‘Lives are at stake’: Ministers warned predators ‘continue to roam freely’ since murder of Sarah Everard
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Predators “continue to roam freely” as women live in fear of attacks in public spaces, ministers have been warned in a major report following the rape and murder of Sarah Everard.
Lady Elish Angiolini said “countless other women” have been targeted by men in the four and half years since the marketing executive, 33, was abducted and killed by serving Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens.
In the second phase of an inquiry launched in the wake of the horrifying crime – which sparked national debate about police standards and women’s safety – Lady Elish has slammed “critical failures” in recording basic data about attacks against women in public spaces and a “scattergun approach” to prevention.
Ms Everard’s heartbroken mother revealed she continues to “rage” against her death as she is tormented by the “horror of her last hours”.
She added the report “shows how much work there is to do in preventing sexually motivated crimes against women”.
Laying out her findings on Tuesday, Lady Elish said: “Women change their travel plans, their routines, and their lives out of fears for their safety in public, while far too many perpetrators continue to roam freely. Women deserve to feel safer. They deserve to be safer.”
Issuing 13 recommendations to initiate a “whole society” approach to protecting women – including the nationwide rollout of two police programs to stop predators – she called for a “turning point” in the fight against violence against women and girls (VAWG).
Lady Elish said it was “deeply disappointing” that a number of recommendations from Part 1 of the inquiry have still not been implemented despite being publicly accepted by government and police chiefs 18 months ago.
This means men with criminal convictions or cautions for sexual offences are still not automatically barred from policing.
And, despite VAWG being classed as a “national threat” in 2023, 26 per cent of police forces have not even implemented a specialist policy on investigating sexual offences, including non-contact offences such as indecent exposure.
Lady Elish said: “I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.”
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Inquiry chairwoman Lady Elish Angiolini (PA Archive)
The lawyer, who was appointed by former home secretary Priti Patel in the wake of Ms Everard’s murder in 2021, found basic questions over how many women are raped in public in England and Wales each year cannot be answered.
“If this data is not being gathered and recorded consistently across forces, how can it be analysed to spot patterns in offending,” she added. “This is a critical failure.”
A survey of 2000 people commissioned by the inquiry found almost nine in ten women aged 18 to 24 had experienced an incident a public space in the past three years, while three quarters had felt unsafe due to the actions of a man.
Despite this, almost 80 per cent of women had not reported the incident to the police.
The 219-page report also found that prevention measures were often under-prioritised for funding due to difficulties in evaluating their success.
Although VAWG is classed as a national threat, it is not backed with the required funding to meet the challenge in line with other threats like counter-terrorism and serious and organised crime, the report found.
Too often, a focus on prevention remains “just words”, Lady Elish said, adding: “Until this disparity is addressed, violence against women and girls cannot credibly be called a ‘national priority’.”
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Sarah Everard was killed in 2021 (PA Media)
Lady Elish also hit out at a “scattered” approach to tackling VAWG across 43 police forces in England and Wales, which is creating “patchwork initiatives which vary from place to place”.
Sarah Everard was kidnapped, raped and murdered by serving Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens in March 2021. He was handed a rare whole life
The Angiolini Inquiry was launched in the wake of the shocking crime to investigate how Couzens was able to use his warrant card to trick Ms Everard into getting into his car and look at wider issues within policing and women’s safety.
In the first stage of her inquiry, published last year, Lady Elish Angiolini found Couzens’ predatory sexual behaviour started 20 years before he killed Ms Everard and he should never have been allowed to join the police.
She called for a radical overhaul of police vetting and recruitment after finding repeated failures to spot red flags, allowing three separate police forces to permit him to serve.
Lady Elish also called for a fundamental change to how police respond to indecent exposure after repeated incidents linked to Couzens were not properly investigated.
Her first report uncovered allegations that he committed a very serious sexual assault against a child who was barely in her teens before his policing career even started. The allegations were among five other incidents of sexual offending, which were never reported to police.
She also identified eight occasions in which alleged indecent exposure was reported to police between 2008 and 2021 – prior to Ms Everard’s murder – but none led to his arrest and prosecution.
