And so there were two. Cressida Dick’s replacement as the Met police commissioner has been whittled down to two men: the former counter-terroism chief Sir Mark Rowley and one of Dick’s lieutenants, Nick Ephgrave. It’s disappointing, but unsurprising, that almost every candidate touted was a white man. The new commissioner has a gargantuan task ahead: tackling the deep-rooted, institutional misogyny and inequality in British policing.
Rowley, the man many consider the frontrunner, has already acknowledged that cultural reform is needed. But his assertion that policing has been largely “transformed” since the 1980s and that it is only “some corners” that still need attention may provide little comfort to the 49% of police staff members across England, Scotland and Wales who, when surveyed as recently as 2018, said they’d heard sexualised jokes told repeatedly at work. Or, indeed, the one in five who had received sexually explicit emails or texts from a colleague, or the almost one in 10 who had been told that sexual favours could lead to preferential treatment.
In April, it emerged that one Met officer won’t face criminal charges even though a misconduct hearing concluded he raped two women. In March, a 52-year-old serving officer was convicted of grooming after he arranged to meet what he thought was a 13-year-old girl hoping for what the Telegraph euphemistically described as “sex”. This is all on top of the 2,000 officers accused of sexual misconduct in the past four years alone. “Some corners” of policing left to address, indeed.
It is depressingly telling that the one potential female candidate for the job said she would not apply because “the substantial reform required needs the support of national and local politicians. I couldn’t see a place in the appointment process for that discussion.” Nor does it bode particularly well that Jon Boutcher, one of the only possible candidates with a real record of speaking out about institutional inequality in policing, has already been eliminated from the race.
Whoever is appointed, it will be vital that they learn from Dick’s mistakes: namely that it is violent men, not protesting women, who need to be policed. And yet still, the Met is wasting time and resources trying to reverse a high court decision that ruled its policing of the Sarah Everard vigil was unlawful.
In January, shortly after Sabina Nessa’s murder in south-east London, I Googled the teacher’s name. “What was Sabina Nessa wearing?” was one of the top searches that popped up under the “people also ask” heading – if more evidence was needed of society’s obsession with blaming victims instead of focusing on perpetrators. And this thinking is endorsed and encouraged by the Met police, who told women in Clapham not to go out alone at night after Everard’s death, and later suggested women might consider flagging down a bus for help if stopped by a lone officer they didn’t trust.
The message that those who do not take every precaution are subtly cast as partially complicit in their own assault reverberates everywhere: from the 200 attack alarms handed out to local women after Nessa’s murder (nobody stopped local men to talk to them about violence against women), to the police commissioner who would later comment that Everard “never should have… submitted” to the false arrest used by Wayne Couzens to abduct her. Or the city council leader who told women “not to put themselves in a compromising position” following the murder of 18-year-old Bobbi-Anne McLeod in Plymouth.
We cleave so stubbornly to the notion that violence against women is a problem for women to fix, a problem for victims to learn how to avoid, even as every passing day brings more revelations screaming that our focus should not be on women but the systems that fail us.
It is not just the police. Fifty-six MPs (or around 9% of all those sitting in Westminster) are reportedly under investigation for sexual misconduct, three cabinet ministers among them. The laws governing us are made in a place where our elected representatives are watching pornography.
The application of these laws, meanwhile, is interpreted by a justice system in England and Wales in which less than 2% of rape cases reported to the police result in a charge or summons, where three-quarters of domestic violence cases are closed without charge, where even the tiny minority of survivors who ever see a courtroom face such agonising waits that many wish they had never reported in the first place.
We have an education system in which, in a three-year period to 2015, an average of one rape a day was reported to the UK police as having occured in schools and in which 5,500 sexual offences were reported in schools, where almost a third of teenage girls say they’ve experienced unwanted sexual touching at school and pupils describe sexual assault as simply routine.
Can the next Met commissioner really look at these facts with a straight face and tell me it is still the women we should be focusing on? Still women we should teach to fix the problem and themselves, with drink testing kits and new apps, and self-tracking and rape-proof underwear and rohypnol-detecting nail polish? And can anybody tell me how we are supposed to carry all that gear while, on the advice of the Metropolitan police, we are running into the path of the nearest bus to flag it down for help?
Or are we finally, belatedly, ready to admit that it is time to recognise the devastating institutional misogyny and racism that pervades the systems around us, the ones we are told we should look to for help and depend on for change? Time to recognise the connections between the rampant sexism running through these intertwined institutions? Time to consign the excuses of “bad apples” and “bad ’uns” to the dustbin and to embrace the root and branch reform that we desperately need? Time to fix the system, not the women.
Fix the System, Not the Women by Laura Bates is published by Simon & Schuster and available to buy now
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