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If you were a woman who had known unwanted interference by men, and who had friends who had been raped, and there was an opportunity to stand with others in solidarity with other women at a vigil called because of the murder of a woman in your vicinity, what would you do?

If you were a policeman charged with keeping the law and protecting the public particularly as regards the virulence of the pandemic, and you were asked to oversee an illegal meeting in which people were at risk of spreading the virus but refused to be moved, what would you do?

Few people who saw pictures of women being manhandled by police officers on Saturday night in Clapham Common can have been unaffected. Most people will have reacted viscerally with revulsion.

On the one hand we have women who felt it was right to attend a vigil, and on the other police who believed it was right to uphold the law. Two wrongs may not make a right, but here two rights clearly made a wrong.

It is understandable that in the heat of the moment some might demand a change in leadership of the Met and many more demand tighter law prohibiting the molestation of women. I would love if there were some story in the Bible which pointed to a solution. But there is no such story – I've scanned the pages.

What there is, however, is evidence that Jesus occasionally broke laws which prohibited the exercising of compassion, and the insight of St. Paul, that all the laws in the world cannot legislate for goodness. I want to say that again: all the laws in the world cannot legislate for goodness.

We're dealing here in Britain with what is a universal malady, namely the fact that men (and I know it's not all men) have a propensity to use violence against women. Moreover, when they do so, women are somehow to be forbearing and even take the blame.

Recently we've come to realise that legislation alone will not halt climate change; it requires us to consciously analyse our behaviour, question our presumptions and recognise that the progress we want to see won't just come about through legislation, but also from the deliberate changes we make to the way we live.

Nothing less, nothing less is required of men in relation to how we treat women.

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