Essay

Attention

Comment

Feminism

15 March 2024

5 min read

Sarah Everard: she was 'exactly like us'

An anniversary of anguish deserves the miracle of our attention.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Sarah Everard.

BBC/Everard Family.

This week, three years ago, we’d been shut in our homes for nearly a year and things were anything but normal. I don’t know about you, but when I think back to those locked-down days, it’s all a bit of a haze, those weird weeks tend to blur into one.

Except this week, that is. This week, three years ago, was a wholly different story.

We, the public, had just learnt that Sarah Everard, a thirty-three-year-old woman in South London, had been abducted, raped and murdered by Wayne Couzens, a serving police officer in the Metropolitan Police. And the news of this heinous crime took our breath away. Do you remember it? How you felt when you learned what had happened to Sarah? I can remember the anguish of hundreds of people ringing out from Clapham Common, reaching every corner of the country. I can remember that, legal or not, nothing seemed to quell the outrage that was drawing people to the vigil being held there. All that grief, it had to go somewhere.

The anger that night was so visceral, it feels like it’s still in the soil of the Common. The fear, so palpable, it still lingers in the air. And at that point, we didn’t even know the half of it. ‘She was just walking home’ - That’s the sentence, isn’t it? The one that haunted those days, weeks, and months.

Three years on and we’re no closer to coming to terms with what happened. Not really. In the wake of the recent Angioloni Inquiry, which concluded that Wayne Couzens should never have been allowed to become, let alone remain, a police officer, the BBC released a documentary that follows DCI Katherine Goodwin’s story as she led the investigation. From first seeing the bulletin of a missing young woman, to hearing the ‘whole life’ sentence come down on Couzens – viewers are walked through the whole thing, step by step. What led up to Sarah’s death, and what followed it. It’s something that we should all see, even though we’ll immediately wish that we hadn’t.

Because it would be hard to unsee the grainy footage of Wayne Couzens standing next to a handcuffed Sarah on the side of a busy road, abducting her while his hazard lights flash, all of it so sickeningly hidden in plain sight. It would be harder still to unhear the victim statement from Sarah’s mum, who admitted that every night, right at the time of the abduction, she silently screams ‘don’t get in the car, Sarah. Don’t believe him. Run!’.

All of it, it’s just so hard to know.

The details are hard to think about, and harder still not to think about. But that’s the point, I suppose. I remember what philosopher Simone Weil wrote,

that ‘capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle… it is a miracle’.

I’m just not used to a ‘miracle’ making me feel so nauseous. In theory, Weil’s words are beautiful, in reality though – they ache.

I don’t tend to acquaint a feeling of utter helplessness with the miraculous. Where my understanding runs dry, my answers falter, and my tears flow – those aren’t the places I expect to see anything of any use, spiritual or otherwise.

But Weil goes on:

‘…it is recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specific from the social category labelled ‘unfortunate’, but as a man (or woman), exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.’

Sarah Everard – her memory, as well as the people within whom her memory is most vivid, and her loss most keenly felt – deserve the miracle of our attention. Then, now, and for many years to come. We continue to grieve her, the woman who never made it home, as if we each knew more of her than her name. And that’s a beautiful thing, a human thing, a sacred thing. Because Sarah was more than her name, and she was more than her death. And so, she must be grieved as such, with our eyes fixed on the beauty of who she was, and the tragedy of who she will never be.

And it’s tricky, because you can’t tidy up lament, can you? There’s no silver-lining, nothing to polish. You can’t put a neat bow on despair or grief.

And then there’s Weil’s ‘exactly like us’ line to grapple with. And grapple with it, we do. The knowledge that it could have been any of us is ever-present. As a woman, I feel it every single day. If male violence against women is a spectrum - 1 being a wolf-whistle as we walk down the street, and 10 being death – the truth is that most of us will only ever face experiences that sit on the lower end of that scale. And yet, we are ever aware that 10 exists and that we could encounter it at any point. So, we are on the lookout for it. We are alert, always.

Sarah walked home a specific way that night; not the quickest route, but the best lit.

That’s what we all do. ‘Exactly like us’, indeed.

Lament; I suppose that’s what this feeling in my stomach is. And maybe yours too. It’s a feeling that goes beyond the rage I feel toward the monstrous perpetrator, and the institutions that failed to stop him, and so many others. It’s a kind of wordless grief that things are the way they are, agony that we live in a world that hurts this much, despair at how things could have been so different. I felt all this three years ago, when I heard about Sarah’s death. And I felt it last night, when my sister walked home from my house in the dark with her hood up so that she was less distinguishable as a woman walking alone.

And it’s tricky, because you can’t tidy up lament, can you? There’s no silver-lining, nothing to polish. You can’t put a neat bow on despair or grief, and you can’t pull yourself out of it by your own bootstraps. And that’s not to be defeatist, or to relinquish our responsibility to enact justice and fight for change. On the contrary, lament is rooted in the knowledge that things can be, and should be, better. But to try and find a way to solve the outrage we feel when it comes to the death of Sarah Everard is to completely misunderstand it, and ourselves, and reality.

Bad things hurt.

So, although writing this piece has been hard, I’m at least comforted in the knowledge that it was supposed to be a hard piece to write. And that the queasiness I feel and the tears that are threatening my professional resolve are the evidence of some kind of miracle that I don’t fully understand.

Essay

Comment

Justice

29 February 2024

5 min read

Dignity: why people matter

How dignity underlies our ethics and law.

Charles Foster

Professor Charles Foster is a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and a member of the Oxford Law Faculty.

A pupil in a classroom looks around and into the camera.

Indus Action

You think that you matter: that you are significant. I agree with you. I think the same about myself.

We all think we are significant, and that our significance requires us to behave and to be treated in particular ways. One of the main functions of the law (perhaps the function of the law) is to regulate this sense of significance: to protect my sense of my significance and to stop it interfering with the sense of significance that others have.

A common name given to this sense of significance is dignity. It is a defining characteristic of humans. We see it as soon as we see behaviourally modern humans – who came on the scene about 45,000 years ago. We laid our dead tenderly in the earth, clutching flowers and amulets, rather than leaving them out as food for hyenas. We carved our faces into mammoth ivory because we knew that there was something about our faces which should endure. We believed that we had souls and that other things, human and non-human did too. This made eating other ensouled things a real problem. We evolved solemn liturgies of oblation and satisfaction to solve it. Our walk through life and death was elaborately choreographed, because it wasn’t proper to stomp and blunder. Comportment mattered because we mattered.

These were astonishing assertions – so astonishing that no big society has ever taken them completely seriously.

Jumping from pre-history to history, dignity, like other precious resources, was appropriated by the rulers, who said that they and only they had a right to it. The hoi polloi never truly believed this; they knew their own worth and moral weight. But the rulers told an artful story. The gods had dignity, they said, and the gods gave it to their favoured ones – typically the royals and the heroes. The royals were the gods’ embodiments or regents, and so the thrones of Mesopotamia and Egypt were invested and affirmed by divine dignity. The capricious gods of Olympus gave dignity at particular times and for particular purposes to their particular favourites, who therefore became demi-gods for a while.

In the Hebrew world, however, a radically democratic move was afoot. God was indeed dignified, but since every human was made in his image, all humans were dignified too – and in the same way as God. The idea was picked up by St Paul: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek’, he declared. ‘There is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus’.

These were astonishing assertions – so astonishing that no big society has ever taken them completely seriously.

The obscenity of Auschwitz relegated the hyper-spiritualised notion of dignity to the cloister, and Kant’s notion to the Academy. For whatever dignity was, it was outraged there, and the outrage extended to bodies and to the non-rationally-autonomous.

Less ambitious, and so more palatable, was Stoicism’s rather anaemic version of the Imago Dei. All humans were potentially dignified, it said, and each human had a duty to strive to realise their dignified potential. It was much less radical than the Judaeo-Christian conception, but still represented a tectonic break with the royal theocracies of Mesopotamia, Egypt and elsewhere.

This Stoical conception of dignity did useful work. It served to save the notion of dignity from two mortal threats - both, embarrassingly, from the Christian world (though Kant’s relationship with Christian orthodoxy was sometimes uneasy).

There is a strand of Platonised Christianity (drawing on the early Augustine) that spiritualises the idea of dignity. If it prevailed dignity would have nothing to say in hospitals about bowels or bedpans, in bedrooms about sex, in plantations about slavery, in jungles about the fate of trees or toucans, or in newsrooms about anything at all.

Kant located dignity in rational autonomy, so snatching dignity from children, the demented, the unconscious, the depressed, everyone who has drunk a bottle of red wine, and more or less everyone who doesn’t have a PhD in philosophy.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War dignity (almost always undefined) appeared in endless national and international laws and declarations. Fairly recently it has started to have a real legal life of its own, being invoked for many purposes, from prisoners’ rights to reproduce to the right to have your name on your tombstone in the language of your choice.

These specific invocations of dignity sometimes disguise its foundational nature – foundational to human nature itself and to the laws that seek to determine how humans should conduct themselves in society

To say that the Judaeo-Christian account of dignity gives rise to all ethics and law in the western world is a big claim. I make it unapologetically.

To see how foundational it is, ask yourself why you think it is wrong to kick a child, but not a rock. Or why it is wrong to play football with a human head, or do an intimate examination, for the purposes of teaching medical students, on a woman in a permanent vegetative state. In describing the wrongness you will certainly find yourself relying on something that looks suspiciously like human dignity.

The law is often said to be protecting interests other than dignity (such as autonomy, freedom, or bodily integrity), or promoting other values (such as beneficence or non-maleficence). Yet on close inspection, those interests and values will all turn out to be parasitic on dignity. Dignity is the first order principle: the others stem from it.

In the last forty or so years there has been a good deal of academic discussion about just what ‘dignity’ means. There is a growing consensus that it has two complementary parts. First: an inalienable element: the intrinsic dignity possessed simply and solely by reason of being human. This cannot be lost or diminished. It just is. And second, a dignity which is a consequence of the first, but denotes how, in the light of your dignified nature, you should comport yourself. If we say of someone ‘She’s let herself down’, we mean that she has failed to behave with the dignity expected of someone who has the high status of being human.

This account of dignity is derived straight from the notion of the Imago Dei, and from Paul’s gloss. The watered-down Stoical version simply gives encouragement to behave well: it has nothing akin to the inalienable element.

To say that the Judaeo-Christian account of dignity gives rise to all ethics and law in the western world is a big claim. I make it unapologetically. Perhaps you think that it is too extravagant. But it is plain enough that this account, or one of its iterations outside the sphere of Judaeo-Christian influence (there are several), accords as does no other with our intuitions about ourselves and about how we should act, and with the most fundamental axioms of the laws in all tolerable jurisdictions. The most enlightened parts of Enlightenment thinking originate in this account, though they are often embarrassed to admit it.

Whatever we mean by the Rule of Law, part of it is that no one is above or outside it: Jews and Greeks, and bond and free, and male and female are to be treated alike. We’re so used to the idea that we have forgotten its revolutionary roots.