‘Lives are at stake’: Ministers warned predators ‘continue to roam freely’ since murder of Sarah Everard
While women live in fear of attack in public spaces, predators “continue to roam free”; ministers have been warned in a major report following the rape and murder of Sarah Everard.
Lady Elish Angiolini said “countless other women” had been targeted by men in the four-and-a-half years since the 33-year-old marketing executive was abducted and murdered by Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens.
In the second phase of the investigation launched after the horrific crime, which sparked a national debate about police standards and women’s safety, Lady Elish criticized “critical failures” in recording key data on attacks on women in public spaces and a “stunned approach” to prevention.
Ms Everard’s heartbroken mother has revealed she continues to be “furious” over her death as she is tormented by the “horror of her final hours”.
He added that the report “shows how much work remains to be done in preventing sexually motivated crimes against women”.
Announcing her findings on Tuesday, Lady Elish said: “Women are changing their travel plans, routines and lives due to fear for their safety in public, while too many perpetrators continue to roam free. Women deserve to feel safer. They deserve to be safer.”
He called for a “turning point” in the fight against violence against women and girls (VAWG), which made 13 recommendations to launch a “whole of society” approach to protecting women – including the launch of two nationwide policing programs to stop predators.
Lady Elish said it was “deeply disappointing” that some of the recommendations from Part 1 of the inquiry had still not been implemented, despite being publicly agreed by the government and police chiefs 18 months ago.
This means men with criminal convictions or warnings for sexual offenses are still not automatically disqualified from policing.
And despite VAWG being classified as a “national threat” in 2023, 26 per cent of police forces have not even implemented a specialist policy for investigating sexual offences, including non-contact offenses such as indecent exposure.
Lady Elish said: “I simply want leaders to act. Lives are at stake.”
The lawyer, appointed by former home secretary Priti Patel after Ms Everard’s murder in 2021, found that fundamental questions about how many women are raped in public each year in England and Wales cannot be answered.
“If this data is not collected and recorded consistently across different forces, how can it be analyzed to detect patterns in offending?” he added. “This is a critical failure.”
A survey of 2,000 people commissioned by the inquiry found that almost nine in ten women aged 18 to 24 had experienced an incident in a public place in the last three years, while three quarters felt unsafe because of a man’s actions.
Despite this, nearly 80 percent of women did not report the incident to the police.
The 219-page report also found that prevention measures were often under-prioritised in terms of funding due to difficulties in assessing the success of them.
The report found that although VAWG was classified as a national threat, it was not supported by the funding required to tackle the challenge in line with other threats such as counter-terrorism and serious and organized crime.
Lady Elish said that too often the focus on prevention was “just lip service”, adding: “Until this inequality is addressed, violence against women and girls cannot credibly be called a ‘national priority’.”
Lady Elish also pointed out that a “diffuse” approach to tackling VAWG across 43 police forces in England and Wales had created “a patchwork of initiatives that vary from place to place”.
Sarah Everard was kidnapped, raped and murdered by Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens in March 2021. He was given a rare life.
The Angiolini Inquiry was launched following the shocking crime to investigate how Couzens used his warrant card to trick Ms Everard into getting into his car and looking into wider issues around policing and women’s safety.
In the first phase of the investigation, published last year, Lady Elish Angiolini found Couzens’ predatory sexual behavior began 20 years before he killed Ms Everard and should never have been allowed to join the police.
He called for a radical overhaul of police investigation and recruitment after he was allowed to allow three separate police forces to operate after seeing repeated failures to detect red flags.
Lady Elish also called for a fundamental change in how police respond to indecent exposure after repeated incidents linked to Couzens were not properly investigated.
His first report revealed allegations that he had committed a very serious sexual assault against a child who was still in his adolescence before his police career began. The allegations were among five other incidents of sexual offenses that were never reported to police.
It also identified eight incidents between 2008 and 2021 – before Ms Everard’s murder – in which allegations of indecent exposure were reported to police, but none led to her arrest and prosecution.
