The Met has sustained blow after blow this week as details of Wayne Couzen’s trial continue to emerge, culminating in this morning’s news that another officer in the parliamentary and diplomatic protection service has been charged with rape. That the Met (and the society it protects) has a woman problem is no longer in question - what exactly should be done about it is.
The shift in thinking since Sarah Everard’s murder is obvious from the response to North Yorkshire Policing and Crime Commissioner Philip Allot’s recent comments. Women should be more “streetwise” about the law, he said - Sarah should never have “submitted” to her arrest. The insensitivity of this phrasing sparked a wave of understandable fury, leading politicians from across the political spectrum to condemn the hapless Allot. Perhaps naively, I doubt that he intended to blame Sarah Everard for her murder, or to absolve Couzens of a shred of guilt for his crime. In fact, I don’t think that women knowing our rights when approached by lone plainclothes police officers is bad advice. Interestingly, the guidance released by the Met on this score is far more diplomatically phrased, yet currently meeting with a similarly furious response. The suggestion that you should try to “wave down a bus” if you feel you’re in danger has already led to a cornucopia of TikTok parody videos. Nicola Sturgeon’s response crystallises the public feeling of the moment: “It’s not up to women to fix this. It’s not us who need to change,” she tweeted. “The problem is male violence, not women’s ‘failure’ to find ever more inventive ways to protect ourselves against it.”
The idea that male violence is a male problem is not new - it dates at least as far back as the 1970s, when women staged a series of Reclaim The Night protests to express frustration at police failures in the Yorkshire Ripper case. The perennial nature of the idea is rooted in its obvious appeal - too often, women are treated as morally responsible for the crimes of our attackers. By shifting the responsibility for male violence away from women, we liberate ourselves simultaneously from this unjust moral blame and from what rapper Dessa calls “a life of running fire-drills.” Unfortunately, it’s much easier tweeted about than done.
Chief among the difficulties is that it's vague. To my knowledge, no one has ever developed a coherent strategy around putting this idea into practice. What does it actually mean, to teach boys not to rape rather than girls to avoid being raped? How do we go about this in a way that avoids the totalitarian implications of policing attitudes and thoughts? How do we avoid breeding resentment or shame in the boys who would never have committed that sort of crime anyway? I’m willing to be convinced that it’s possible, but so far no one seems to be giving these practical concerns any thought.
Even if a world where men police themselves and each other so effectively that women no longer need to avoid risk is possible, we don’t live in that world now. So I want local councils to fund outdoor lighting. I don’t object to the police giving out free rape alarms or encouraging me to know my rights. By throwing all this out with the victim-blaming bathwater, we put the police (and, more importantly, women) in an impossible position. Risk reduction, however inadequate or flawed it may be, is all we have.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t pursue a world in which men don’t rape. My innate pessimism leads me to doubt whether such a world is attainable, but a world in which men rape less undoubtedly is. My little brother recently told me that he and his friends no longer speak to one of their mates, since it transpired that he’d assaulted a female friend of theirs. I actually locked myself in his bathroom and had a little cry. It matters, when men stand up for us to other men. I suspect that it has more of an effect than any poster campaign or consent workshop ever could. But the idea that “it’s not up to women to fix this” strikes me as a reductive one (and students of history might agree.) It doesn’t help me when I’m walking home at 3AM, jumping at shadows. And it won’t do my little nieces (hurtling towards puberty and alcohol and parties and cruel teenage boyfriends) any perceptible good.
Is it possible to reject the normalisation of sexual violence – reject the burden of it, the moral responsibility for it, in a world where walking home through well-lit streets at 9 PM and trusting policemen (like mum said you should) can get you killed - while still taking practical steps to protect yourself? For my nieces’ sake, I have to believe that it is.