Sarah Everard’s disappearance should shock us into overturning centuries of inequality

The disappearance of Sarah Everard has touched off many people’s deeper fears. Nearly every woman has felt the anxiety that they imagine she must have felt, walking home alone in the dark. We do not know yet what happened in this particular case but it is like a siren going off, telling us that something is wrong.

Decades on from “Reclaim the Night”, the demand for an equal right to public spaces, it seems as if we have progressed too little, and it is damning that so many women have felt compelled to share stories of their own experiences this week.

A YouGov opinion poll for the UN Women UK’s Safe Spaces Now project finds that almost all young women in the UK have felt threatened – 96 per cent of respondents say they did not report incidents of sexual harassment, with 45 per cent saying they thought it would not change anything.

This raises the question in its most fundamental form: what would change things? We know what is wrong: that too many men are a threat to women. We do not need to get sidetracked into the “not all men” debate; there is a problem with masculinity that manifests itself in enough men to make life for “nearly all women” full of fear in a way that it is simply not for nearly all men.

But what can be done? So far the response of most politicians has been to express concern, horror and sympathy. Sir Keir Starmer, who was asked yesterday about the case, said many of the right things. “The first thing we need to do is recognise the scale of violence against women and girls,” he said; we need to “tackle it at root”; and “it’s very important for men to speak out”.

Unfortunately, he also called for more police on the streets, which struck a jarring note when a serving member of the Metropolitan Police has been arrested on suspicion of murder.

Beyond that, however, what does tackling the problem of women’s safety “at root” involve, beyond men speaking out, which is welcome but hardly a comprehensive solution? Obviously, no one has the answers, or else the problem would have been solved by now, but we know more about where to look than we did even 10 years ago.

We know that this is a problem of men, of male psychology, how it is formed and how it can sometimes go down destructive and violent paths. We need to understand more about how that happens in order to understand how to deflect it at source. We need to be tough on male violence and tough on the causes of male violence.

When a woman can disappear off the streets of London, leaving others fearful for their safety, when two women a week in England and Wales are killed by a current or former partner, centuries of inequality need to be overturned.

The disappearance of Sarah Everard should act as an electric shock to jolt us into collective action.