The appalling murder of Sarah Everard and the inappropriate Police action in response to the vigil last Saturday night came too late for the Conference motions deadline, so the Federal Conference Committee used its power under the standing orders to allow our Westminster Women and Equalities spokesperson, Wera Hobhouse, to make a statement on the events and the issues they raised. Here it is in full:

The killing of Sarah Everard horrified a whole nation.
That sickening feeling when we heard she was missing.
The wait. The search. As we all tried to hold on to hope, even as we feared the worst.
And then it came.
The heart-breaking news
This is every woman’s nightmare, every parent’s nightmare, every sibling’s nightmare, every friend’s nightmare. It could have been us – no, this is us. It is our fear, it is our reality.
I think Sarah’s death hit us all so hard because we know it could really have been any woman.
Sarah, a thirty-three-year-old marketing executive who grew up in York, studied in Durham, and then moved to London.
Who lived in Brixton Hill and had just started a new job.
A young woman who her family described as “bright and beautiful”, “kind and thoughtful”, “caring and dependable”.
Who “always put others first and had the most amazing sense of humour.”

Our thoughts have been with Sarah’s family ever since we heard Sarah was missing.
And our hearts go out to them still.
We grieve with them.
And we are angry.

Because – while the killing of a woman by a stranger is particularly awful and relatively rare – violence against women and girls is not.
On average, a woman is killed by a man in the UK every three days.
Every three days.
Most of them killed by their partner or their ex.
Their lives viciously snatched away. The lives of their family and friends destroyed.
Why does it keep happening?
Because beneath these evil killings lies a culture of normalising sexual harassment, abuse and violence.
This culture doesn’t only target women, men are victims too. But 99% of the perpetrators are men.

This is what we need to talk about. Let’s start changing our language. Not ‘violence against women’ as if there were no active perpetrators. Let’s call it violence by men.
More than six hundred thousand women are sexually assaulted each year,
And only one in six report it to the police.
More than fifty-thousand women reported being raped last year,
Only fourteen-hundred rapists were convicted. Why?
Because our culture, our language and our criminal justice system still works around the assumption that rape was to some extent the woman’s own fault. She asked for it, she provoked it. She consented.
99% of perpetrators of sexual violence are men. They are all too often missing from the discussion.
Rape continues to be normalised by the absence of talking about the perpetrators.
Many women experience harassment and discrimination in the workplace on a daily basis.
Many women receive appalling abuse online – threats and intimidation, for daring to have an opinion.
Too many women never feel safe on our streets.
Everything has to change.
Women are speaking up. More men should do the same.

We Liberal Democrats led the campaign to ban upskirting, and to make revenge porn a criminal offence.
Liberal Democrats are leading the charge now to make misogyny a hate crime.
Crimes motivated by hatred against women must be treated as seriously as those motivated by racism or religious hatred.
It’s why we are pressing the Government to finally pass the Domestic Abuse Bill it promised four years ago…
It’s why we have passed amendments to make sure it protects all women, regardless of race, nationality or immigration status.
And it is why we are demanding that the UK ratifies the Istanbul Convention and upholds internationally-agreed standards for preventing violence against women and supporting survivors.
Liberal Democrats will continue to call for better sex and relationship education in schools and better training and more resources for police, prosecutors and judges.

Crimes against women must be dealt with properly and survivors must be listened to and supported.
Let’s talk about the perpetrators not only the victims.
Criminals must not go unpunished, victims must get justice.
No woman should be the victim of sexual crimes, abuse and harassment.
No woman should live in fear of them either.
No girl should grow up learning that harassment is part of life.
No young woman should have to avoid walking down streets, or through the local park.
No parent should have to sit home worrying.
No victim should be made to feel that is was her own fault.
Everything has to change.

The women who came to Clapham Common for a peaceful vigil last Saturday evening gathered there to say they had enough
Like all of us, they were angry.
Angry at the killing of one young woman.
And the deaths of so many other women, at the hands of men.
Angry that male violence hasn’t been tackled with anything close to the urgency it demands.
That women are too often the victims, men are almost always the perpetrators.
Their anger was our anger. Their message is our message.
So when we saw what happened to those women, we were all – rightly – outraged.
Police officers, forcing women to the ground.
Arresting them, for exercising their fundamental human rights.
The right to peaceful assembly. To free expression.
The right to protest.

We all understand the need for restrictions on gatherings during this pandemic.
Liberal Democrats have supported the public health laws throughout the past year to contain the spread of Covid.
We have rejected the notion, pushed by some on the Tory right, that there is a choice between public health and civil liberties.
We know that we must do all we can to protect both – and that the best way to restore everyone’s freedoms is to get Covid under control.
But what the police did on Clapham Common last weekend wasn’t necessary to protect public health.
The Met should have been working with the organisers ahead of the vigil, to make sure it could go ahead: safe and Covid-secure.
That is exactly what Reclaim These Streets had been asking them to do.
The Met’s refusal to facilitate a peaceful, Covid-safe vigil – and to force the organisers to call it off – was wrong.
Their heavy-handed tactics against the women who did attend the vigil was wrong.
The scenes from last Saturday reminded us all that, even during a pandemic, we must be vigilant in defence of the rights and freedoms we hold dear.
Not rejecting all restrictions, like the Tory extremists.
But not handing the Government a blank cheque either.

As proud liberals, we must hold the Government to account, carefully balancing the need for public health measures and the need to protect civil liberties.
And now, instead of trying to correct it, the Conservatives are doubling down:
Trying to pass new laws to hand the police even more powers, that would persist even after the need for Covid restrictions is over.
That is wrong.
Liberal Democrats voted against the Protest Crackdown Bill on Tuesday, and we will continue to resist the Conservatives’ attempts to weaken the right to protest.
They tried to silence the women of Clapham Common last Saturday night.

Women will not be silenced now. We had enough. We want to end sexual violence, abuse and harassment and a whole culture that allows all of it to persist and too much of it to go unpunished.
We will keep saying it, we will not be ignored:
Everything will have to change.