Experts warn that police complacency and inadequate reform mean women are still relying on “keys in hand” rather than a functioning system to survive while out in public spaces as new findings into sexual violence are released
Nearly five years ago after Sarah Everard’s walk home ended in an act of monstrous violence, her mother has told how the “horror” of her death still tortures her. A new report has found that many sexual predators are still getting away with their crimes, and that schemes created to prevent them are often “just words”.
Sarah’s rape and murder by serving police officer Wayne Couzens, who used his warrant card to stage a fake arrest, exposed deep issues of misogyny within policing and ignited a national outcry that demanded urgent change. But now an independent inquiry says many perpetrators are slipping through the cracks due to a lack of action, with police still not doing enough to keep women safe.
After 33-year-old Sarah’s murder, Lady Elish Angiolini was commissioned to carry out an inquiry, with the first part published in February 2024. The report found there was a string of “lamentable and repeated” missed policing opportunities to stop Couzens.
The second part released today looked at the wider issue of sexually motivated attacks by strangers, and warned that the progress women have been promised has largely failed to materialise.
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In a statement, Sarah’s mother Sue spoke powerfully of her grief, saying. “Sarah will always be missing and I will always long for her,” she said. “I go through a turmoil of emotions – sadness, rage, panic, guilt and numbness. They used to come all in one day but as time goes by they are more widely spaced and, to some extent, time blunts the edges.
“I am not yet at the point where happy memories of Sarah come to the fore. When I think of her, I can’t get past the horror of her last hours. I am still tormented by the thought of what she endured.”
Wayne Couzens
On the evening of March 3, 2021, 33-year-old Sarah Everard was kidnapped in South London as she walked home from a friend’s house near Clapham Common. She was stopped by off-duty Met Police officer Wayne Couzens, 52, who handcuffed her in a fake arrest.
She had left her friend’s house on Leathwaite Road at 9pm and walked along the A205 South Circular Road across the common en route to her Brixton Hill home. She spoke to her boyfriend on the phone for around 15 minutes and agreed to meet him the next day.
At 9.28pm she was seen on a doorbell camera on Poynders Road and four minutes later on the dashcam of a passing police car. It was at 9.34pm that Couzens stopped Sarah in the street outside Poynders Court. He showed her his police warrant card before handcuffing her. It is thought that the 52-year-old accused her of breaching lockdown rules.
After getting into his white Vauxhall Crossland, that Couzens had rented from a vehicle company in Dover, she was driven to Kent. By 11.43pm, Couzens and Sarah were in Dover and had tranferred to his personal car from the rental vehicle.
Between 11.53pm and 00.57am on March 4, his mobile phone connected to cell sites in the Shepherdswell area. It is believed he raped Sarah at some point between midnight and 1.45am. At 2.34am, Couzens was seen purchasing drinks from a Dover petrol station, and it was likely he had strangled Sarah using his police duty belt by this time.
He then drove to Hoad’s Wood near Ashford where he owned a plot of land. He was seen on CCTV in the area between 3.22am and 6.32am before driving back to Dover to switch into his rental car and returning at 8.26am. He disposed of Sarah’s phone in one of the town’s watercourses at 9.21am.
Later that day, Sarah’s boyfriend contacted police after she failed to meet him. In the days following the murder, Couzens told colleagues he was suffering from stress and no longer wanted to carry a gun. On March 5, he purchased and filled a petrol container at a service station in Whitfield.
He then returned to Hoad’s Wood and burnt Sarah’s body in a refrigerator. At 1.47pm, he bought two large builder’s bags from B&Q before returning to the site, where he used one of the bags to dispose of Sarah’s remains in a pond.
On March 8, he reported himself ill from work, returning his equipment and police belt and handcuffs. On March 10 at 4.20pm, police found human remains around 100 metres from Couzens’ plot of land. On March 12, the remains were identified as Sarah through dental records.
Thanks to the CCTV footage and DNA, Couzens was arrested on March 9 in Deal. On September 30, 2021, he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order.
‘Slow and inadequate progress’
The Angiolini Inquiry, established after Sarah’s murder, outlined numerous changes needed across policing. But Karen Whybro, a women’s safety consultant, believes reform has been “slow and inadequate.”
Speaking to the Mirror, Karen said that despite the political promises, the core issue of predatory violence towards women remains unaddressed. “I survey women all the time on how safe they feel,” Karen tells the Mirror. “Generally you get a reasonable amount who feel safe during the daytime, but we get around 80 percent here in Essex who feel unsafe when it becomes dark.”
Women are still taught to fear the dark, but Karen challenges the effectiveness of self-defence tactics: “They urge us to make sure your phone is charged, take taxis, cover your drink, avoid walking alone – we’ve been taught this helps, but there’s little evidence it does long-term.”
She stresses that this focus on victim behaviour is fundamentally flawed: “All of these precautionary things we do don’t protect women – it moves them onto the next person. It’s not violence prevention.”
“As far as I can see, there’s very little progress within policing,” she says. “I was looking recently at the Met strategy that was supposed to implement a force-wide programme that hasn’t happened. That would be one of my first questions, why haven’t some of the very simple actions from their own strategy been implemented?”
The persistent culture of sexism remains a “huge issue.” Karen reveals the scale of the problem seen firsthand: “I’ve trained about 500 police officers in Essex Police and 50 percent of their internal disciplinaries were [Violence Against Women and Girls] related offences.”
Crucially, the failure to address lower-level predatory behaviour – like the flashing incidents Couzens was reported for weeks before the murder – is still a massive vulnerability.
“Wayne Couzens was reported for flashing a few weeks before and that wasn’t taken seriously,” said Karen. “That’s a good example of where you need to take these lower-level behaviours more seriously.”
After Sarah’s death, officials found Couzens had exposed himself to female members of staff at McDonald’s in Swanley, Kent, on 14 and 27 February 2021 just days before murdering Sarah but the cases weren’t investigated properly.
Beyond policing, the national response to creating safe public spaces has stalled. In 2021, the crisis was labelled an “epidemic” requiring urgent action, but Karen says, “that’s not happened.”
While she notes that some local authorities – like West Midlands and Greater Manchester – are doing “good work,” it is “very slow.” She advocates for a fundamental culture shift.
“I’d like to see councils have their own [VAWG] strategies, not relying on the police,” she adds. “The general public can be active bystanders, they can challenge those behaviours, they can step in and push them out from society.”
One positive step highlighted by Karen is a shift in focus to the predator, rather than the potential victim. Initiatives such as Project Vigilant (pioneered by Thames Valley Police) are training police and security to stop predatory behaviour before it escalates.
“We know these men are going to commit it,” Karen says. “If you look at the patterns of behaviour with Wayne Couzens, you can witness these predatory behaviours.” Project Vigilant aims to identify and intervene with individuals exhibiting these signs, directly targeting the source of the danger.
Lady Elish Angiolini KC, chairing the inquiry, said there was a disparity between how forces dealt with violence against women and other high-priority crimes where “funding and preventative activity is the norm”.
Speaking to journalists as the report was published, she said: “What is of great concern to me, still, is that basic questions cannot be answered. No-one was able to confidently tell me how many women nationally report being the victim of sexually motivated crimes in public spaces. This gap in knowledge fundamentally impacted my ability to assess how effective current measures are at preventing these crimes.
“For example, we cannot answer basic questions such as ‘how many women were raped by strangers in public spaces, as opposed to someone known to them, in private spaces in England and Wales last year’, and there is limited data on sexual assault and indecent exposure. If this data is not being gathered and recorded consistently across forces, how can it be analysed to spot patterns in offending? This is a critical failure.”
She said that the focus should be on stopping perpetrators rather than changing women’s behaviour, and that data on offenders is “limited and disjointed”. Lady Elish continued: “Too many perpetrators are slipping through the cracks in an overworked system; police, prison and probation resources are overstretched and underfunded.”
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