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'Text me when you get home' post perfectly describes what women face walking home alone

<p>Sarah Everard’s disappearance has sparked lots of  talk about women’s fear merely walking home</p>

Sarah Everard’s disappearance has sparked lots of talk about women’s fear merely walking home

PA

Women are sharing how prevalent the phrase “text me when you get home” is in their life in the wake of Sarah Everard’s disappearance.

The trend was shared by Lucy Mountain, a fitness trainer who took to Instagram share a photo of a WhatsApp message.

She was inspired by the disappearance of Sarah Everard, who was walking home from her friends’ house in Clapham in London before she went missing on 3 March.

Giving examples of precautions women frequently take, such as sharing their live location via GPS with friends and walking with keys between their fingers, Mountain wrote: “What’s so insidious is that these things don’t even feel like ‘special safety tools’.

“They’re literally just engrained behaviours and actions we’ve had to pick up since we were little girls. Because ’that’s just the way it is’.

“‘Text me when you get home xxx’ is a standard procedure amongst women. Auto-pilot.”

The post has received nearly a million likes, showing that it hit a nerve with people all over the internet.

Twitter was also brimming with women sharing what that phrase meant to them, showing its dominance in women going out after dark.

This follows on from the announcement from Dame Cressida Dick, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police stating a serving Metropolitan police offer has been arrested on suspicion of kidnap and murder on 10 March, and she was aware it was “every family’s worst nightmare” but it is “incredibly rare for a woman to be abducted from streets.”

However, this was little comfort to some women online as they felt terrorised by the fear, causing “Reclaim the Streets” to sweep Twitter, inspired by the 1977 movement “Reclaim The Night”.

More: The matriarchal societies around the world that embrace the power of womanhood

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