Harriet Wistrich Interview .Sister in Law.
Sister in Law: Fighting for Justice in a System Designed by Men
Just recently it was Kulsama Akter who was the victim, stabbed to death in front of her five-month-old son on a shopping trip in Bradford. West Yorkshire Police has since referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) as it had prior contact with Akter before she died.
Each week in the UK two women are killed – though that number rose during the pandemic. This week was no different. On Monday, police forced their way into a £3 million Grade II-listed house near Hyde Park where they found Kamonnan Thiamphanit, 27, known to her friends as Angela, stabbed to death.
On Thursday, in the latest horrifying case, the Old Bailey heard how Sarah Mayhew, a 38 year-old from Croydon, was killed before her body was sliced up using power tools and dumped in a park. Some of her remains are still missing.
Meanwhile rape convictions are at such an all-time low that it feels as though the offence is all but decriminalised. With the shadow of Sarah Everard offering a constant reminder that the police itself is home to monsters like her murderer Wayne Couzens, as well as serial rapist David Carrick, what hope is there that anything will change?
I found hope, unexpectedly, in reading Sister in Law, by the eminent lawyer Harriet Wistrich, 63. For while it is a history of her three-decade career, peppered as it has been by some of Britain’s most significant cases of violence against women, it is also a reminder of how she battled, often successfully, for significant change, challenging the police, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), government departments and even the prison system to think again about the brutality women endure.
On the way, Wistrich confirms, she’s come across “some absolutely gut-wrenchingly terrible police” while the CPS, she says, is “in many ways the worst institution – immune from accountability”.
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