Sarah Everard’s family have paid tribute to the 33-year-old marketing executive and called for more information from the public after human remains believed to be hers were found in woodland in Kent.
Wayne Couzens (48), a serving member of the Metropolitan Police, is in custody after he was arrested on suspicion of her kidnapping and murder.
“Sarah was bright and beautiful – a wonderful daughter and sister. She was kind and thoughtful, caring and dependable. She always put others first and had the most amazing sense of humour. She was strong and principled and a shining example to us all. We are very proud of her and she brought so much joy to our lives,” Ms Everard’s family said in a statement.
“We are so grateful to the police and would like to thank them for all they are doing. We are now pleading for additional help from the public.”
Ms Everard disappeared last week while she was walking home alone about 9pm from a friend’s house in the London district of Clapham. Mr Couzens, who works in an armed police division that protects MPs and diplomatic missions, was arrested at his home in Kent on Tuesday, along with a woman who was held on suspicion of assisting an offender.
Call for action
MPs at Westminster called on the government to take action to combat misogyny and violence against women and said women would not be reassured by a Metropolitan Police statement that abduction was rare. Opening an annual International Women’s Day debate in the House of Commons, Conservative Maria Miller said the fact was that women lived in fear every day.
“Although the raw facts may show that it is rare for a woman to be abducted, the experience of young women is that the fear of sexual harassment, or worse, is ever in their mind, whether on a night out at the pub or after threats to their physical safety on social media, while for the one in six women who will be stalked in their lifetime, the fear of attack is very real. So, rather than telling women not to worry, listen to our experience,” she said.
“We should not accept a culture of violence towards women, we should not be complicit in covering it up, and we need to give women effective mechanisms to report what happens in order to expose the scale of the problem, call it out publicly, and punish those who perpetrate this culture of fear.”
Labour’s Jess Phillips read the names of 118 women killed by men since last year’s debate, adding that all MPs had prayed that Ms Everard’s name would not be added to the list.
“In this place we count what we care about. We count the vaccines done, the number of people on benefits, we rule or oppose based on a count and we obsessively track that data. We love to count data of our own popularity. However, we don’t currently count dead women,” she said.
“No government study is done into the patterns every year of the data on victims of domestic abuse who are killed, die by suicide or die suddenly. Dead women is a thing we’ve all just accepted as part of our daily lives.”
