This has been a long, draining week for many women with the most awful outcome imaginable, another very real reminder that when women walk alone at night, we role a dice.
Our safety is never guaranteed and that is a fact.
We are told to wear sensible shoes, keep to lighted areas, only pretend to listen to music, call a friend, hold your keys in your hand, walk quickly, don’t dally. The night, a place of nightmares for children where ghosts lurk around the corner, is a living nightmare for women.
It is interesting, is it not, that the onus, the headlines, continue to focus on the victim/survivor of sexual assault and harassment. Most recently a headline proclaimed 'Almost all young women in the UK have been sexually harassed, survey finds'.
Hmmm.
It is laughable that in an article set to expose structural sexual violence, that the headline posits women as passive victims, our bodies static objects that are acted upon, controlled by anyone but ourselves. How about focusing on the perpetrators for a change? It is completely unacceptable to change the narrative? We are fed up of the story that creates the passive victim that should expect danger when walking at night.
Something has to change. Platitudes offered by politicians do nothing - they want to placate, smooth over our anger and not tackle a widespread life-threatening issue that confronts HALF of the population.
Imagine half the population is struck down with a disease, a disease which cruelly latches onto the immune system and destroys the host. There is no chance, no possibility, that this would not be addressed. The disease would be routed out, the population would be saved.
We are facing a disease, a disease that is systematically killing half our population and yet it is being left untreated. Action and not words is needed and it needs to start now. It has been 44 years since 'Reclaim the Night', when women were told to stay home as the serial killer known as the 'Yorkshire Ripper' had yet to be apprehended. That was one man. And what has changed? Women are still being killed, still being told not to walk along, what to wear, how to guard against attacks. It is simple: we are facing an epidemic.
It is not all men but it is enough. Accepting that this is the state of affairs, a state of disease that women have to immunise themselves against is unacceptable.
Walking home should not be a gamble with our lives.