Wayne couzens pleads guilty to the murder of Sarah Everard

[MotionActivatedDog]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-57774597

@GroggyLegs you're absolutely right.

We were taught about monsters under the bed as children but they're walking the streets, police officers in this cunts case. Some twat on a friends SM commented , actually blamed her for being out and breaking the fucking Covid rules. It was a man of course.

I agree he is man. To call him a monster is to deny the reality that these men are very common and all around us. They are our dads, our brothers, our husbands, our sons, our colleagues, our friends. They’re in all walks of life. Unlike fictional monsters.

@MotionActivatedDog

I agree he is man. To call him a monster is to deny the reality that these men are very common and all around us. They are our dads, our brothers, our husbands, our sons, our colleagues, our friends. They’re in all walks of life. Unlike fictional monsters.

Daniel Sloss is good on this (quoted from a video excerpt that is now very difficult to find from one of his shows - the redacted language is quoted from a newspaper article about it):

Deep down, I know most men are good, but when one in ten men are sh!! and the other nine do nothing, they might as well not f!!!ing be there. "Instead of having this f!!!ing hero complex and being, like, "I'm going to beat up a rapist, stop one, because I know it can be done, because I know how I f!!!ing failed at it.

Were there signs in my friend's behaviour towards women that I ignored? Yes. And then he raped my friend. That's on me until the day I die.

Talk to your f!!!ing boys. Get involved.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4214904-Male-friends-opposing-attitude-towards-women-is-troubling?msgid=106340671

Thank you @EmbarrassingAdmissions that is a good excerpt.

Well he’ll go to prison, and hopefully never see the light of day again. But sometimes I feel like it’s pointless - it doesn’t bring Sarah Everard back, it doesn’t erase her suffering before she died, it doesn’t end her family’s torture, and absolutely nothing will change. Sarah’s name and face will fade from our collective consciousness. Our anger and upset will fade. We’ll occasionally remember ‘the Sarah Everard murder’ as we do ‘the Soham murders’ or ‘the Jo Yeates case’. One less dangerous man on the streets - hooray. Men will continue to rape and assault and kill women every week of every year.

Sadly all this is true @MissChanandlerBong90

This was an evil crime. Women should be free and safe.

I see the Met are going to look into why Couzen's exposing his genitals in public in 2015 was never investigated.. If he had been convicted maybe Sarah would still be alive. There has to be zero tolerance of so called minor sex offences like flashing and voyeurism as there seems to be evidence that these minor crimes often result in escalation to rape and in this case murder as well.

www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/sarah-everard-wayne-couzens-police-investigation-watchdog-misconduct-b944986.html

I feel visceral hatred for this man. Very well said Groggy , far too often these crimes are attributed to ‘monsters’ when violence against women is an everyday occurrence by everyday men.

My thoughts are with Sarah’s loved ones, and Sarah herself, who should have been safe simply walking home.

[quote 334bu]I see the Met are going to look into why Couzen's exposing his genitals in public in 2015 was never investigated.. If he had been convicted maybe Sarah would still be alive. There has to be zero tolerance of so called minor sex offences like flashing and voyeurism as there seems to be evidence that these minor crimes often result in escalation to rape and in this case murder as well.

www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/sarah-everard-wayne-couzens-police-investigation-watchdog-misconduct-b944986.html[/quote]
This is good. But what I think we could really do with is a scraping of records to see which other reports of lower level sexual crimes have not been investigated.

I do think the police ought to start assuming that most sexual crimes will be the work of a serial offender and so the investigation should be broader than the one incident initially brought to their attention.

@ferretface

Unsurprisingly the perpetrator has a history of using sex workers. How many more like him are there? Men feeling entitled to purchase and ultimately just to take? That's not to say that all men who use prostitutes will go on to murder (obviously not) but it's part of a very toxic narrative about who women are and what they're worth.

I used to be pretty neutral on porn and sex work but 99% of it is not truly consensual.

Totally agree. There’s an article on Mail Online where the theme the whole way through is ‘he was such a nice and wonderful man, we don’t understand how this happened’.

Well he’s a man who clearly saw some women as less equal than others, buying their bodies for sex and exposing himself to them whilst they work in low paid food service roles. He was never a nice man, he was always the same person he is now. He just was able to hide it. Until of course he didn’t hide it anymore.

This is an important conversation. These men aren’t monsters, to varying degrees they walk among us as ordinary men, who visit prostitutes, watch violet porn, who hold a desire to abuse women. The entire point is that this man IS an ordinary man.

This is an important conversation. These men aren’t monsters, to varying degrees they walk among us as ordinary men, who visit prostitutes, watch violet porn, who hold a desire to abuse women. The entire point is that this man IS an ordinary man.

Such a true, and sobering, thought.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/09/sarah-everards-murder-shows-true-cost-polices-failure-take-sexual/

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph.

The Telegraph also suggesting an interest in extreme pornography with the phone wiping and having been seen throwing an SD card out of the window. Whether we’ll hear more without a trial I don’t know. But that wouldn’t be surprising.

This is an important conversation. These men aren’t monsters, to varying degrees they walk among us as ordinary men, who visit prostitutes, watch violet porn, who hold a desire to abuse women. The entire point is that this man IS an ordinary man.

Yes. In something I linked above, there were women who had friends who walked them home to protect them amidst reports of a local rapist For one of them, the friend was the local rapist. Another had the horror of having recently been out with a friend who, a few days later, killed a sex worker.

A wretched number of us are related to these men or in relationships with them. We work alongside, for, or supervise these men in the workplace. The cruelty and the horror lies in the banality of how ordinary they are, and how many people describe them at 'nice'.

And yet - as Sloss says, sometimes, it's in plain sight - but there is no socially agreed way of having these conversations or addressing problematic behaviour.

I don't understand why there isn't a fast response system when a policeman is accused of exposure - as soon as it happens, your info is linked and acted on immediately.

I work with young people and if an allegation was made against I would.immediately have no access to young people or their information on our database, which I completely support

Agree with much above. When women are raped and murdered, the narrative is always “How could this seemingly lovely family man commit such a horrific crime?”. I keep forgetting the exact article, but there was a survey recently that found 50% of men in the UK watched violent porn in the past week. Look up how many visitors pornhub has and the top search terms. Men wanking off over violence and rape are not the exception. Men using prostitutes and battering them for kicks are not the exception. They’re the norm. And like any addiction, they’ll only seek more and more extreme “content”.

Not sure if this is the “right” feminist board to post this on and I’m
sorry to bring this back to “gender”, but the failure to investigate allegations of indecent exposure boils my piss. Like when Laurie Penny was chatting on about teaching girls “it’s rude to look at other people’s genitals”, completely ignoring that some men expose themselves for kicks. Like the “transwoman” who exposed themselves in the Wi Spa - how were the female customers supposed to tell the difference between someone “innocently” getting their lady dick out in a changing room, vs someone exposing themselves.

I do think indecent exposure is not taken seriously enough. It’s seen as embarrassing or lewd, not as the gateway crime it really is. But then the police and CPS have no interest in prosecuting rape, so is it surprising!?

Tatiandbeans is right. Offenders like this man don’t start with a carefully planned crime of extreme severity. They start with lesser crimes and, when they get away with it, move on to worse. Which is why the flashing should have been taken far more seriously. And it is absolutely relevant to the question of male bodies in women’s spaces. If Wi Spa and Laurie Penny had their way, nothing - absolutely nothing - could stop Couzins arriving, declaring himself to be a woman, and getting his gratification wandering around a woman’s space naked. We know that flashing is extremely common and why on Earth wouldn’t flashers take advantage of this golden opportunity, knowing that LP et al will blame the victims.

GroggyLegs

I agree with all you say squirrel but I personally refuse to describe men like this as 'monsters' because I feel I'm excusing their behaviour as non-human.

This was a man.
A husband & a police officer.”

Heart-wrenching too to see the aerial shots of his garden with children’s garden toys. Families destroyed by someone who potentially ought to have been jailed at least 6 years ago.

@TatoAndBeans

Agree with much above. When women are raped and murdered, the narrative is always “How could this seemingly lovely family man commit such a horrific crime?”. I keep forgetting the exact article, but there was a survey recently that found 50% of men in the UK watched violent porn in the past week. Look up how many visitors pornhub has and the top search terms. Men wanking off over violence and rape are not the exception. Men using prostitutes and battering them for kicks are not the exception. They’re the norm. And like any addiction, they’ll only seek more and more extreme “content”.

Not sure if this is the “right” feminist board to post this on and I’m
sorry to bring this back to “gender”, but the failure to investigate allegations of indecent exposure boils my piss. Like when Laurie Penny was chatting on about teaching girls “it’s rude to look at other people’s genitals”, completely ignoring that some men expose themselves for kicks. Like the “transwoman” who exposed themselves in the Wi Spa - how were the female customers supposed to tell the difference between someone “innocently” getting their lady dick out in a changing room, vs someone exposing themselves.

I do think indecent exposure is not taken seriously enough. It’s seen as embarrassing or lewd, not as the gateway crime it really is. But then the police and CPS have no interest in prosecuting rape, so is it surprising!?

So true!

@TatoAndBeans

Agree with much above. When women are raped and murdered, the narrative is always “How could this seemingly lovely family man commit such a horrific crime?”. I keep forgetting the exact article, but there was a survey recently that found 50% of men in the UK watched violent porn in the past week. Look up how many visitors pornhub has and the top search terms. Men wanking off over violence and rape are not the exception. Men using prostitutes and battering them for kicks are not the exception. They’re the norm. And like any addiction, they’ll only seek more and more extreme “content”.

Not sure if this is the “right” feminist board to post this on and I’m
sorry to bring this back to “gender”, but the failure to investigate allegations of indecent exposure boils my piss. Like when Laurie Penny was chatting on about teaching girls “it’s rude to look at other people’s genitals”, completely ignoring that some men expose themselves for kicks. Like the “transwoman” who exposed themselves in the Wi Spa - how were the female customers supposed to tell the difference between someone “innocently” getting their lady dick out in a changing room, vs someone exposing themselves.

I do think indecent exposure is not taken seriously enough. It’s seen as embarrassing or lewd, not as the gateway crime it really is. But then the police and CPS have no interest in prosecuting rape, so is it surprising!?

Exactly. Do you remember a few years ago there was the shocking case of the man in Ireland who murdered his wife and young sons. The initial articles about the crime didn’t even name the victims, it’s was all about the murderer and how he was “a family man”. It sparked the “Her name is Clodagh” campaign.

www.thejournal.ie/clodagh-alan-haw-claire-byrne-live-her-name-is-clodagh-4511536-Feb2019/

Wayne Couzens back in 2011 was nicknamed "the rapist" by colleagues (when he was in the Civil Nuclear Constabulary)because he made female staff feel so uncomfortable.

He was reported for driving around naked below the waist in Dover when he was a police volunteer and Kent police did not investigate - this was 3 years before he joined the Met.

There were 2 reports to the Met of him "flashing." So many missed opportunities. How on earth did he manage to become a police officer? How can the public have any faith in a service that time and time again fails to protect women and girls?

www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/wayne-couzens-nickname-met-police-sarah-everard-b945119.html

For fuck sake.

All the signs were there, and everyone shrugged it off. His sex crimes never held him back in his career, his colleagues joked about it, and he went on to rape women and then murder at least one.

There is an article in the Daily Mail saying that he was called 'The Rapist' by colleagues and that there are several historical accusations of harassment from other women officers. I've summarised it because I know some people don't want to click on a Daily Mail link:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9775241/He-known-Rapist-Met-hired-Sarah-Everards-killer-Wayne-Couzens-despite-nickname.html

Harriet Wistrich has called for a wider inquiry into police failings and misogyny. After examples like the disgraceful behaviour of the the officers who shared images of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, she is right that it goes beyond the 'one bad apple' response.

How many red flags do there need to be,?

This has been an issue for decades.

Ian Huntley had been reported for sex offences including rape iirc by multiple women and girls.

I'm sure there are plenty more examples.

It's been known for yonks that sex offenders escalate. They don't all go on to murder but the men who rape assault etc women/ girls they cross paths with will likely have started out with 'minor' sex offences. Groping flashing. Following. All that stuff.

For years women esp feminists have been saying look these 'low level' crimes need to be properly recorded investigated. Taken seriously.

The Macdonald's exposure a few days before the murder should have rang alarm bells with the police. It was brazen. The action of a man who has already escalated, that there will be all the previous victims before he got to that point. Customers and staff. CCTV? Car parked outside. They got his plate. That shouts confident and wanting to go further, take more risks.

It was reported. Not looked into AFAIK. Because as an ex copper pointed out patronisingly on a news piece. The police aren't interested in that stuff. They have more important crimes to investigate.