EVERYONE knows that when you’re in a hole, you should stop digging. Everyone except Cressida Dick, the first female commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. She has been under fire for the behaviour of her force in the wake of the horrific abduction and murder of Sarah Everard.
The murder led to an unprecedented outpouring of anguish and anger from women on social media about their safety and the everyday incidences of harassment nearly every female has encountered at some stage in her life.
That a serving officer in the Metropolitan Police had been charged with the crime should have added to the extreme sensitivity the organisation ought to have shown in handling this case and the public reaction to it.
Common sense should have been applied when it was faced with a request to stage a candle-lit vigil last Saturday on Clapham Common, where Sarah was last seen alive.
Instead, the Met went into full Captain Mainwaring mode, sticking rigidly to its view that adherence to Covid regulations was the only issue at stake. As if.
Permission was denied to the organisers, who had planned to respect social distancing as much as possible, so the event was formally called off.
But anyone with an ounce of cop on, if you’ll pardon the pun, would’ve known that women were going to turn up in great numbers anyway. The smart thing would have been to allow it to go ahead and keep a watchful distance.
But no. They lost the plot and, in PC Plod mode, bulldozed into crowds who were armed with nothing more offensive than a bunch of daffs. How the Met’s PR department must have winced at those front-page pictures of a young woman wrestled to the ground and handcuffed by male police officers.
And if that image wasn’t powerful enough… how about the one of six police officers guarding a statue of Winston Churchill in the following hours?
Because unbelievably, the government’s latest crime bill proposes a maximum 10 years for defacing statues while the average jail term for rape starts at five years.
Defending the plans, Tory policing minister Kit Malthouse said the tougher sentences took into account the “emotional and symbolic value” of some statues, particularly war memorials.
Labour shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds pointed out that the bill contained the word “memorial” eight times and failed to include the word “woman” once.
When Commissioner Dick said that while Sarah Everard’s kidnap and murder was tragic, it was also “incredibly rare” and women should not feel afraid to walk alone on London’s streets.
But data from the Office for National Statistics shows there were 5,663 kidnapping crimes reported between October 2019 and September 2020. Around 78 per cent of these were of women.
MP Jess Phillips said the government did not collect detailed data on the numbers of women killed each year and the circumstances of their deaths.
"In this place [Westminster] we count what we care about,” she said. “We count the vaccines done, the number of people on benefits. We rule or we oppose based on a count and we obsessively track that data. However, we don’t currently count dead women.”
Every year, on International Women’s Day, she reads out a list of the women murdered by men in the preceding year. It took her four and a half minutes to read out the names.
It shouldn’t need to be said that not all men are violent, sexist or abusive. Of course they aren’t. But we still need to ask why some men do behave that way towards women.
Call it 'toxic masculinity', call it a twisted attitude towards females, but call it out as wrong.
The howl of outrage that came from women in this past week reflects anger at a situation that has gone on for too long, as those feminists who organised 'reclaim the night' protests back in the 1970s will testify.
Murder and rape are at the extreme end of the scale. But there have been thousands more cases, mostly unreported, of sexual harassment endured by women and girls, as revealed by the many testimonies on social media.
Like many women, I wish I could go back to the moment when I was groped on the bus as a schoolgirl, so that I could call out and shame my assailant instead of me being the one left feeling embarrassed and humiliated.
If only I'd had the sangfroid and wit of a well-known Derry feminist when she was confronted by a flasher in her youth.
“Do you know what this is?” he leered. “Aye,” she replied, peering at him. “It looks like a penis. Only smaller.”
