On Saturday two of my friends and I cycled from Peckham to Clapham, along streets we know very well, along streets Sarah Everard knew very well.

We went to a vigil to remember her, and to take a stand against the endemic violence that faces women in our homes and on the streets. When we arrived, just as the sun was setting, we could see people streaming towards the bandstand from all directions.

As a distanced crowd of thousands of women assembled—united in grief and anger—it became clear this was a really important moment. Together we shouted, chanted, and clapped, feeling that special power that comes from being in a collective space. What happened next has been well documented. Even so, when I woke up on Sunday I struggled to believe it.

As night fell, the police attacked a peaceful vigil of grieving women. They started by grabbing the women who had been speaking to the crowd and continued to make a series of violent arrests, until what had been a moment of collective power turned into a moment of despair.

Having spent many years organising in social movements, I am under no illusions about how the police can behave when confronted with a crowd of people who are demanding justice or systemic change – but even I was shocked. There is a decades-long pattern of deeply entrenched racist, sexist, and violent behaviour within the police, and rarely has it been so blatant that this is a prejudiced institution designed to maintain ‘order’ rather than ensure our safety.

It is clear there must be consequences for the police’s atrocious handling of Saturday’s vigil. Many are calling for Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick’s resignation, but we know that these issues go far beyond one individual – and that even if she were to go, Priti Patel’s replacement would be unlikely to be any better.

We cannot tinker round the edges of a system which is rotten to the core. This weekend’s events must serve as a wake up call about the wider challenges ahead of us if we want to confront both patriarchal violence and creeping authoritarianism.

The reality is that existing as a woman in this society means being subjected to violence. Every week, three women are killed and four more who are experiencing abuse take their own lives. We lose a sister a day in a system that fails to protect us. But alongside those most serious of cases, there’s also a constant presence of harassment. Polling showing that 97 percent of women aged 18-24 have experienced harassment comes as no surprise to any of us. Now, the catalyst of Sarah Everard’s death opens up a historic opportunity to end this war on women.

But this isn’t only a question of changing the individual behaviour of individual men – the roots go much deeper. Working-class women in particular are made vulnerable to violence as a result of being forced to stay in dangerous families and relationships through economic pressure.

The steps we need to take to deal with this increased vulnerability are obvious: increase funding for domestic violence refuges to above 2010 levels, build more social housing to support women escaping abuse, expand mental health provision to offer women long term support after harassment, abuse and assault – the list goes on and on.

The Sisters Uncut feministo offers a minimum programme for the feminist movement, a movement that includes all women, cis and trans, black and white, gay and straight, UK passport holders and migrants.

As well as dealing with the way in which class and gender reinforce women’s oppression, we also need to address the way the state handles violence against women. Our justice system has failed over and over again – from the effective decriminalisation of rape to the state-sanctioned abuse of women by undercover spy cops who infiltrated justice movements, and a police force so fundamentally unbothered by femicide that officers pose for joke photos with the bodies of victims.

Such an awful state of affairs demands a paradigm shift in how we organise society to improve our collective safety; one based on revolutionary change, not more bobbies on the beat.

But we don’t just have to fight for these demands. As Saturday night proved, we have to defend our right to speak up and fight back at all. Priti Patel is currently spearheading an authoritarian assault on the right to protest, the most recent egregious example of which is the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill which is meant to continue its rushed journey through parliament later today.

This bill means that any protest which puts a subsection of the population at risk of ‘serious annoyance’ would be defined as criminal and punishable by up to ten years in prison. In essence, this will allow the police and government to selectively decide which protests they want to declare illegal and then repress them using the threat of a decade behind bars.

On Saturday night, the police came for our sisters. They threw them to the ground, roughed them up, and took them away. But this system has been doing the same thing to women for a long time. Working-class women, immigrant women, queer women, trans women – together they have been on the frontlines resisting gendered and state violence for longer than I have been alive.

I hope that this weekend galvanises many more to get involved in this struggle, and in a movement which can transform the society which makes such a struggle necessary.