According to the report, at least 1,200 women and girls had been murdered or had just vanished in Canada since 1980 — and the real figure is estimated to be closer to 4,000. Little, though, has been done about it. Three years later, Justin Trudeau finally vowed to act. “We will fail you no longer,” he said to the families of those who have been disappearing at a rate of about 130 a year for the past three decades. And then he continued to fail.

Born in British Columbia, Cherry Smiley grew up among the Nlaka’pamux (Thompson) and Diné (Navajo) nations. A grassroots feminist, she is determined to give a voice to these patronised, victimised women. “There’s this expectation,” she says, “that when you’re talking about murdered and disappeared Indigenous women, you are supposed to cry and turn up with your eagle feather and show these visible signs of pain and trauma. That’s what the government wants to see. And if that is not how you are expressing yourself it’s very easy to ignore you.”

In February, Smiley published Not Sacred, Not Squaws: Indigenous Feminism Redefined, in which she lays bare the roles of culture and tradition in the oppression of Indigenous women and sets out her vision of a feminist future. Throughout the book, she charts what she describes as the “colonisation” of women’s bodies through systems of prostitution. She questions old dogmas – such as that Indigenous men are never abusive to Indigenous women.

The title is deliberately provocative, taking aim at both non-Indigenous people who have internalised racist terminology and stereotypes about Indigenous women, and at those traditional Indigenous men and women who claim “their” women are “sacred”. The idea of “Squaw-ness” — that these women are hyper-sexual, deviant, and dirty — was historically imposed on them. It has resulted, she says, in the normalisation and justification of male violence. Today, the struggle for a reckoning is hard and few are brought to justice.

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Justin Trudeau's phoney dictatorship

By MALCOM KYEYUNE

In 2002, Robert Pickton, a farmer from outside Vancouver, was finally arrested. He had fed a number of his victims — all prostituted, many Indigenous — to his pigs. Police had ignored calls from Indigenous activists and family members to investigate for many years, marking files on the victims with NHI (no human involved). Since he was arrested, the police have claimed the investigations of missing and murdered women is a “strategic priority”. But a reckoning isn’t coming. It took five years for Pickton to be convicted, and women are still being picked up from roadsides and raped, killed, dumped in rivers and landfill, or burned.

The inquiry wouldn’t have been launched were it not for women like Smiley seeking justice for other women. But before long, it was expanded to include all the categories of what Trudeau has referred to as “2SLGBTQQIA+ people” (Two Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual). No longer just about female victims, a small number of missing and murdered men have been included too.

“Trudeau is playing to an audience of so-called progressives, which has resulted in the national inquiry becoming about all murdered and disappeared Indigenous peoples, rather than exclusively about women,” says Smiley. “This inquiry that we fought so hard for was supposed to focus on women. Why can’t men have their own inquiry, and leave us to have ours?”

Smiley’s book burns angrily through this issue, setting out her vision for the liberation of all women, and challenging the idea that “white feminism” has no relevance to Indigenous women. In particular, she explores the way in which many Indigenous men have betrayed women by embracing patriarchal norms. “I used to say that patriarchy was imposed upon Indigenous men,” she says. “And now I say that Indigenous men adopted it because it benefited them.” Before Indigenous peoples were colonised, she explains, there was still male violence. “But it was different, and from what I understand from the oral traditions, gender roles were a lot more fluid… because you need to survive when living in very harsh conditions.” But that all changed with the arrival of the colonists.

Her book is based on her PhD thesis at Montreal’s Concordia University, where she quickly became disillusioned with the censorious and anti-feminist climate in academia. Despite being labelled both a Swerf (sex-worker-exclusionary radical feminist) and a Terf, she is defiantly unapologetic: “I hate academia, and the consensus is that the feeling is mutual,” she laughs, calling the university a “manstitution”.

She is deeply critical of what passes for feminism within academic Indigenous circles. The trouble, she suggests, is that some Indigenous women are strongly opposed to revealing the truth; many claim that Indigenous men are not violent towards Indigenous women, that white men are the only perpetrators of such crimes. “When we understand that Indigenous women are not simply conduits for the violence of colonisation, we can more accurately name the violence perpetrated against Indigenous women as femicide, as opposed to genocide” — that the victims are marginalised by their sex as well as their cultural heritage.

“In Canada, such women argue that ‘decolonisation’ can be achieved via a return to Indigenous cultural traditions.” Smiley is particularly angered by the defence of harmful practices towards women in the name of “tradition”, such as banishing women and girls to a purpose-built hut during menstruation. For her, it is irrelevant whether or not this happened “back in the day”, because “it is wrong, so why should we accept it now?”

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Buck Angel: 'We never denied our biology'

By Julie Bindel

While cultural relativists are justifying aspects of Indigenous culture that feminists are resisting — such as male violence and social control — some who might call themselves progressives are busy attributing fake meanings to ancient Indigenous terms. They have, for example, rewritten terms such as “Two Spirit” to mean “a third gender”. In fact, says Smiley, the term was created by lesbians and gay men in the Nineties to describe an Indigenous person who is same-sex attracted.

Smiley facing criticism from her own community for refusing to keep quiet about the male violence within it. She has also been slammed by so-called “progressive academics” for speaking out against queer theory and cultural relativism. Smiley has been left an outsider, which has been hard for her to bear.

But her feminism and the fight against male violence drives her forward, despite the slings and arrows that come her way. “Indigenous feminism is not about preserving men’s right to their ‘culture’ when it harms women, or to protect them from criticism. It is about liberating women.” Smiley is determined that her movement, the quest for women’s liberation, will not be destroyed by modern-day misogynists. “A systemic mass violation of Indigenous women has been inflicted on us since colonisation began, so we will not let it happen to us in the name of progress.”

What’s even more appalling is that Couzens had apparently committed indecent exposure twice: once in 2015 and once three days before Everard’s murder.

Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, said in an unfortunate phrase a few months ago that there is the occasional “bad ‘un” in the service. She did go on to say that they are “intolerant” of violence and that they “​​work to identify and tackle and prevent any such behaviours”. But the impression was given that the occasional bad ‘un is an inevitable part of the institution.

It appears to be rather more than one, for the record. Apparently, 27 serving Metropolitan Police officers have been convicted of sex crimes since 2016. At least one is still on the force as an unpaid special constable, having joined the Met after his conviction for indecent exposure. (A simple criminal conviction does not automatically bar you from joining the police.) Another Met officer, who worked in the same unit as Couzens, is facing rape charges this week.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Metropolitan Police has been accused of institutional misogyny — and of needing drastic reform. In the wake of an awful story, there is an understandable, human need to want to make sure it never happens again. Specifically, we feel the police should, of all professions, be the one without a single “bad ‘un”.

But it’s also worth remembering that, in the coming years or decades, no matter how well we vet police officers, you’ll read some horrible story like this again. Hopefully we can reduce the likelihood; perhaps even reduce it a lot. But the numbers involved are just too large for it to be realistic that we can bring it to zero. So we need to have some idea – with this, and with every movement campaigning for some social good, from public health to racial justice – of what success looks like. And if we want to aim for zero, then we have to be honest about what the costs of that aim are.

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Why don't women feel safe?

By Tom Chivers

Here’s why I think it will be difficult to reach zero: the numbers. About 120,000 sexual offences were recorded in England and Wales in 2017, of which 40,000 were rapes. That’s a huge undercount of the actual figure committed (the Crime Survey of England and Wales estimates the true figure at four million), but let’s use it.

Presumably some of those 120,000 were committed by the same people — there probably weren’t 120,000 recorded perpetrators — but even if we half that number, we still end up at about 0.1% of the entire population of England and Wales recorded as committing a sex crime each year.

Let’s take that 0.1%, and pretend that the whole population is equally likely to commit sex crimes. There are about 160,000 police officers in the UK. That means that if police officers commit sex crimes at the same rate as the rest of the population, you would expect about 160 sex offences committed by police officers every year.

I sincerely hope that police officers don’t commit sex crimes at the same rate as the rest of the population. But even if they only do it 1% as often, you would still expect one or two every year; easily enough to fill newspapers with appalling stories. At those rates, you’d expect even rarer crimes such as rape and murder once every few years.

So let’s return to the question: what does success look like?

This is a difficult conversation for any reforming movement.Because there are costs that come with demanding too perfect a victory.

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The police have a woman problem

By Sarah Ditum

Take a topical example: Zero Covid. You can say what you like about the movement’s aims, but at least it was explicit about them: it called for the “elimination of the virus from the UK”. If there’s still a single case of Covid in your country, you have not achieved Zero Covid, and you keep trying until you have.

New Zealand was always the Zero Covid paragon, along with Australia and Hong Kong and a few other places. As recently as August, a single Auckland case that couldn’t be traced to a point of origin led to a several-week lockdown. But this week, the Wellington government formally abandoned its policy of eliminating Covid, and moved to a plan to live with the virus (albeit, no doubt, at a much lower level of the virus than we have to live with). The costs of maintaining Zero Covid in the face of the Delta variant — and the reduced threat of the virus itself, given the vaccines — led them to decide that going for absolute zero wasn’t the best policy anymore.

In the UK, we have decided that a certain mortality rate is acceptable. Professor Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, said recently that “living with the virus” will probably mean about 100 deaths a day, or more than 30,000 a year. It’s a grim thought, but we have to be clear-eyed and say that the elimination of risk is probably impossible, so we have to tolerate some level of it.

But when it comes to violence against women and girls, what is an acceptable number of murders every year? It’s an appalling question, but it’s one we have to ask, just as we had to with Covid. And it’s worth stopping at this point and asking whether you know how many women are murdered each year right now. Give a figure, in numbers per 100,000 per year. And then say how many you think is acceptable, again in numbers per 100,000 per year: 10 per 100,000, one in 100,000, 0.1 per 100,000?

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Why women fear the police

By Julie Bindel

Here’s the real figure: according to the ONS, there has been an average of about 200 women and girls murdered each year in England and Wales for the last 10 years. Out of a population of about 31 million, that is a little under 0.7 women per 100,000 per year.

To be clear: I’m not saying that’s acceptable. But if you’d just said that you thought about one woman in every 100,000 was killed every year, and you wouldn’t rest until the murder rate was below one in 100,000, then we’re already below that.

If you said one in a million, then we’ve still got some way to go. But soon you’re going to start hitting up against some really hard limits. According to the World Bank, only two countries in the world recorded 0.1 murders per 100,000 female population (that is, one in a million) in their most recent data, and those two countries were Oman and the Palestinian territories, which makes me think that the data might not be entirely reliable.

Other countries manage 0.3 per 100,000: Singapore, Japan, Macao, Norway, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. But most of the countries we tend to think of as our peers — France, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Canada — have roughly similar numbers. Getting the numbers much below that seems to be very difficult.

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Women rebels without a cause

By Mary Harrington

You could argue that it does no harm to aim for zero, even if you know you won’t get there. But it’s not as simple as that. Reducing some societal harm costs money and time, and at some point, you’re going to hit diminishing returns. You’ll have to spend ever more resources for smaller and smaller improvements.

Maybe you’d say that you can’t put a price on a human life, and that’s understandable. But the reality in which we all live puts a price on human lives for you, via opportunity costs. If you spend the money on street lighting, you can’t spend it on dialysis machines, or early years education, or renewable energy subsidies. At some stage, because of diminishing returns, you’ll reach a point where spending more money on reducing murder rates means that more people die (or more people are harmed) elsewhere.

Whatever social problem you’re talking about fixing — obesity, police brutality, inactivity, racist abuse — we need to be explicit about whether we’re aiming for zero, and facing up to all the costs that will come with, or admit that you’re really aiming for some more achievable (but more painful to accept) figure.

When it comes to police reforms, there are all sorts of trade-offs to consider. One obvious reform, for instance, might be to impose stricter rules on recruitment — such as that no one with any criminal record at all can be a police officer. But I imagine that would hinder the efforts to increase the number of non-white police recruits, since young men of colour are the most likely to have criminal records. How much it would hinder them I don’t know, and perhaps the trade-off would be worth it, but you need to start by acknowledging the trade-off.

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Who would kill children to save the planet?

By Tom Chivers

I’m really, really not saying there’s nothing that can be done. Couzens turned up to a police work party with a sex worker, and his colleagues “jokingly” called him “the Rapist”. There is something wrong with a culture that allows that, and there are clear failures on the part of the police in investigating his earlier offences.

Most importantly, we need better data on how many police officers do commit crimes, so that we can get a sense of whether they’re more or less than we would expect. Profoundly affecting though they are, policymakers can’t make these decisions on the back of high-profile anecdotes and shocking individual stories.

Any group made up of thousands of people, such as the police force, will include some number of dreadful individuals, however hard you try to keep them out. And every so often, a dreadful person will do something dreadful.