On 15 February, London mayor Sadiq Khan unveiled six new London Overground names inspired by the city’s history and culture. With the aim of making the system easier to navigate for commuters, Khan announced that six branches would now be called Lioness, Mildmay, Windrush, Weaver, Suffragette and Liberty.

Notably, two parts of the rebrand pay tribute to the achievements of women: passengers travelling from Gospel Oak to Barking Riverside will now use the green Suffragette line to honour the women who fought for female liberation in the early 20th century and the Overground’s Watford Junction to Euston branch, which runs through Wembley, will now be named the Lioness line after the footballing legacy created by England’s women’s team.

An important nod to our contribution to British culture and history? Perhaps. But for many the gesture has felt meaningless, particularly in the face of the national emergency that is violence against women and girls. 

The statistics are sobering: a woman is killed by a man every three days in the UK. Domestic abuse makes up 18% of all recorded crime in England and Wales. In the year ending March 2022, there were 194,683 sexual offences, of which 70,330 were rape. Reports show that the country has also seen a chilling rise in acid attacks, with the highest number on record seeing more than 700 in one year alone, just weeks after a south London chemical attack unfolding left a woman and her two children injured and days following an incident where a woman was left “burning” and blistered when a mystery substance was thrown over her at a pub in Basingstoke, Hampshire.

While there have been some positive developments – the first person convicted of cyberflashing under the Online Safety Act will be sentenced next month – the reality is that those in power are failing to act and women are dying because of it. 

Following the deaths of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman in 2020 and Sarah Everard in 2021, and despite an official police assessment suggesting that it should treat violence against women and girls as seriously as terrorism, we’re still not safe on our streets. And not enough is being done about it.

At the end of 2023, a coalition of over 70 leading organisations working to end violence against women and girls signed a joint manifesto calling on all political parties to tackle VAWG at the next general election. The manifesto notes that women’s and girls’ right to live free from violence should be a “key election issue”, yet all too often, the subject is “co-opted or weaponised” by political parties to justify regressive policies or barely mentioned at all.

A real commitment to protecting women and girls is what we really need, not a new Overground map supposed to make us feel seen and valued.

After all, as many online have pointed out, naming the line “suffragette” rather than after a specific historical figure, say Emmeline Pankhurst, feels tokenistic. As for the Lionesses, their legacy and impact is indisputable. But did they not still have to sign an open letter urging the government to U-turn after the Department for Education refused to give girls equal access to football in PE lessons?

When one in three UK women have experienced online abuse or harassment, 15-year-old girls are being stabbed on their way into school and a fifth of men aged 16-29 look ‘favourably’ on social media influencer Andrew Tate, a man who has talked about hitting and choking women and said he is “absolutely a misogynist”, it’s clear that violence against women is a national emergency we’re watching unfold in realtime.

And hopping on the Suffragette line rather than the Overground will do absolutely nothing to change that. 

Images: Getty