Nothing about us without us
Who run the world? It would be nice if it was girls.
Sarah Everard was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a serving Metropolitan police officer. In response, the Met have announced they will be putting more police officers in the streets to make women feel safer.
This seems problematic to me.
“What do we do to make women feel safer?” asked a friend, when I complained about the extra police officers.
I stopped and thought for a second.
What makes women feel unsafe in the first place?
To start with, 98% of rapes end up with no conviction. Rape has been effectively decriminalised in the UK, and as the Rape Review pointed out, we are seeing more serial rapists. One unprosecuted rape will lead to more rapes in over half the cases.
“How often are rape victims failed by the criminal justice system? The answer is deeply upsetting: nearly always. There are an estimated 128,000 victims of rape a year. Less than 20% of victims of rape report to the police. Even worse, only 1.6% of rapes that are reported result in someone being charged” (UK Rape Review, 2021).
The justice system has been dismantled to the extent that court cases take years to bring to trial.
Many activities that make women feel unsafe are not illegal; cat calling, sexual harassment, being stared at on public transport.
Strategies implemented by women see them restricted and constrained in ways that men aren’t. This isn’t something we talk about.
In The Right Amount of Panic, F. Vera-Gray not only reaffirms that violence against women is widely underreported but also that women’s safety measures cause them to avoid situations where they may be placed in danger.
Women trade freedom for safety over and over again (p.25).
Then, because their movements are more restricted, 61% of women killed by men were killed by a current or former partner.
What do the police say about sexual assaults, rapes and anti-social behaviour?
In the house, women are in danger from those they know; outside places of safety, they are in danger from the night time economy. But the night-time economy brings money to the council so politicians support it and lobby for it, while the police say it costs money and people’s safety. In those cases, the police get ignored.
What happens when the police are also the perpetrators thought? In the Bristol protests, they used ‘revenge policing’ and led people into motorways in the path of oncoming cars.
When acting against squatters, over four police forces joined to provide over 100 officers to evict a handful of people.
In the attempted eviction of squatters on the High Street in the centre of Bristol, over 20 police officers entered a student flat without a warrant. When residents pursued the matter, the police said they did not know who the officers were or where their bodycam footage was. Bristol247 finally managed to get a comment from Thames Valley police to say they would investigate the matter.
Police officers, during the protests, entered a young woman’s home under false pretences, handcuffed her half-dressed, ridiculed her as she had a panic attack, and then left when they realised she was not who they wanted to speak to.
Where are the consequences for the perpetrators?
There are seemingly very few or no consequences at all when men (in the police or not) kill, rape, assault, break into private property, use their power without accountability, scrutiny or transparency.
Why not?
The answer to that lies in who is in charge.
As we saw with the self-proclaimed ‘city leaders’ and their letter orchestrated by Bristol City Council, including then Police Crime Commissioner Sue Mountstevens, the police’s actions are not only used to further policy objectives — policing private property and protecting revenue streams for the council — but are also protected by the policy makers and those who fund the latter.
In Bristol, the mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, has spoken of his support for the nil cap on Sexual Entertainment Venues, while supporting the night time economy, and the new night-time economy czar, Carly Heath, refused to speak in support of them after she was appointed.
Is this a move to protect women? Rees says it is but the police data shows that regulated SEVs, with security for the workers, results in a tiny number of assaults at those premises. Out of 44,000 incidents, two were reported at SEVs.
At the Bristol247 mayoral hustings, when asked what the first act he’d like to see at the new arena is, the mayor answered, ‘Beyonce.’
The mayor named a woman who quite specifically commercialised her sexuality in order to become a billionaire, while in the same hustings he said that sexual entertainment venues promoted misogyny.
Beyoncé does it visibly and publicly because that’s one of the only ways women in the patriarchy don’t get killed or raped for it. That’s certainly not 100% effective though.
Women trade freedom for safety but get killed by people known to them.
Women perform and sell what the patriarchy labels them as, sexual objects, and these places get shut down; perpetrators face very little justice but the system blames the women.
So what do we do?
We listen to the women. We see who controls their behaviour. We identify those who police and constrain that behaviour.
When you work back from all those actions to the people in charge, it is seemingly always the politicians who are to be held accountable.
The power comes from the top down, not the other way around:
“There is unbelievable power in ownership, and women should own their sexuality. There is a double standard when it comes to sexuality that still persists. Men are free and women are not. That is crazy. The old lessons of submissiveness and fragility made us victims. Women are so much more than that. You can be a businesswoman, a mother, an artist, and a feminist—whatever you want to be—and still be a sexual being. It’s not mutually exclusive.”
The two women institutionally responsible for the murder of Sarah Everard are Priti Patel, Home Secretary, and Cressida Dick, Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis. Neither has resigned. No politician in Bristol has apologised or resigned for supporting the police’s actions either.
The Right Amount of Panic is free from Policy Press with code WR21 until October 31 2021 (epub version), which is how I read it.