Today is the first anniversary of the murder of Sarah Everard. Should we be placated by the forthcoming inquiry into the circumstances of the case? In my view, no, and this is a view shared by many of us that campaign against male violence towards women and girls.
Lawyers for the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) a feminist legal charity have launched a legal challenge against the Home Secretary Priti Patel, because, as its director Harriet Wistrich says, ‘The inquiry is not looking at the culture of policing. An inquiry into only one specific incident, albeit an horrific one, cannot come close to uncovering what that culture is and why and how it permeates policing – let alone what we can do to change it.’
When it comes to policing, change is slow. In the 1990s I worked in a domestic violence unit within a Metropolitan police station. I was in a civilian role, accompanying officers to 999 calls. The officers were supposedly highly trained skilled professionals, picked for the job because of their ‘natural empathy’ with the victims. Unfortunately, apart from one or two exceptions, these officers carried as many prejudicial views of the victims as their less ‘empathic’ peers.
In fact, some of the specially trained officers bent over backwards to empathise not with the women but with the perpetrators. Sometimes the conversations in the police vehicles would be very difficult to hear, with officers second guessing how much the complainant had been drinking, and in what way she might be to blame for the violence. The women were often judged for being angry, and I saw officers react with sympathy to the perpetrators. Unless the victims were in a bad enough state to be taken to hospital, the perpetrator was rarely arrested.
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