ARABELLA JAMES still has just as many questions as she did in those first, unforgettable few days after Sarah Everard's death in 2021, when news that she'd been murdered by a police officer shocked the nation and galvanised a movement on women's safety.
The south-west Londoner and her housemates lived within a mile of the street in Clapham from which Everard, a 33-year-old Durham graduate and marketing executive, was abducted, raped and killed by an off-duty Metropolitan Police constable in a series of shocking events set to be retold in a BBC documentary next Tuesday.
James, 29, thinks about those events often, whenever she's walking at night or tracking her housemates home on her iPhone's Find My feature. If a police officer stops and asks her to get in his car, what are her options? Will carrying a rape alarm still be the reality for women like her living in London in 30 years' time? And what will it take to feel like the police are taking women's safety seriously, then, if not the brutal murder of a young woman by one of their own? "It's hard to imagine a news story that could shock us more than what happened to Sarah," says James, an executive assistant working in the city.
"What's even more shocking is how little it feels has been done since then.
The Mayor is supposed to be helping make us feel safer, but instead he seems to be spending his money on renaming Tube lines... It's getting boring now, praying for summer to come around so we feel safer. I feel just as afraid walking home at night as we did three years ago... if not more so." James and her friends are not alone.
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