.
A 2024 study by the women’s charity Refuge found 53% of women said that the police had made not much or no progress in addressing problems of sexism and misogyny among police officers in the year prior.
A quarter of women (25%) said their trust in the police to handle violence against women and girls has gone down in that time.
‘Women aren’t believed’
Issy Vine, a former police call-handler, believes a culture of silence within the Met persists.
In 2023, she claims her Met Police colleague followed her after work. She’d sat next to him for the first time that day, in which time she says he called a rape victim a slut and referred to Clapham Common as ‘Sarah Everard territory’, while also making racist remarks.
‘He’d said all these weird things and comments throughout the day that were so shocking,’ Issy, 31, tells Metro. ‘With one of the comments he made, I gained a bit of confidence and said “no, that’s disgusting, you shouldn’t be racist”, and I could see in his eyes, he switched.
‘He was really angry I’d challenged him on it.’
After her shift finished at 11pm, Issy hung back for 15 minutes, so her colleague would leave first. But outside he sat at the bus stop opposite.
Issy says he shouted at her and asked when her bus was coming, as hers pulled up, so she said goodbye, tapped her card, and took her seat.
‘The bus closed the doors, and moved off, and then I could hear banging on the bus, as if someone’s just missed it,’ Issy adds. ‘The bus stopped, the doors opened, and he gets on the bus and plonks himself next to me.
‘It was really creepy, and the aggressive banging on the bus was really extreme, and it was really quiet and dead at night.’
When she questioned why he was on her bus when he lived in the opposite direction, she claims he said: ‘I’m going to come your way tonight.’
Issy says her collegue even followed her to her Tube, before she jumped onto the platform as the doors were closing to lose him. ‘It was so bizarre and I felt so uncomfortable,’ she says.
The next day she reported him at work and he was dismissed for gross misconduct in November 2023. But after six months he was given his job back in a different centre.
‘I’d been so proud they got rid of him… and then they said he was back and everything shattered,’ she recalls. ‘I went numb and tears were streaming down my face.’
Issy claims other collegues have since told her this man has a reputation for being ‘creepy’.
‘One dispatcher DM’d me and said “male staff have had to warn us not to sit next to him”… he’d also been emailing a female police officer saying he was going to take her out on a date,’ Issy adds. ‘She said “no, thank you” and he said “I’m going to do it, even if you don’t like it”.’
Ultimately, Issy says she wouldn’t go to the police again if she needed help, and it’s because she feels it’s the ‘victims that are scrutinised and torn apart’.
‘I think it’s down to a lot of ingrained misogyny and sexism and that’s why women aren’t believed, but we have to keep shouting,’ she adds. ‘We have to embarrass these institutions and then they’ll do something.’
In March 2023, Baroness Louise Casey’s report, commissioned in the wake of the murder of Sarah Everard, said the Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic.
Activist Jamie believes to immediately help keep women safer, the police need to treat indecent exposure as the ‘gateway it is to escalating sex crimes’, and to ‘fast-track police criminal activity through the system’ rather than it ‘taking four years’.
‘We’re five years on and I’m still doing one or two appearances a week saying men need to stop killing us,’ she says.
‘There hasn’t been the watershed moment we all believed there would be, and there should’ve been.’
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