Men need to control the men who hate women

The murder of Sarah Everard, a woman walking home one evening, by a London police officer who handcuffed her, kidnapped, raped, strangled her and burned her body — well, that says it all about women’s lives and men’s lives and what her family will have to endure until they die.

Officer Wayne Couzens, 48, pulled up beside her, showed her his police ID, claimed her visit to a friend had violated COVID rules, and arrested her. (Stop-checks were a pandemic police power recommended by Ontario Premier Doug Ford. The police refused.) It’s not clear just when Everard realized the man driving was going to kill her.

Because London is thick with street cameras, the kidnap is on film. Strangely for a tabloid that makes its money abusing women, the absolute best coverage came from the Daily Mail: timelines, kidnap video, interrogation video, screenshots, maps, video as he bought hairbands (to tie her or perhaps maintain his erection), a gas can to burn her corpse, a McDonald’s meal later.

Couzens, a former mechanic, was a sex offender, but police didn’t check clues when he was hired. He had harassed female officers, was nicknamed “the rapist” by other cops, surveilled women in cars and at their homes, exposed himself twice before the murder, was in a vicious online group with 16 other officers and so on.

The Met police chief, Cressida Dick, said there are “lessons” to be learned. But there aren’t, as Guardian columnist Marina Hyde wrote. Women already know what their lives will be like. Their mothers have warned them.

Since Everard’s murder in March 2021, at least 80 women in the U.K. have been murdered by men, Hyde wrote. As Couzens, the killer, a huge man with legs so fat he could hardly sit while being questioned in handcuffs, was being sentenced to life in prison, another man, a pizza delivery worker, was in a nearby courtroom charged with beating London primary school teacher Sabina Nessa to death. She had been unknown to him.

I used to think of the historic male brutality toward women as a psychological phenomenon, something that might be untangled. Have you always hated women? Why? How can we make you stop harassing/demeaning/raping/beating/killing them? How can we make you want to stop?

I now think it’s simpler than that. Our greatest problem is that we are physically smaller than men.

Even in an office job, it matters. Male journalists write about walking in crowds or strolling Toronto streets at night for airy commentary. I would love that, but could not do it safely. I brace for words, but have feared worse and received worse. Men are stronger than women. It matters psychologically.

The judge for some reason called Everard, 33, a “wholly blameless victim.” A senior police chief said of the case that women have to be “streetwise about when they can be arrested … to just learn a bit about that legal process.” So not blameless, then.

The London police suggested women escape killers by “shouting out to a passerby, running into a house, knocking on a door, waving a bus down.”

In other words, the burden will not be placed on men like Couzens, already considered a danger to women, armed, in positions of authority, driving a cab perhaps, or making deliveries. The police will not start hiring university-educated cadets. Police unions will not stop imposing a cop code of terror and silencing. And so on.

The burden will be on women like Everard. All she could have done to save herself was stay home eternally, never trusting anyone, especially a cop.

I have written about Everard because she is a recent victim, and I can’t get over the hours before he strangled her with his police belt. But then I can’t get over how a killer researched online how to tear a vagina apart and then did it to an Indigenous woman, Cindy Gladue, in Edmonton in 2011. I can’t get over footage shot by Sandra Bland as she was stopped by a Texas cop in 2015.

Until men put men on curfew and under control, the only thing that will help women is if we weren’t born.

» Heather Mallick is a Toronto-based columnist covering current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @HeatherMallick