Reclaim These Streets: Statement Of Purpose & Call For Policy Action work in progress document.
#ReclaimTheseStreets was founded in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder, to back action to make our streets, our homes, our workplaces, and our country a safer place for all women.
Ms Everard’s killing again highlighted the scale of violence and harassment against women, which exist both in the UK and globally. A recent study by United Nations Women UK, revealed 97% of women aged 18 – 24 have experienced sexual harassment, and 80% of women overall.
Increased policing and, infuriatingly, self-imposed restrictions on women’s freedoms are often presented as the only viable solutions to ending violence and harassment. This is not the case. Moreover, such solutions fail to tackle the material and social roots of the problem.
We support lawmakers who recognise more far-reaching action is necessary.
We support Zarah Sultana MP’s letter last week to the Prime Minister (co-signed by more than fifty other MPs and Lords). Because of this, we are standing with her and other MPs, to call on the Government to:
Ratify the Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence.
Ratify the International Labour Organisation’s Convention No. 190, recognising the right of everyone to a world of work free from gender-based violence and harassment.
Reimagine sex and relationship education in schools, colleges, and universities to incorporate concrete guidance on healthy relationships, consent and sexuality.
Introduce mandatory training in schools and workplaces, such as bystander-intervention training.
Strengthen financial support for women and girls to address poverty and economic insecurity, including tackling the gender pay gap, increasing the national minimum wage to the real living wage.
Introduce reporting tools in schools and workplaces to map where incidents of sexual harassment and violence are occurring.
Reverse the last decade’s cuts to women’s services, including women’s refuges and specialist services for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) women.
Actively fund victim-centred services, including domestic violence charities.
Invest in treatments for survivors of domestic and sexual violence, including long-term mental health support.
We also agree with and support Harriet Harman MP’s proposal to amend the law to:
Prevent rape complainants from being examined on their sexual history in court. This change is a step which could encourage more victims of rape to come forward.
Make predatory car-to-kerb harassment of women and schoolgirls illegal.
We agree with Jess Philips MP, that the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Bill, currently in Parliament, does not do enough to improve how violence against women is treated and handled by our justice system. We are supporting Ms Philips call for the government to:
Listen, act and work cross party, to bring about the vital changes the bill needs to better protect women including strategies to tackle street harassment; improve how courts deal with cases of sexual violence and minimum sentences for rape.
We also support the government’s move last week to ask the police to record crimes of violence motivated by a person’s sex or gender on an experimental basis; and join Stella Creasy MP in calling on the government to:
Legally class violence and harassment motivated by a person’s sex or gender as a hate crime.
What members of the group can do right now to help:
Write to your MP (details of how to do this can be found here. This linked post includes an email template you can adapt as well as instructions on how to look up who your MP and find contact details).
Sign one of the parliamentary petitions Reclaim These Streets is supporting. The list can be found here.
Share this post and talk to your friends, family, and co-workers about the twelve actions we are supporting.
(Well they did ask for it to be shared, so I am sure they dont mind it being posted to mumsnet!)
No mention of women organising together
No mention of the problem actually being men's violence against women.
No concept of women as autonomous human beings but merely as passive supplicants who if they ask nicely might get some crumbs thrown their way
If this was how the Women's Liberation Movement started there would be no Rape Crisis Centres, no Women's Aid and so on.
They make the WEP look radical.