And the judge who said a
13 year old victim of sexual assault was a “sexual predator”, and pretty much painted the 41 year old man who assaulted her as her innocent victim. The 41 year old.man who incidentally had a very sizeable collection of images of child abuse.
That was only in 2013.
Felix I too appreciate your contributions as a serving police officer, but I think you also demonstrate a big part of the problem. I imagine your reluctance to see the whole issue of the prevalence of sexual crimes carried out by men against women, and the lack of justice for women victims of these crimes, as part of a wider cultural landscape is fairly common among police officers.
But denying that is never going to address the root of the problem, IMO, and as long as we don’t do that but just tinker around with the surface issues, then the problem will persist.
We have had literally thousands of years of male domination and female subjugation in virtually every culture worldwide. And it’s still overtly the case in many parts of the world today. The fact that we’ve had a few decades here in most of the western world of addressing the most blatant inequalities and injustices against women cannot possibly eradicate or balance out the ENORMOUS cultural bias that has accrued against women and in favour of men during those millennia.
Human beings don’t work that way. The human unconscious doesn’t work that way. There may be a majority of people in the UK who now consciously believe that women deserve to be treated with the same respect as men, but at the level of our collective unconscious (as Jung referred to it), we are all still massively influenced by the huge weight of the societal norms of the past that lie behind us.
No one exists in a cultural vacuum. Not male sex offenders, not female victims of sexual offences, not police officers investigating sexual offences, not prosecutors or defenders or judges or jurors trying the cases.
Some of those in the police and the CJS are obviously better than others at overcoming that cultural bias, and do an amazing job of supporting victims and delivering justice. Nazir Afzal stands out as an example of this, and at least one woman on the follow up programme said the police who investigated her case did a brilliant job. (Although I think the CPS then refused to take the case forward.)
But there are still too many stories of women being disbelieved, being treated really badly by the police and/or the CJS, being retraumatised by the whole process - some saying that process was even more traumatic than the actual assault/rape itself. The woman who reported the assault in the pub toilets certainly didn’t feel she’d gained anything at all from the process, and the whole thing affected her pretty badly.
I thought that comment from the police in the wake of Sarah Everard’s killler being convicted about what women should do to verify the identity of a man claiming to be a police officer and arresting them was a huge indicator of the failure to grasp the real problem. The point is that whatever we do, women cannot keep ourselves safe if some men are determined to prey on us, and if society as a whole has not yet got to the point of zero tolerance of the phenomenon of male VAWG.
We as a society are still far too tolerant of male violence, male sexual entitlement, and other “peccadilloes” like male abandonment of parental responsibility, and at the same time are still far too ready to judge, blame and punish women for being victims. It hasn’t come out of nowhere. It’s come out of centuries and centuries of the world being ordered that way.
It’s tied up with the fact that women are still punished for being raped in some parts of the world today. That girls are gang raped as punishment for crimes committed by their male relatives in some parts of the world today. That girls can’t access an education in some parts of the world today. That women need the permission of male guardians to do just about anything in some parts of the world today.
It’s tied up with the fact that no women at all were able to vote till 1918 and most not till 1928 in the UK. That women in Switzerland didn’t get the vote till 1971-1989, depending on which canton they lived in. That rape was historically seen as a mark of shame and dishonour on the woman who was raped and her husband or father. That marital rape was only criminalised in England and Wales in 1991. That coercive control has only very recently been recognised as a form of abuse. That a woman’s underwear can still be handed round a jury in a rape trial in the 21st century.
That when the Rotherham and other grooming gangs first came to light the police dismissed the whole thing saying the girls were making “lifestyle choices” and referring to them as prostitutes. This also in the 21st century. That when the mass New Year’s Eve sexual assaults happened in Cologne, the liberal media initially refused to report it or to acknowledge the facts of it because it made some men look bad. And with the fact that until very recently, under German law a woman could not claim to have been raped unless she had actively fought back.
None of these things are isolated and independent of each other. They are all part of a pattern, a wider picture and that picture is called patriarchy.
That doesn’t mean that all men, or even a majority of men, are sexual offenders. But it does mean that society still enables to a far greater extent than we would like to believe the significant minority who are, and likewise still blames and judges to a far greater extent than we would like to believe the women they offend against.
We are in agreement Felix about the importance of practical ways of moving forward with this, such as rape victims having the chance to “practise” being cross examined, and possibly removing the jury - but only if the rest of the CJS receives thorough and much better training on the issue than at present. Another option would be mandatory training on rape myths and unconscious bias against women for all jurors selected to serve on rape trials, before the actual trial proceeds.
But IMO there has to be a fundamental cultural shift towards recognising and redressing that huge bias that still exists against women and in favour of men, and recognising and addressing the tacit societal endorsement of male sexual entitlement. Until we do that, the unconscious sexism and misogyny will just find new outlets to escape through, as fast as we plug up the ones already there.