Jaya GAJPARIA, London South Bank University, United Kingdom
The park is situated in the London Borough of Brent, celebrated for being the most multi-culturally diverse borough in the UK. On the 6th June 2020, Nicole and Bibaa are in the Fryent Country Park where they are murdered.
During the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, I visit this park most morning run. I find moments of silence during a time of exceptional incomprehension and grief during the global pandemic. I run through the woods and commune with the trees. My eyes feast on the splendour of the woodlands in the stillness. But this one morning, I look up and notice a young man in his 20s taking photographs of me. There is no one else around. I ask him to stop, I tell him it is inappropriate and demand that he deletes the photos. I am uncertain he does.
This case study example questions the degree to which law enforcement authorities are institutionally misogynistic laced with a violent culture that abuses and discards women and girls recklessly. The paper aims to unpick the layers of violence that permeate women’s lives.
Against this backdrop, this paper aims to make an important distinction between social and spatial gendered violence, the impact of race and ethnicity on violent geographies, and the intersectional experiences of violence, perceptions of safety and actual risks. This paper draws on feminist literature which locates such experiences within a violence-against-women framework (Vera-Gray, 2017) and human geography which refers to the human relationship to our physical environment to challenge the dichotomous tension between perceived and actual safety and danger within the public and private spheres but also through the interspaces of women’s lives.
Mots clés :
A104519JG