Less than a day separated the arrest of a serving Metropolitan police officer on suspicion of Sarah Everard’s murder from the first suggestions that women calm down and put it in perspective. The Metropolitan police commissioner Cressida Dick, wanted to stress that actual kidnap is “rare”.
A professor of criminology, Marian FitzGerald, thought it important to tell other women – twice – on the BBC, not to get “hysterical”. She was being interviewed by a senior man in an organisation which has evidently shared her reservations about women’s fallibility – were they worthy, even, of being paid the same as men? – and it duly went unchallenged.
The message, that women’s difficulties with the status quo can be just as troublesome as male offending behaviour, was seemingly reinforced by the BBC’s favourite troll, the ubiquitous ex-judge Jonathan Sumption. “Most profound cultural problems like this are not easily amenable to government action or legislation,” he claimed, on Any Questions? “It’s going to be a gradual process, I’m sorry but we’ve got to be realistic about this.” It was only to be expected: Sumption had previously levelled at female lawyers the same imputation of naivety. “It takes time. You’ve got to be patient.” Via such insights do the retired male beneficiaries of overwhelmingly unequal professions recommend themselves to Radio 4 producers.
The men of the Tory party, in contrast, attempted a full, three-day experiment with feminism before, exasperated, they resumed a technique that has served brilliantly to protect successive mediocrities from female challenge. When Jo Stevens, shadow secretary for culture, media and sport, mentioned new legislation that could mean longer prison terms for harming a statue than for rape, Oliver Dowden, the DCMS minister, responded in the manner of David “calm down dear” Cameron and Matt “watch your tone” Hancock. She disappointed him. “I really wish that members in this House would take a more temperate approach towards this.”
However, his party’s insistence that the statues have such “tremendous emotional value” as to require significant additional protection was, you gathered, rationality in action. A few sentences later, he congratulated a man for his “passionate concern” about tourism.
Spectators who share Dowden’s passion for “this country’s glorious heritage” would have instantly recognised a practice dear to Britain’s very earliest gaslighters, one later critical to parliament’s traditionalists. “By their constitution they are more liable to be affected by gusts and waves of sentiment” was one MP’s objection to women’s suffrage in 1910. He added: “Their very emotional nature makes women an easier prey to showy argument.”
This analysis required only light updating before being aimed by Dowden’s colleague, the current attorney general Michael Ellis, at Labour’s shadow solicitor general, Ellie Reeves. He considered her over-exercised about justice for women. “I do not think the emotive language that the honourable lady uses is appropriate at all.”
Reeves was attempting a question about the government’s response to the shocking decline in rape convictions, a subject that probably interests or distresses at least half the population, the more so given the picture of relentless but effectively tolerated street harassment that has emerged since Sarah Everard’s killing. Judgments within the last week suggest, if not actual complaisance, a staggering absence of official interest in the impact on women.
Among those who think, unlike Sumption, that it might be possible to improve on this, there have been discussions about educating boys and young men, about the impact of pornography and a wider culture that has made familiar the objectification and terrorising of women, not least in highly regarded TV drama.
What, however, can be done to educate powerful older men with the resolutely uncomprehending mindset of a Dowden or an Ellis? Significant change looks unlikely in a government whose ministers, so far from endorsing heightened public concern about women’s safety, have preferred to attack female colleagues for being inadequately meek.
To give our latter-day anti-suffragists their due, their accusations of rudeness and irrationality may not be reflexive, but a considered way of silencing irksome female critics while avoiding accusations of misogyny. Certainly, if the restrained speech deplored by Dowden and Ellis were actually objectionable, no words could adequately convey the urgency of reforming the still sexist, still male-dominated criminal justice system that did not also offend this abject duo. Any hints? Is there some becomingly soft, appropriately flattering style in which to persuade a culture perhaps held back from listening by its own excess Dowdens and Ellises, that it’s time to signal, consistently, that the frequency of sexual molestation does not diminish its gravity, the trauma it inflicts? As opposed to the opposite.
Just last week an off-duty police officer, Oliver Banfield, remained at liberty after his conviction for attacking a lone woman at night. He stays in his post. Shortly before, Javed Miah, who sexually assaulted a woman at night, running away when she used the SOS function on her phone, avoided jail because he was the “sole earner”. In February a chef who admitted kissing and touching a resisting colleague somehow convinced a magistrate that it was his Turkish culture. Men with an interest in terrorising vulnerable women may have been further reassured by the suspended sentence handed, at Kingston crown court last year, to an Uber driver who harassed and exposed himself for 20 minutes to a woman in his cab, where she was avoiding unsafe streets. Not that the recent five-year sentence for a man who murdered his wife, pleading lockdown distress, left much room for doubt about values still prevailing in parts of what is claimed – by men – to be an infinitely more enlightened system. Alleged equalities progress did not, for instance, prevent a professional tribunal deciding, in the case of a barrister turned upskirter, that it is possible to be both a member of the bar and a registered sex offender.
If women can remain emotionless in the face of such judgments, there really is something wrong with us.
Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
