Police tackle rape culture, badly.
From Another Angry Woman.
The Met make a rudimentary effort to tackle rape culture. Poorly.
The Met have finally noticed they have a terrible problem with rape, spotting it as figures for people reporting rape to the police have taken a dive recently. So they appointed a shiny new head of their Sapphire unit, and in an interview with the Guardian he has announced the changes he will make.
He has plans for environmental interventions to tackle rape, notably using licencing laws to get pubs and bars where rape and sexual assault are prevalent shut down, and increase surveillance of men who have never been charged with rape, but intelligence suggests they are perpetrators.
Neither of these measures strike me as particularly effective in dealing with rape culture. Are there pubs and clubs which are “rape-hotspots”, or is it more that the heterosexual “pulling” scene enables rape and sexual assault rather easily. Meanwhile, the covert policing tactics are creepy, immoral, and will increase a perception of perpetrators as “the real victims” of rape. Furthermore, how exactly will they be getting this information? What makes some men pre-predators in the Met’s book?
Basically, these are rather authoritarian and punitive measures for dealing with a problem which is societal.
The good news is, this probably won’t really be the focus of the Met’s new approach to rape, because the new chief is also going to focus on women, raising awareness about how they can “reduce vulnerability”. Yeah, so they’ve not changed at all in their stance towards victim blaming.
To sum up his approach, then, women should be a bit more careful, alcohol is definitely to blame, so maybe avoid going to pubs the Met don’t close down. Also, there’s some men who are predators, but the rest of them are probably all right.
Ineffectual, and fairly offensive.
What the Met should be doing (if they don’t go and live in the sewers and bother us no more) is looking at the shit in their own backyard. They contribute wholesale to rape culture. They’ve been implicated in huge failures to investigating rape, in ways which are criminally negligent. They have been implicated in rapes. When they actually bother investigating, it is half-arsed or downright invasive for the women.
And they just don’t understand rape and rape culture.
They have a lot of work to do themselves, but rather than focus on their own failings, they’re pointing to the nearest ghastly nightclub with a sticky floor and screaming “SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING.”
Society as a whole is fairly weak on its understanding of rape culture, and the police don’t help at all.
From Another Angry Woman.
How on earth are policemen that use porn supposed to tackle women who have been raped. Porn portrays raped women as happy to be raped, and enjoying the experience eventually. No wonder that no man believes women that have been raped, male mass media tells them and shows them that women and children are liars and trying to fit innocent men up. It has a totally psychopathic outlook on women and children, and if this is the only male media that even talks or shows women and children, men are not going to have a very good attitude to us. Having men in charge of investigating rape is like putting Gary Glitter in charge of investigating Jimmy Savile.
It does sound like a pretty bad attempt at sorting out the problem. But in fairness, it’s not down to the police to solve ‘rape culture’, frankly they can’t. This is a total society issue and has to be tackled in a range of ways from a number of different angles. It requires by-in in most, if not all, areas of society.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you say “And they just don’t understand rape and rape culture.” They don’t. That is the biggest problem. I’ve lost count of the amount of perfectly civil, reasonable men who have looked at me in disbelief as I try and explain these concerns. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s that they’ve not experienced the day-in-day-out underlying fear that most women learn to live with.
Given the rape-culture that we live in, amy moves are going to feel sluggish and too-slow. But at least the Met have started to tackle the problem, all be-it frustratingly poorly, it will hopefully open up avenues and opportunities for the groups who have solid experience in this issue to start a dialogue and move things forward.
I would prefer it to move a little quicker myself. I have a six year old daughter who was sexually assaulted in the playground by 5 boys. On the boys’ part it wasn’t maliciously done, but the school’s empathy and viewpoint was completely with the boys to the point that they refused to even see the effect that a week of bullying was having on my daughter. 1/3 girls in secondary school is sexually assaulted so think men have to take the responsibility for creating their culture where they refuse to think about the content, messages and culture their media and attitudes towards females produces.
Of course men should take responsibility. Everyone needs to. My point is simply that the police alone cannot ‘fix’ the rape culture. They are merely a part of it.
We should most definitely keep pressure on.