3 min read
Baroness Bertin has been moved to recount her family’s story in the wake of the killing of Sarah Everard, an event she hopes will make “society stand up and say ‘No more’.”
In a powerful op-ed for The House magazine, Bertin, who was David Cameron’s press secretary during his time as Prime Minister, said preventing further deaths “goes far wider and deeper than the criminal justice system”, and should be about education and early intervention.
“My own cousin was murdered by a complete stranger when she was 18,” she writes.
“Her killer had been harassing girls in her neighbourhood, a suburb outside of Paris. Unbeknown to her and my family, he stalked her over a period of time, and when he knew she was alone in the house, he forced himself in and strangled her.”
Bertin said “stranger killings and domestic abuse are inextricably linked” and while there is no quick fix to either “legislation can and should signal a change in the way we act and think as a society”.
Having introduced the Stalking Protection Bill to the House of Lords in 2019, and as a member of the joint committee on the Draft Domestic Abuse Bill, currently still going through Parliament, she said the criminal justice system “clearly has a big role to play” in tackling this issue.
“But this goes far wider and deeper than the criminal justice system,” Bertin adds.
“We should be helping society raise better men. If a boy is only seeing abuse and violence at home, and compounding it by accessing violent and abusive pornography online – without the right support and guidance there is a pretty high chance he will carry on that cycle either in his own relationships or more widely in society.
“Early intervention and recognition are essential.”
The peer welcomed the new funding for perpetrator interventions, but said we “cannot carry on with a situation where rape has such low prosecution rates”.
In the past five years the number of cases reported to police and initially recorded as rape have risen sharply, but the number that make it to court over that time has more than halved.
Official statistics show in the 12 months to the end of March 2020, 58,856 cases of rape were recorded by police forces in England and Wales.
But this translated to just 2,102 prosecutions, compared with 3,043 in the previous reporting period, which led to the victims’ commissioner Dame Vera Baird to say rape has effectively been decriminalised.
Bertin said: “I often reflect that my cousin might be alive today if the police had taken her killer’s harassment of young girls more seriously, if his behaviour had been called out as grossly unacceptable by his peers, or if he had been put on a perpetrator scheme like the ones we know work.”
She added: “The task is huge but there will always be victims if we continue to treat perpetrators as an after-thought.
“Sarah Everard, my cousin and all the other women facing violence right now, deserve better than that.”