New UK police powers pose risk to domestic violence services
Michelle Wright
WVoN co-editor
Concerns have been raised about the impact that forthcoming changes to local policing in England and Wales will have on violence against women services.
On 15 November Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) will be elected.
They will be accountable for tackling crime in their local area and will have control of the police budget.
This will have huge implications for women’s organisations, the End Violence Against Women (EVAW) coalition has warned.
Sarah Green, their spokesperson, said: “Those elected will have the power to determine funding for domestic and sexual violence services.
“This will affect the priority given to tackling violence against women, and funding for specialist services such as Rape Crisis – which we know make a crucial difference in supporting women and girls after assault.”
EVAW, together with Rape Crisis England and Wales and the Women’s Resource Centre (WRC), are now calling on women’s organisations to lobby their local candidates to ask them to make dealing with violence against women a local police priority.
Ms Green added: “We urge women’s organisations to start pursuing candidates and making demands of them now. Get in contact and tell them about the importance of specialist women’s services.”
Welsh Women’s Aid has already responded with a manifesto for candidates to sign.
It was recently revealed that over 80 per cent of confirmed PCC candidates to date are male.
The most high profile females to stand so far are former solicitor general Vera Baird and ex-MP Jane Kennedy.
Further information on the changes can be found on the EVAW website. Resources are also available from the WRC.
Sexist violence is one of the biggest killers of women in the UK – 1 in 3 female visitors to A & E is because of gender violence, suicide, family murder and rape all permeate out from the basic attitude of hate based on gender. And yet the judiciary still refuse to categorise it in its own right, in the way that racist and homophobic hatred is. Until we have the courage to call it what it is, rather than fragmenting the picture into a million broken shards, we will not get sexism taken seriously, let alone sexist violence. And men are skirting round taking a good hard look at themselves and their culture in much the same way the Catholic Church struggles to confront male violence against children.
I completely agree Vicki. There are mountains of evidence that tell us that rape, particularly violent rape, is more about power and sadism than sexual gratification. Despite this, as you say, nobody seems to want to take about the sexism of sexual assault. It is much easier for our society to engage in victim blaming, to twist events in such a way as to figure out how the victim somehow “invited” the attack. Awareness campaigns tend to focus on the behavior of women, or on the conditions or environments that “lead” to sexual assault. They seem to completely ignore the sexist attitudes and rape culture that are the actual (both underlying AND immediate) cause of sexual violence. We need to face the fact that RAPE IS A HATE CRIME. When someone is targeted for violence based solely on their gender, it is just as much a hate crime as targeting someone based purely on their race or religion. Likewise, forums where men gather to threaten and harass women because of their views or their appearance or any other reason (sadly, these kinds of things inundate the internet right now) is hate speech, pure and simple. The justice system needs to recognize this as such. I remember a story of a teacher charged with hate speech (and rightly so!) for saying that the Holocaust was just a Jewish conspiracy and never happened. And yet, at the same time, we have teachers and other prominent figures raving about how women are all sluts and whores and deserve to get raped if they act in a way that is perceived to be “promiscuous”. And everyone just accepts it as a part of popular media. BOTH are hate speech, and sexual violence, by its very nature, is a hate crime. Our society needs to wake up and recognize that.
Graeme
Stand for Prime Minister – go on, stop just spouting your common sense humanity and do something about it!!! Totally agree, but don’t understand why such a large slice of feminism wants to call it something different or suggest it is something different than any other hate crime. Maybe its the scale of it, or the proven history of where this type of hatred leads nations to … any thoughts?
I think it has a lot to do with the varying levels and aspects of normalization. Historically, racial equality has often preceded gender equality. France, to name just one example, was the first country to extend universal suffrage to all MEN, regardless of race, but did not include women in this “universal” suffrage until over 150 years later! For some reason, gendered discrimination remains, to this day, more “invisible” (as in, everyone refuses to see it) than racial discrimination. As a society, we are more comfortable acknowledging racism than sexism. But as you’ve said, it goes beyond that. Because even feminist thought tends not to focus on the hatred involved. Sexism is often framed as a patriarchal ploy to subjugate women. This is part of it, sure, but I think when feminists implicitly adopt that view, they lend patriarchy and misogyny a “rationality” that does not exist.
Politicians will say their attack on women’s rights and “women’s” programs are about morality, or the economy. Religious figures will say it is about God’s will. We all know that their flimsy reasoning falls apart without much prodding. Ultimately, it is about anger, and hatred. We see this in the oceans of vitriol leveled against women on the internet, where anonymity gives people license to vent these feelings. Even feminist thought tends to focus on the way these people are socially conditioned to find this acceptable. That is of course such an important point, but I find we tend to shy away from the underlying question: where is this anger, this hatred coming from? We address objectification every day. But many people objectify animals as things that exist for our pleasure, while at the same time, very few people honest HATE animals. This pattern does not hold true with regard to women, who are the target of not JUST objectification and subjugation, but outright and baffling hatred. I don’t pretend to understand why, but I think one reason this is not addressed as much in even feminist theory is that it is, frankly, terrifying. It reflects an irrationality and savagery latent within our culture, that even those critical of said culture don’t want to accept. We prefer to talk about patriarchy and sexism as a kind of “civilized” gender discrimination. When in fact it is an invisible and rancid barbaric core. That is my thought, anyway.
Haha. Also, I don’t think I have the requisite network of evil connections or stacks of blood money to make it as a politician. Being barely into one’s twenties probably wouldn’t help either. Maybe someday, if/when I become a rich old white guy, I could infiltrate the political ranks. I still cling to the hopes that some of those rich old white faces are doing just that, and that their hearts aren’t quite as withered as their skin, or as black and white as their suits. Doubtful, though. My generation has a lot of work to do. I reeeeeeally hope we’re up to the task.
I think it is psychopathic … when I studied psychotherapy and read up on the symptomatic thinking of psychopathy, it exactly mirrors chauvinistic thinking. I think the thing that drives the hatred is that most males, one way or another, with the very obvious exclusion of your good self and other enlightened souls, buy into the ego enhancing idea that they are intrinsicly superior to females. It helps them deal with their day to day position at the mid and bottom end of the male pack that there is a whole substrata of humanity called women and children that are lower than them in males’ esteem. To help them justify this, every mistake a female makes is then projected onto every female as a trait of her ‘breed’ separate to men’s mistakes which are seen just as an individual’s mistake rather than indicative of the whole ‘breed’ of men. Equality in education and work opportunities is fuelling this hatred as women confound the psychopathic model and do well in the world and prove themselves to be equal in general intelligence, ability to drive and all the other areas that men and society have said they cannot undertake because of their breed characteristics. The only way this psychopathic thinking can deal with this is to pour hatred and scorn onto the object that is confounding their world view point. As you said, I too see rape and sexual assault as sexist violence rather than sexual violence, and see the killing of females throughout our country like the recent 12 year old girl in Mitcham as a sexist murder rather than just an abhorent act by one individual. It is interesting to note how many girls are attacked by males who pick them out for their gender … the sexual aspect is a bit of a red herring to my mind, it is part of the reason for their attack but their gender and the psychopath’s view of them as an object rather than a person because of their gender is far more the driver for the subsequent behaviour towards them than hormones and other BS that society like to put it down to. As for the younger generation’s grasp of gender hatred, can’t say I really can see much hope for a mass enlightenment given the prevalence of gender hatred propoganda which is how I see porn. Eroticised violence towards females. I wonder if all the men featured in porn were termed pricks and wankers how popular the genre would be amongst men… Am interested how come you are so switched on to the hidden world around you? You have an insight that most 50 year olds don’t have. Are you a young Yoda?!!!