Just a few days ago another woman was murdered. We might know about the horrific ending of Sarah Everard’s life because she was raped and murdered in London, yet this is is not something that has never happened before. Every few months we hear about a similar case, we get shocked, we might even weep, the case gets a lot of press and then silence. Pure deafening silence like nothing happened. This is not right.

This morning I read loads of articles reporting Sarah’s murder and I couldn’t imagine how horrible it must have been for her in those last few moments of her life. Feeling betrayed by a police officer that is supposed to be there to help her. She did all the right things, left her friends at a decent hour, called her boyfriend and stayed on the phone for more than half the walk she had to walk yet she still was pounced on by a monster that decided her life was not worth nothing. Nothing. Evening writing this, it gives me a sick feeling in my stomach.

I did some research about the frequency of sexual assaults against women and the statistics are shocking. On the data collected over a year the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) estimated that;

  • 20% of women have experienced some type of sexual assault since the age of 16 – that is equivalent to 3.4 million women
  • 3.1% of women (510,000) aged 16 to 59 had experienced a sexual assault in the last year. 510,000 which works out to 1398 cases women experiencing sexual assaults per day.

This is utterly horrific, yet the awareness for this needs to come from us men and not only from women. There is only so much that women can do to protect themselves, yet if we don’t teach our kids, the young boys that tomorrow will be men, this cycle will never end. We all have friends, sisters, girlfriends, wives, mothers and grandmothers, we must teach the next generation to show respect and to adore life. We need to do our utmost best in ensuring that from a tender age boys are taught to protect and respect girls and later women at all times.

I strongly belief that in order to make this world a better and safer place for everyone, we need to do our bit to teach those coming after us.

If we belief in life, we need to show women the respect they deserve. This will go a long way towards ensuring equality. Yes, if we protect women we will be ensuring that they can feel safer and if they feel safer they can feel and mostly important BE equal.