Gary Lineker tweeted disgust at Suella Braverman’s language, the BBC lost the plot, and one story downplayed in the furore that followed was the toll of women killed by men, ‘low-level sex crimes’ that may lead to murder, and official and social reactions to them.
Lineker the football star caught what many in Britain clearly feel about the Tories playing to hatred of asylum seekers. It is also easier to voice horror at drowned bodies than to think about women and young girls whose lives are taken on streets they know or destroyed in their own homes. The frequency is the trouble. It’s too close to home. Very often it IS home.
But yes, of course, people shocked as yet another crowded, unseaworthy small boat overturns are also horrified when yet another woman goes missing. Or complains to police who either ignore the complaint or act too late.
The horror becomes dread when it turns out that an armed and uniformed policeman, tasked to guard 'VIPs’, serving in London’s once boastful Met, kidnapped Sarah Everard using his warrant card then handcuffed her before he raped and murdered her.
Knowing that the supposed protectors of society have enabled if not protected misogynist murder is too much for many to face.
The Met Commissioner, remarkably, tried to manage public fear after Couzens was charged by announcing it was likely multiple police officers would be charged weekly with sexual crime. It has since emerged that uniformed killer Wayne Couzens repeatedly indecently exposed himself without investigation, although several women reported him to police.
Last Thursday Labour MP Jess Phillips, as she has done since 2005 in the International Women’s Day debate, read the names of the 109 women killed in the past year in the UK where the killer or suspect is a man. The youngest killed was 15, the oldest was 92. Just before Phillips came into the Commons she had to add an 109th, 52-year-old Helen Harrison, found dead on March 5.
Phillips took the names from Counting Dead Women recorded by Karen Ingala Smith, also of the Femicide Census, to make "killed women an issue of major public concern". (The census counts Couzens as one of 16 serving or former police officers who killed women between 2009 and 2021.)
They were disappointed by a sparsely-attended debate, having contacted every MP in whose constituency a woman was killed. Only three male MPs turned up, although there were bereaved families in the gallery, usually un-ignorable for politicians. Some campaigners stood while Phillips read, angry and fearful their points would be lost.
But next day The Guardian gave sizeable space to the mother of 21-year-old Libby Squire, whose body was dumped in the Humber in 2019. Lisa Squire is convinced that her murderer had ‘flashed’ her daughter weeks earlier. Neither she nor her daughter reported the incident, something she bitterly regrets.
She has helped Labour MP Diana Johnson to prepare amendments to bills on indecent exposure, identifying it as a ‘gateway crime’. Since 2018 almost 250 men guilty of it have been convicted of rape.
Libby Squire’s murderer Pawel Relowicz was eventually convicted, but his trial revealed that within hours of killing her he was exposing himself again on Hull’s streets. "He’s going to be in his early 50s when he gets out," Lisa Squire says. She would like his 27-year sentence increased to a whole life tariff like that of Couzens. And in honour of her daughter she wants everyone subjected to ‘flashing’ to report it.
Offensive, repulsive male behaviour inhibits women’s freedom. It is not ‘pathetic’. It leaves many inclined to keep quiet about it, afraid to run or walk in favourite places.
Flashers are not a joke. As some of us may have believed or still believe, these offenders are not ‘sad harmless men’. No matter what your doubts about policing, report every one.
