Women are treated differently from men – even while holding a vigil

Editorial: People have the right to ask why this public gathering of women, which was not a protest, should have been met with such a heavy-handed police response

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There is, at the heart of the overwhelming public reaction to the shocking murder of Sarah Everard, a colossal sense of unfairness. Why should women be frightened to walk home alone when men are not? Why should women be harassed in the street when men are not?

And now, after the awful scenes on Saturday night on Clapham Common, people have the right to ask why this public gathering of women, which was not a protest, should have been met with such a heavy-handed police response?

Whatever one’s view of the throwing of a statue of a slave trader into a river in Bristol, it is no disrespect to the cause, or the people who did it, to state as a matter of fact that it was an act of public disorder, which the police stood back and watched.