The Angiolini Inquiry’s new Part 2 First Report, published on 2 December, is a stark reminder of a truth women already know in their bones: public spaces still don’t belong to us. Four years after the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Metropolitan Police officer, this report asks a deceptively simple question: What is actually being done to stop sexually motivated crimes against women in public?
The answer, laid out across hundreds of pages, is both sobering and galvanising.
We still don’t know how big the problem is
One of the most striking findings is also the most basic: the UK still has no national data on how many women are sexually assaulted in public spaces. There is no standard recording of whether an attacker was a stranger, where the offence took place, or how often women experience harassment, exposure, or predatory surveillance in the everyday spaces we use: streets, buses, parks, stations, inside and outside nightlife venues.
This is astonishing. In an age of granular data collection, women’s safety remains a statistical blind spot.
But women themselves already know the scale. Surveys repeatedly show that most women feel unsafe walking alone at night. They change their routes, clutch their keys, call a friend, speed up, cross the road; rituals of hypervigilance passed down like an unwanted inheritance. As Angiolini writes, women have normalised low-level threat to the point where it becomes invisible to everyone except those living with it.
The prevention landscape is vibrant, but chaotic
The report also documents something hopeful: there are creative, committed, passionate people across the country working to make public spaces safer for women. Local councils redesigning parks. Transport networks using tech to track predatory behaviour. Night-time economy teams training staff to intervene. Police forces piloting new approaches to identifying men who hunt for victims around bars and clubs.
But this energy is scattered. Innovations pop up in one town but never spread. Some brilliant projects lose funding after a year. Others never receive evaluation, meaning no one knows if they’re working, or if they could work even better.
The result is a patchwork, not a system.
Women, yet again, are being asked to carry the load
A thread running through the report and through countless testimonies is deep frustration at prevention messages aimed at women rather than at perpetrators.
“Don’t walk alone.”
“Watch your drink.”
“Text me when you get home.”
As Angiolini notes, women have been doing these things since childhood. They are exhausted by them. And they do not address the root of the problem: the men who offend, or think about offending, or escalate offending.
The Inquiry insists on what feminist campaigners have been saying for decades: to protect women, we need to understand men.
This includes identifying predatory behaviour early, intervening before an offence is committed, and making services available for men who fear their own impulses. Crucially, it also includes ensuring policing has the resources, training and leadership to treat these crimes as preventable, not inevitable.
Project Vigilant and Operation Soteria: rare bright spots
The report highlights two policing initiatives that are working and should be rolled out nationally:
- Project Vigilant: covert and overt patrols in the night-time economy, trained to spot predatory men. Where it has been used, it has disrupted potential offenders and led to arrests that may otherwise never have happened.
- Operation Soteria: a radical rethinking of rape investigation, shifting focus from the victim’s credibility to the perpetrator’s behaviour pattern. Early results show improved investigations and reduced opportunities for repeat offending.
These programmes demonstrate what’s possible when attention is placed where it belongs: on the perpetrators, not the women they target.
A whole-system approach — not another short-term fix
Perhaps the most important message is that prevention must be long-term, properly funded, and coordinated across society. The report calls for:
- a national strategy focusing specifically on sexually motivated crimes in public spaces;
- multi-year investment in public campaigns and early intervention for boys and men;
- mandatory national standards in policing;
- better data, better design, and better accountability.
Women’s safety cannot depend on a flurry of initiatives launched after each tragedy, only to fade when headlines move on. It must be built into how we design cities, run transport, educate children, and hold power to account.
What this report really asks of us
The Angiolini Inquiry is not asking for miracles. It is asking for commitment: from government, from police leadership, from communities, and yes, from men.
Its conclusion is clear: these crimes are preventable. The question now is whether the political and institutional will exists to act.
Because women like Sarah Everard were not simply “walking home.” They were living their lives. And every woman deserves to do that freely, without fear.
Image source: The Guardian
