No, the Sarah Everard drama doesn’t need to be written by a woman

Sarah Everard’s kidnap and murder is the crime that haunts a generation. Everyone remembers the days of searching, the rising, ambient terror, the devastating truth that was more barbaric than anyone’s worst fears. To every woman it was a reminder: you are not safe, and you cannot trust the powers in place to protect you.

We were supposed to be independent, supposed to be free to walk the streets, whether or not it was dark, or we were drunk, or carried a rape alarm. We will never be so foolish again. It isn’t glib to say it really could have been any one of us, and we all saw ourselves in her. I couldn’t not: we shared a name, went to the same university, lived in the same neighbourhood. The road she was on when she was kidnapped is one I walked at night, alone, all the time.

Sarah Everard’s memory still lingers, five years later, and emotions around it have been stirred up again since the BBC announced it is working on a new drama about the case. More than 400 female screenwriters have signed a letter of complaint seen by Sky News because a man – Jeff Pope – has been commissioned to write it. This, they say, is an opportunity squandered for a story about violence against women and girls to be told by someone who understands.

“We are not saying men cannot write about women’s experiences. But we are saying that in a case this specific, this raw, and this rooted in the dynamics of power and gender, the question of who tells the story is inseparable from the story itself. To commission a male writer is not a neutral creative decision.

“The particular awareness that comes from moving through the world as a woman – the calculations made, the fears managed, the incidents absorbed and rarely reported – cannot be fully accessed by someone who has never had to live it, however gifted, however diligent their research.”

Usually, my inclination would be to agree. In an industry so dominated by men, the decision not to promote a woman’s voice here appears a spectacular own goal for the BBC. Except the man in question is probably the most prestigious and best adapter of true-life drama working in Britain. His involvement – which has the support of Everard’s family – is a mark of responsibility and quality. It confirms that they couldn’t be treating this story more seriously.

You may not know Jeff Pope – how many TV screenwriters can you name? Perhaps Russell T Davies, Sally Wainwright or Jack Thorne – but you will have seen his programmes. His specialism is in highly emotive drama based on real, memorable events – usually crimes, or miscarriages of justice: Little Boy Blue, about the murder of Liverpool schoolboy Rhys Thomas, The Reckoning, about the monstrosities of Jimmy Savile.

Only last month ITV broadcast Believe Me, not about John Worboys, the “black cab rapist”, but about his victims’ struggle, over and over again, to be taken seriously by misogynistic, dismissive police, who preferred to question their alcohol intake, promiscuity, drug use, emotion, or lack of emotion, than believe them when they said they had been spiked and assaulted.

It made resoundingly clear what stopped – and continues to stop – women from reporting sexual assault and I felt, watching, that it was evident how much care had been taken to faithfully depict woman’s experiences that men cannot understand. From the physical – a visceral rectal examination, after a rape – to the ingrained: the pressure to be polite and keep peace that leads women who “should’ve known better” to go along with things, trying to avoid conflict but only leading them into more danger.

As a writer, Pope does not take ownership of a narrative that is not his, but uses witness statements, victim testimony, news reports, interviews, and other extensive voices and meticulous research to construct one that is responsible and makes the right people and messages most prominent. This forces audiences, who tune in for entertainment, to be informed, incensed, and change their perspectives.

That is what justifies true-life drama – and what makes it different from gory, exploitative true crime. Personally, I have no interest in unnecessary, sensationalist retellings of rapes and murders (look at the Jeffrey Dahmer or Ed Gein series on Netflix), or of tedious rehashes of recent news stories (Huw Edwards, or the Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor interview), or of appealing to trolls, voyeurs and conspiracy theorists (Channel 5’s recent Kate McCann drama). But I do think that there can be a higher purpose to dramatising real events if they allow a great number of people to think and to feel.

Is the Sarah Everard case one of those? We are all too aware of what happened, and outraged, so it doesn’t need the same platforming in the name of public interest as, say, the Post Office scandal (triumphantly dramatised for ITV by Gwyneth Hughes), or the insidious dangers of the manosphere (Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham’s Adolescence). But the BBC has stated that the drama, which is produced alongside Kirsty Cunningham, who made the BBC’s 2024 documentary Sarah Everard: The Search for Justice, will focus on the failures of the Metropolitan Police, rather than Sarah herself.

That is crucial – especially when considering who deserves to write it. Because there is little for us to gain from a replay of a murder case we followed hour by hour at the time. But confronting primetime drama fans with a working culture in which Wayne Couzens, Everard’s killer, was able to continue working in the police after previous offences and even had the nickname “the rapist”, could have an enormous impact. It isn’t always enough to be told about institutionalised misogyny and what it can lead to. Showing people, through characters and emotions, brings it home much more deeply.

Of course a woman could do that job. There are plenty of brilliant female screenwriters, like Nicole Taylor who wrote the Bafta-winning Rochdale grooming gangs drama Three Girls, who are more than qualified, and the gender imbalance in screenwriting is an industry-wide problem that broadcasters must commit to redressing at all levels. But to complain that Pope is wrong simply because he is a man is to ignore his achievements in diligent storytelling and to miss the point of this drama completely.

Because it’s not for the women who see themselves in Sarah Everard, it’s for everyone else. The most important thing about this programme is not the accuracy of how it reflects the fears of women, but how forcefully it condemns the actions of men.

Pope recently said, when discussing Believe Me, “Just because you’re a man and it’s not happening to you it doesn’t mean you can forget about it … you’ve got to lance the boil. It’s astonishing how little understanding men have of women’s lives.” Isn’t he right to commit his work to making them understand?

If Pope’s involvement means a gripping, unmissable story that more people watch, and involves a man scrutinising misogynistic culture, its message may have a greater chance of getting through. Women already know how scared we are. We don’t need that rendered on screen – we say it all the time. We just need men to listen.