I’m not going to another vigil. I don’t want to stand silently in the cold holding flowers. Every time another woman is murdered, I want to run into the street and release a primal scream of rage.
It is time for this era of vigils – kickstarted by Sarah Everard’s murder and reinforced by Sabina Nessa’s and Ashling Murphy’s – to end. These vigils-not-protests, the liberal love child of respectability politics and coronavirus regulations, have muted our collective anger. We travel on currents of heartbreak and anger to stand with our sisters outside in the cold, only to return home aching with impotent rage while the structures of power that are killing us remain undented.
Men kill women because our society builds men that kill women. If we have a hope of stopping more women dying, it’s not through vigils or criminal sanctions for killers. Even if a murderer gets a life sentence, the conditions that create killers are still in operation. It’s only a matter of time until the next murder.
