Neil Mackay: We need to start talking about a curfew for men

In the wake of the killing, and a police officer being charged with murder, Green Party peer Jenny Jones caustically – and crucially, ironically – suggested men should adhere to a 6pm curfew to keep women safe. She rightly wanted to hit a nerve when it comes to how women are treated on one hand and men on the other.

The argument, inevitably, was stripped online of nuance and weaponised by culture warriors screaming – at the least appropriate time – of "feminazis.

Significantly, Baroness Jones was speaking after tone-deaf comments from police in London who told women “not to go out alone”.

Read more: Sarah Everard: Reclaim These Streets movement

Think of the ugly stupidity of such comments: after a woman is killed, a suggested police solution is that other women stay indoors. Effectively, it’s a women’s curfew. As Baroness Jones pointed out, nobody seemed to “bat an eyelid” in response.

She did respond, though, and with old-fashioned rhetoric – "why don’t men stay indoors instead?" – making an important point about the different ways in which society treats the sexes. The rage which greeted her curfew comments rather proved her point.

Nobody, clearly, should be under a curfew, men or women, but Baroness Jones raised an issue which struck home with me, deeply, personally. We men need to start talking about the fact that women have every reason to be scared when they see one of us, a stranger, on the streets at night, because men kill women. That is the horrible, inescapable, truth.

I like walking at night near my home – as a writer it lets me think. But over the years I’ve come to do it less and less. I realised that the sight of me, a big guy, looming out of the dark alone could easily be frightening for many women.

It worried me for a long time that I might unwittingly scare women, so I modified my behaviour. Now, if I go walking at night, I’ll ask my wife or one of my daughters to come along.

Baroness Jones

I’m attuned to the fear of violence. I was raised in a rough, poor area with a lot of street crime, and ended up in hospital quite a few times after being attacked, so I'm acutely aware of my own safety at night.

It dawned on me long, long ago that my fears must be small in comparison to most women. If I’m sometimes extra-vigilant at night, particularly if I’m walking through a strange city, and maybe slip the sharp end of a set of keys through my fingers, so they’ll go in the eye of anyone who attacks me – how must women feel?

I say "women", not "some women", because there are very few women I know who haven’t been subjected to violence or sexually aggressive behaviour from men. I first realised just how endemic male violence was when I was 18 and fresh into university. A close friend told me that she’d been raped by her employer during the summer holidays. Then another friend told me of her attack, and slowly but surely over the years nearly all of the women who I’ve been close to had similar experiences. It’s a mountain of horror – and it’s only men to blame, there’s no way around that fact.

It’s a terrible thing, as a man, to hear the memories of women you care about, telling of the pain and suffering caused by other men. I can’t help but share a feeling of collective guilt. It’s never the right time to use expressions like "not all men", in my view.

Predictably, the debate which Baroness Jones was trying to start about the fear women experience at night and the disparity with which men’s concerns and women’s concerns are treated by society as a whole disappeared in an inevitable wave of social media screeching.

Ten years ago, we’d have discussed as a society the intricacies of what she was trying, sarcastically, to get at. Today, there’s 24 hours of social media hysteria, then we move on to something else. That fails all women. Evidently, even if we’d collectively been intelligent enough to attempt a sensible discussion about what Baroness Jones said, it was never going to end up in a curfew for men – we know that – but a thoughtful debate might at least have meant that more men became more aware of the fears women have around their safety at night.

In truth, the death of Sarah Everard raised a host of issues which we need to talk about but aren’t doing so because heat and rage have taken the place of debate, and there’s no longer scope for sustained discussion thanks to social media.

After the killing, there was a flood of reports about criminal behaviour by police towards women, including allegations of violence and rape, and the turning of blind eyes and pathetic punishments.

Today, we should be talking about how police select recruits. How are candidates psychologically profiled? How thorough are background checks? How continuously are officers risk assessed?

We’re not having that discussion because today we don’t do discussion. Think back to some of the most dreadful crimes in recent memory and it’s clear that until lately we noted the failings each crime highlighted, debated how to make the country safer, and acted accordingly.

The 2002 Soham case, for instance, in which two young girls were murdered, led to prolonged, widespread debate which prompted a number of important changes that improved the safety system set up to protect children.

We’ve lost the art of listening. As a first step, men need to start hearing what women are saying. It’s not about listening to our wives and daughters, or mothers and sisters. It’s about listening to the women we don’t know – and extending the same kind of empathy we have for the women in our lives to all women everywhere.