Women’s rights are being trampled on

It was timely and poignant that the Labour MP Jess Phillips yesterday read out the names of the women killed as a result of male violence over the past year.

Phillips has taken on this grim task for the past nine years to highlight the issue of women’s safety and the latest roll call was delivered on the same day that an inquiry into one of Britain’s most notorious violent men was published.

Lady Elish Angiolini’s investigation into Wayne Couzens, who was a serving Met officer when he murdered Sarah Everard three years ago, demonstrates graphically how unsafe women are when they can’t even go to the police for protection.

Among the many disturbing findings in Lady Elish’s report was the statement by the Met to her inquiry in 2022 that they would still have recruited the monster even if they had known about his past.

This was a past that included “hunting trips” around London looking for victims, suspected multiple rapes, the serious sexual assault of a child, the attempted kidnapping of a woman at knifepoint and numerous incidents of indecent exposure – these uncovered crimes being just “the tip of the iceberg”.

Lady Elish said she believed Everard would still be alive if police had done their job properly and taken the complaints of the other women he assaulted seriously. 

While Couzens represents a particularly dark episode in British policing, we know his case can’t be taken in isolation but reflects a police mindset that is quick to belittle women’s concerns.

This week, killer Iain Packer was finally brought to justice in Scotland, 19 years after the murder of Emma Caldwell, and following a 26-year reign of terror which saw him also convicted of 11 rapes and multiple sexual assaults against 21 other women.

One of the more than 20 women who testified against him claimed his name had been flagged to police by fellow sex workers in the years after Emma’s death, but “they didn’t listen”. Another woman said “hundreds of lassies” had reported Packer but were ignored.

Despite profuse apologies from forces such as the Met and Police Scotland, having been caught red-handed enabling male violence, there is no public confidence that much will change.

Also this week, Staffordshire Police held a “hate crimes” training day where they agreed that women who take measures to protect themselves against unfamiliar men are subject to “flawed unconscious bias”.

It is a view of the world that refuses to acknowledge the risks women endure daily because they are women. If their legitimate fears offend some men who object to being lumped in with the worst of their sex, that’s too bad.

Every three days, a woman is killed by a man in the UK and one in four women experience domestic violence.

The figures have lost their power to shock. We have long lived in a culture where, as writer Margaret Atwood put it: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

And now we are also expected to stand by while the police, the courts and even our news organisations class men convicted of rape and murder as female.

With a straight face, Sky News reported that a woman, Scarlet Blake, had filmed herself killing a cat before going on to murder a male stranger. Only later did the report add that the killer was a “trans woman”.

In its initial account of the case, the Guardian failed to mention anywhere that the murderer was transgender, giving the misleading impression that a woman had committed the offence.

Blake, who was referred to as a woman during the trial, has changed his pronouns but not his gender. Yet although he was sent to a male prison, he was recorded as a female criminal in official statistics.

Thames Valley Police said they recorded him as female on their crime recording system because he identified as a female.

Because so few women are convicted of murder – one in 20 in the three years between 2020 and 2022 – any male conviction classed as female dramatically skews the female murder conviction data.

Not only is this terrible for the integrity of social statistics, said Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, “it is also terrible for public understanding of murder and who commits murder”.

“This deceit by public bodies and news organisations needs to be sorted out, and quickly,” he tweeted yesterday.

The government belatedly addressed this distortion of the truth, telling police to list offenders as male unless they have legally changed gender. 

But Number 10 has no control over the brainwashing that has persuaded so many in public life that being a woman, with all that entails, is no longer an experience exclusive to women.

Is it any wonder that male violence against women shows no sign of abating when respect for women and for women’s rights is at a new low?

In a recent visit to the UK, the UN’s special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, found women were being failed here.

“Entrenched patriarchy at almost every level of society, combined with a rise in misogyny that permeates the physical and online world, is denying thousands of women and girls across the UK the right to live in safety, free from fear and violence,” she said.

Until we confront contested ideologies that spin lies about sex and gender and deny the reality of what it is to be a woman, there is no hope.

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