On Thursday night, Sisters Uncut, a provocative feminist organization that emerged as the leader of the most vigorous protests in Britain’s growing national movement around women’s safety, declared a small victory.
“We delayed #PoliceCrackdownBill,” the group announced on Twitter. “This is a victory, but we are not going to stop.”
The announcement was only the latest evidence that this movement differs from previous campaigns that opposed violence against women in general terms, but that rarely made comprehensive demands.
The women are furious not only at the death of Sarah Everard, 33, in London – a police officer has been accused of her kidnapping and murder – but at what they see as a cruel and misogynistic police response afterwards. They are directing their anger towards law enforcement and the justice system, and pressing to eliminate a proposed police and criminal law, which would create new restrictions on protests and grant new powers to the police, and which triggered violent protests in Bristol on Sunday. night.
This position may seem contradictory to some. After all, the police are often seen as protectors of public security. When the international Black Lives Matter movement led to calls for expropriation or even abolition by the police, opponents quickly cited women’s safety from rape and assault as a reason why the police should be preserved.
But if Everard’s death convinced many women in Britain that the police were not protecting them, the violent police action a few days later, in a vigil in his honor in London, along with the arrest of a police officer for his murder , led many to conclude that the police is an active threat. Women’s security and freedom, they argue, can only come from much deeper social changes – and any policy change in response to Everard’s death must focus on that.
Impunity for sexual violence
Margaret Atwood famously said that there was nothing in her novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” that had not happened to women somewhere, at some point in history. This is often treated as evidence from an in-depth source, but it is actually the force behind the novel’s visceral central horror: that any protection that women might think would be offered by democracy, education, wealth or race can easily disappear in a moment.
For many women in Britain, Everard’s murder and the violent police dispersion of a London vigil in their memory triggered a similar horror, on a less dystopian scale, about how unprotected they really are. It also became a time to reflect on the plight of black women and other target groups of abuse, which had long been ignored.
Raven Bowen, the chief executive of National Ugly Mugs, a group working to prevent violence against sex workers, said she believed that when the police stopped Everard’s vigil at Clapham Common last weekend, the women there had “A little taste” The kind of trauma that many sex workers reported having experienced at the hands of the police for years.
She believes that such experiences have a cumulative effect. “When they ask for protection, what do they get?” Dr. Bowen asked rhetorically. “It becomes a learned experience.”
Lydia Caradonna, a writer and sex worker, said she often found the idea that women like her had no right to police protection because “we sacrifice the part of our femininity that keeps us safe, the part that makes us worthy of protection.”
That is why, she believes, that Everard’s death sent so many shock waves. “There is an idea about proper femininity,” she said. “That Sarah was a decent woman, she did what she should, she dressed the way she should” – but none of that was enough to keep her safe.
“It can also be a bit shattering when you realize you did the right things and you were still beaten,” said Nicole Westmarland, a researcher at Durham University who studies violence against women. “This is what happened on an international mass scale, really.”
Rape has ‘been decriminalized’
As public anger grew after Everard’s death, the government promised new actions to improve the safety of women: more CCTV cameras, better street lighting and plainclothes policemen in bars and clubs to monitor attacks on employers. And he campaigned for more support for the police and crime bill, which would grant new comprehensive powers to police departments across the country.
All of these responses seemed to be based on the theory that women felt insecure because there were not enough police, with enough power, in enough places.
But for many women expressing fear and indignation, especially those at events organized by the Uncut Sisters, that was precisely the setback. In his opinion, the police themselves were a source of trauma and danger. And giving them more power would only make women more vulnerable.
Everard’s death was a single tragedy, and the police action in Clapham last weekend was against a protest. But the statistics tell a story of many more widespread failures.
From 2019 to 2020, less than 3 percent of rapes reported to the police were prosecuted, according to government statistics. And if unreported cases are taken into account, the actual rate of prosecution is even lower.
“Rape has been decriminalized, frankly,” said Emily Gray, a professor at Derby University who studies policing.
A 2019 report in the British newspaper The Independent found that 568 London police officers were charged with sexual assault between 2012 and 2018, but only 43 faced disciplinary proceedings. And from April 2015 to April 2018, there were at least 700 reports of domestic violence by police and police officials, according to documents obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalists from 37 of Britain’s 48 police forces.
Opponents of the police and criminal bill, which would give the police ample power to end protests, argue that this would make scenes like the one at Clapham Common more frequent and would not prevent the most prevalent forms of violence against women.
“Violence against women often comes from an imbalance of power,” said Gray. One of the reasons the police bill is being attacked, she said, is that it “does nothing about it”.
Workarounds
So what are the alternatives? Different groups tend to focus on different remedies.
Sisters Uncut, which was founded in 2014 in response to government austerity measures that cut funding for shelters for women and other forms of aid for women at risk, has long demanded that these services be reinstated.
The aggressor programs, which work intensively with abusive men to prevent them from attacking their partners, have shown promise in cases where the aggressors are committed to change, said Westmarland, who studied them.
“Physical and sexual abuse has decreased substantially and in some cases has been completely eliminated,” she said. But she noted that the programs have not been effective in reducing coercive control – the dominant emotional abuse that is the hallmark of domestic violence and that is deeply traumatic in itself.
A belief that permeates almost all the groups involved – including traditional ones like the Instituto da Mulher, the largest women’s organization in the country – is that education must be the centerpiece of any change.
Such education could be “a real attempt at prevention and shaping some of the prevalent attitudes that harm girls and women, as well as non-binary people, in our society,” said Kate Manne, professor of philosophy at Cornell University and author of two books on the ways in which sexism shapes society, he said in an interview.
But while education may sound like the kind of nondescript concept that anyone could support, Dr. Manne said in a text message that she believed it would be quietly radical for education to address the politically charged issues of misogyny, male privilege and male responsibility ending male violence.
“Can you imagine if sex education became political?” she asked. “Sigh. It’s my dream, though.”