reclaim the night revisited

on November 22nd this year, The Guardian was publishing this:

Thirty years after the first Reclaim the Night march, the event is now being revived by a new generation of young women who are speaking out against violence.

In 1977, when the first Reclaim the Night march was held in Leeds, I was just 15 and remember watching it on the news with a growing sense of excitement and political conviction. The Yorkshire Ripper was still terrorising the north of England and the police had been advising that, to avoid attack, women should stay inside after dark. The march responded directly to this warning (placards read "No curfew on women - curfew on men") and hundreds of women shouted about their anger at being kept off the streets - the supposedly public highways, after all - by the threat of male violence. Marches occurred simultaneously in 12 English locations, from Manchester to Soho.

And the marches continued for more than a decade, becoming a fixture in towns and cities worldwide (in the US they termed them Take Back the Night) before the British version fizzled out in the 90s.

It wasn't until 2004 that a group of women decided to revive the event. That first year wasn't hugely promising, just 30 women turning up to march through the London streets. The following year, though, numbers swelled to almost 1,000 women. And this Saturday - the International Day to End Violence Against Women - well over 1,000 women are expected to troop through the capital, starting at Trafalgar Square and ending at the University of London Union on Malet Street. There will also be marches in Oxford, Cornwall, Cardiff and Leeds. Organisers say they have been inundated with inquiries from all over the country.

And despite regular pronouncements that feminist activism has long since curled up and died, that it has become a turn-off and an irrelevance to young women more interested in glamour modelling, the Reclaim the Night movement is being spearheaded and bolstered by younger women. The woman largely responsible for Reclaim the Night's revival, for instance, is 29-year-old Finn Mackay, a long-time political activist and founder of the London Feminist Network (LFN), a women-only networking and campaigning organisation. Why did she decide it was time to renew these street protests? "I think women have had enough misogyny and violence, and young women are aware of the early feminist battles and know they are far from won," she says. ...

*** some post-march info here and here

unfortunately, the situation now is both more similar to the past than one would think and more grim than that article suggests. it's happening again: in ipswich, suffolk, another "ripper" is killing women and the police are reacting in pretty much the same way as in '77, giving women a curfew but not being of much help otherwise, while the media is dehumanizing the victims and painting the killer with sympathetic colors. very few voices are protesting this appalling state of affairs, although it seems a reclaim the night is planned in ipswich for december 29th.

--> i blame the pariarchy gives an excellent analysis:
"Ipswich spree killer: obviously dominated by women"

--> and here's also something i wrote up in romanian
[yeah, the romanian press - namely the ziua newspaper - saw fit to put news about the murders in the "entertainment" section, use the headline "jack the ripper returns: after 118 years, british prostitutes are again in danger" and include a movie poster style photo, basically reducing the victims to "prostitute" status and glamorizing the whole thing! it makes me wanna vomit.]

but something that makes me feel better, at least, is this video i made for a presentation on take back the night, with images from a 2004 march and "standing in the way of control" by the gossip as soundtrack: