We have allowed relations between sexes to become barbaric

“Every victim who comes forward will be believed…” Thank you, Simon Bailey, for usefully demonstrating that, whoever in the entire country is put in charge of the schools “rape culture” investigation, it should not be you. Of course, British institutions being what they are today, it is you.

Bailey, chief constable of Norfolk and “national police lead” for child protection, contrived, in one grammatical clause, to discredit the impartiality of any inquiry he might lead. By denominating a complainant – every complainant – as a “victim”, he prejudged the issue; by guaranteeing they will be believed, he declared open season on any male who might be accused.

If girls in schools in Britain are being subjected to rape, then that is a very serious matter that must be investigated to its roots. But that must be done with an open mind. The website Everyone’s Invited, which sparked this latest Grande Peur, currently carries 11,554 “testimonies”: does Simon Bailey believe them all? It seems beyond doubt that there is a core of serious occurrences of rape in our schools, but there could not be a more unsatisfactory forum for addressing that problem than the Everyone’s Invited website.

For a start, it is anonymous; “This is an anonymous submission form,” the invitation reads. “Please do not include names. If names or specific details are included that compromise the anonymity of the testimony, your testimony will not be posted.” That may be necessary for legal reasons, but the result is that completely unknown people go onto the site and write a testimony that may equally be an honest account of a deplorable incident, or a fantasy spun by someone secure in anonymity. The obvious point is that social media, in which contemporary youth is marinated, is the worst conceivable medium for lodging a complaint against possibly criminal conduct.

The place for that is the headteacher’s study, the parental home and, if the allegation is criminal, the police station. The other obvious problem is that the hotchpotch of testimonies ranges from grave criminal sexual offences to groping and other minor – though reprehensible – actions that equate more to oafishness than to assault. By ascribing to the whole miscellany – major and minor, true and false – the emotive title of “rape culture”, the scale and gravity of the problem has become extravagantly distorted. Initially, these allegations concerned some senior public schools, a fact that provoked additional media interest; to any person of sense, it was the belated detonation of a long-ticking time bomb.

In the 19th century, a tribe of South Sea islanders was discovered that aroused the interest of anthropologists because they had never divined the connection between sexual congress and procreation. A similar level of naivety must be attributed to those advocates of co-education who thought it a good idea to confine adolescents of both sexes, at the most frenetic stage of their hormonal and emotional development, together in a residential institution, and who now evince surprise and dismay at the wholly predictable and inevitable outcome.

From preliminary, largely anecdotal evidence, it appears that the schools worst affected are those former boys’ schools that accept girls in the senior forms. It is also reported that Winchester, under pressure from concerned parents, has suspended its plans to introduce girls.

Girls and boys in their formative years need a custom-built education to enable them to come to terms respectively with their femininity and masculinity. Our ancestors knew that, but their wisdom, derived from common sense and empiricism, was rejected; they were presumed to be backward in everything because they lacked the technological sophistication to travel in space or develop the internet. So, a toxic notion has developed in recent decades, driven partly by feminism, partly by other forces, that females must do everything that males do and share all their institutions and activities.

In fact, single-sex education, helping girls to develop their identity before embarking on the wider world of mixed-sex activities in work and leisure, is the best formation for life and for raising a family. Women have been badly misled by feminists, now becoming the Girondins of the sexual revolution, marginalised by the transgender Jacobins carrying all before them. Even when they had no vote, women at least had privacy in their lavatories and personal spaces; that is no longer the case.

The reality is that relations between the sexes have been allowed, actually encouraged, to deteriorate into a chaos of incivility that in some instances is downright barbaric. It was feminists who deterred men from practising the everyday courtesies – giving up a seat on public transport to a woman, rising when a lady enters a room, and so forth – that acted as an automatic, almost subconscious, conduit of respect. In the past half-century, women have been harried from pillar to post by social engineers who imposed conflicting identities upon them, from the promiscuous mini-skirted “dolly bird” of the 1960s, to the glass-ceiling shattering executive marketing widgets today.

They have put up with a lot, but there is no reason why they should put up with sexual harassment, if it is genuine. Here, however, our compromised schools system comes into conjunction with the most dysfunctional institution in Britain: our police and justice system. British justice has become an oxymoron: institutionalised bias has been enforced on the courts by statute. Endowing certain classes of citizens with “protected characteristics” is incompatible with justice. Imposing hugely increased mandatory sentences for so-called “hate crime”, on the partisan grounds that the victim was someone the progressive establishment thought more important than other people, is unjust.

Why did the electorate tolerate this bastardisation of principles established under Magna Carta? Why did it tolerate the politicisation of the police? Police forces routinely fly rainbow flags, the emblem of a political movement, over their premises and decorate their uniforms with rainbow epaulettes or hat bands at relevant political demonstrations. How much respect or confidence can the Metropolitan Police command after the public has seen them kneeling before BLM demonstrators? What could be more revealing than the remark by a Humberside police officer to a man suspected of a “non-crime hate incident”: “I need to check your thinking”?

Now comes the latest extravagance, from Simon Bailey: “Every victim who comes forward will be believed…” What does such a mentality on the part of the investigating authority augur for the prospects of young men wrongfully accused being able to salvage their reputations and future careers?

Not to worry: Boris is on the case. He is apparently thinking of creating a new hate crime of “misogyny”. He should think again. The dangers threatening women and girls are rape and murder, and both are adequately criminalised under a large variety of statutes. A true Conservative government should be erasing the flawed concept of “hate” crime from the statute book, not enlarging the woke canon to pander to the left.

The establishment response to the “rape culture” claims has been to demand more sex education in schools. There is already far too much, focusing children prematurely on sexual matters, with five-year-olds encouraged to question what sex they are. What is required is the restoration of moral education, respect for the opposite sex, good manners and – as a healthy and necessary incentive – disciplinary systems that have real teeth. Will that happen? In woke Britain today? Don’t hold your breath. Meanwhile, every victim will be believed.