Late Thursday night, Sisters Uncut, a defiant feminist organization that emerged as the leader of the most powerful protests in Britain’s growing national movement around women’s security, declared a small victory.
“We have delayed the #PoliceCrackdownBill,” the group announced on Twitter. “It’s a win, but we will not stop.”
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The announcement was just the latest proof that this movement differs from past campaigns that were generally opposed to violence against women, but rarely made great demands.
Women are not furious about the death of Sarah Everard (33) in London – a police officer has been charged with her kidnapping and murder – but about what they subsequently regard as a heavy and misogynistic reaction. They are furious at law enforcement and the justice system and are urging to scrap a proposed bill on police and crime that would create new restrictions on protests and give broad new powers to the police, and that would spark violent protests in Bristol on Sunday night. has.
This position may seem contradictory to some. After all, the police are often seen as protectors of public safety. When the international movement Black Lives Matter led to calls to defend or even abolish the police, opponents quickly cited the safety of women against rape and assault as a reason why the police should be guarded.
But when Everard’s death convinced many women in Britain that the police were not protecting them, the violent police action took place a few days later on a London guard in her honor, along with the arrest of a police officer over her murder. led many people to conclude that the police are an active threat. According to them, women’s safety and freedom can only come from deeper social changes – and any policy change in response to Everard’s death should focus on that.
Unpunished for sexual violence
Margaret Atwood famously said that there was nothing in her novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” that happened to women at some point in history. It is often seen as proof of profound acquisition, but in fact it is the power behind the novel’s intricate central horror: that any protection women think would be offered through democracy, education, wealth or race all too easily in an instant .
For many women in Britain, the murder of Everard and the violent spread of a London vigilance in her memory of the police caused a similar horror, on a less dystopian scale, about how unprotected they really are. It also became a moment to reflect on the suffering of colored women and other groups targeting abuse that has long been ignored.
Raven Bowen, CEO of National Ugly Mugs, a group working to prevent violence against sex workers, said she believes the women there got a taste of the sort when police guarded Everard at Clapham Common last year. weekend broke. of trauma that many sex workers have experienced at the hands of the police for years.
She believes that such experiences have a cumulative effect. “What do they get when they ask for protection?” Ask Bowen rhetoric. “It’s a learning experience.”
Lydia Caradonna, a writer and sex worker, said she often encountered the idea that women like her are not entitled to police protection because ‘we have sacrificed the part of our womanhood that keeps us safe, the part that makes us worthy protection. ”
That, she says, is why Everard’s death caused such shock waves. ‘There’s this idea about being a proper woman,’ she said, ‘that Sarah was a proper woman, she did what she had to, she dressed the way she should’ – but none of that was enough to keep her safe.
“It can also be quite a crushing sense of self when you realize you’ve done things well and are still being assaulted,” said Nicole Westmarland, a Durham University researcher studying violence against women. “That’s really what happened on an international scale.”
Rape ‘decriminalized’
As public anger escalated after the murder of Everard, the government promised new actions to improve women’s safety: more CCTV cameras, better street lighting and regular police in pubs and clubs to watch for attacks on female patrons. And it has pushed for more support for the police and crime bill, which will give police departments across the country new powers.
All the answers seem grounded in the theory that women feel insecure because there were not enough police, with enough power, in enough places.
But for many women who express fear and indignation, especially at events organized by Sisters Uncut, it was exactly backward. According to them, the police themselves were a source of trauma and danger. And if they give more power, women will only become more vulnerable.
Everard’s death was a single tragedy, and police action in Clapham last weekend was against one protest. But statistics tell a story of many more widespread failures.
According to government statistics, from 2019 to 2020, less than 3% of the rapes reported to the police were prosecuted. And when unreported cases are considered, the actual prosecution rate is even lower.
“Rape has honestly been decriminalized,” said Emily Gray, a lecturer at Derby University who studies policing.
A 2019 report by the British newspaper The Independent found that 568 police officers in London had been accused of sexual assault from 2012 to 2018, but only 43 had faced disciplinary proceedings. And from April 2015 to April 2018, there were at least 700 reports of domestic violence by police officers and police personnel, according to documents obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalists from 37 of Britain’s 48 police forces.
Opponents of the police and crime bill, which will give police a wide power to stop protests, argue that it will make scenes like the one on Clapham Common more frequent and will not prevent the most common forms of violence against women. do not stop.
“Violence against women usually comes from a power imbalance,” Gray said. One reason the police bill is being attacked, she said, is that “it does nothing about it.”
Alternative solutions
What are the alternatives? Different groups tend to focus on different drugs.
Sisters Uncut, founded in 2014 in response to government austerity measures that have cut funding for women’s shelters and other assistance to women at risk, has long demanded that such services be reintroduced.
Offender programs, which work intensively with abusive men to prevent them from attacking their partner, have shown some promise in cases where the abusers are committed to change, Westmarland, who studied them, said.
“The physical and sexual abuse has decreased significantly and in some cases has been completely eliminated,” she said. But she noted that the programs were not effective in reducing coercion – the prevailing emotional abuse that is the hallmark of domestic violence and that is deeply traumatic on its own.
One belief that has cut through almost all the groups involved – including mainstream groups such as the Women’s Institute, the largest women’s organization in the country – is that education should be at the center of any change.
Such education can be a real opportunity to prevent and shape some of the common attitudes that hurt girls and women as well as non-binary people in our society, ‘Kate Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University and the author of two books on the ways in which sexism shapes society, said in an interview.
But while education may sound like the kind of anodine concept anyone can support, Men texted that she believed it would actually be radical if education were to address the politically charged issues of misogyny, male privilege and male responsibility for ending male violence. address. .
“Can you imagine sex education becoming political?” she asked. ‘Sigh. However, this is my dream. ‘
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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