What happened to Sarah Everard a year ago was unspeakably terrible; an indictment of the police and of the society that allowed someone like Wayne Couzens, the constable who kidnapped, raped and killed her, to go about his business free to commit the crime. 

The anniversary of her murder is a good opportunity to revisit urgent ways of making London safer for women. Instead, the RMT union of Tube workers have decided to stage total, crippling strikes, a spiteful, spoiled and incomprehensible accompaniment to the walk-outs by drivers of the Victoria and Central lines every weekend night between 8:30pm and 4:29AM from January to June. 

Let’s translate that latter, five-month showpiece strike: instead of being able to hop on a fast means of transport home, women – especially those without the funds to throw at private transfers – must now hang about on streets late into the night waiting for buses. Often those streets, and those bus-stops, are empty, scary, and privy to any menacing or mentally ill man that happens to wander by. There are almost never any police to be seen on the streets, so anything can – and, in the case of Sarah Everard, who was merely walking after dark – does occasionally and tragically happen. 

So there’s collapsing trust in the Met, which in addition to no discernible presence on the streets has repeatedly been hit by scandals about sexism and misogyny. 

And now, the RMT union, blinded with greed and a childish, 1970s-style glee at obstructing and holding hostage a whole metropolis, oozing disdain at the need of ordinary people to get to work, show they also don’t give a toss about women’s ability to get home at night. The result is that women trying to go about their business after dinnertime haven’t felt this unsafe and exposed in decades. 

The reality is that women are let down by more than RMT antics. The discourse surrounding women’s safety misses the mark, and has done since #MeToo. The focus is almost entirely on misogyny – on rooting out root problems, so to speak – and, in the case of the police, scouring the force for culprits. 

Both are well and good, especially the latter, but the simple fact remains that women would be a lot safer if they weren’t simply seen as sitting ducks. Women are still raised to be non-combative. There is no real model of the everyday female warrior divorced from sex idols like Lara Croft of Wonderwoman. If someone wanted to attack me physically, they’d be right in assuming I wouldn’t have the strength or skill to repel them. Most men see most women this way. But if women were actually taught skills of self-defence, or in extremis permitted to carry mace (illegal in the UK), perhaps some men would stop seeing us as so much pray. 

In the end, the solution does lie in eradicating the urge amongst some men to destroy and kill, but we’re a long way from pulling that one off. In the meantime, women on the streets remain sitting ducks, and as long as everyone from the Met to the Tube unions continue to disregard our safety, it’s time we were give some means of taking matters into our own hands.