Sarah Everard's case stirs awful memories. So little has changed over the years | Catherine Mayer

Those who attack women and girls are not aberrations but a product of deeply ingrained systems and cultures in society

Years ago, on an early morning furred with frost, something caught my attention as I passed the local churchyard: a mannequin sprawled on a gravestone. It took a moment for me to realise what I was seeing, a body, naked from the waist down.

The police took a statement. This should have been the extent of my involvement. I couldn't identify the murder victim or add any other useful detail. Nevertheless, during the following week an officer dropped by my flat several times unannounced to update me on the case". On his last visit, he showed me a card he'd made for a colleague as a joke, a post-mortem headshot of the victim with helmet and moustache added, transforming the dead woman, he said, into the spitting image of his boss. As horror robbed me of speech, he asked me out on a date.