Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The police shouldn’t be expected to clamp down on wolf whistling

Every morning on the way to work I pass a group of Polish builders waiting to start work on the new Design Museum. I know, it tells us a great deal about the availability of British youth for work in construction that every last one of them is Polish, so far as I can make out – and come to that, are the Irish nowadays too swanky to be navvies? –  but what’s interesting is how well behaved they are. They smoke heroically, but when women walk by they register their existence but don’t utter a peep. Possibly it’s because their English isn’t good enough for Wotcher, darling, but they don’t wolf whistle either, which I assume is a lingua franca. It’s not just me, I may say; it’s the same with teenage girls.

In one way, this is a good thing. I remember when I was about 17, I would start to go red about a hundred paces from a building site and by the time I was actually in earshot, they could warm their hands from my face. Naturally the banter was good humoured; equally naturally I never quite felt up to responding. So I understand that not everyone gets a kick out of wolf whistles. But I took the view, and still take it, that this is one of the realities of being in a public space rather than some insulated private domain – a private car, say. You put up with a bit of give and take from your fellow citizens, and if you don’t like it, you toughen up.

What never crossed my mind was that a time would come when an attractive woman would need the police to sort out builders whose ‘disrespectful comments’ gave her grief.

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