In the wake of Sarah Everard, there has been a renowned reflection throughout the UK of the danger women face in their day to day lives. Although this danger has been always been prevalent, it seems as though it is only addressed after cases are publicised by the media. “An investigation by UN Women UK found that 97% of women aged 18-24 have been sexually harassed”, this is the reality of being a woman in the UK, and it is the ignorance of the continued harassment that leads to the unfortunate tragedies we see in the news, and yet at that point there is still shock that they have even happened.
Whilst whistling at a girl on the street may not seem like a form of harassment, to many people it is a strangely accepted part of walking around or just existing outside for a woman. Personally, I kept a tally of the amount of times I was wolf whistled, shouted at, and honked at through the month of August out of curiosity and considering I isolated for two weeks due to Covid-19 my answer was 14 times. 14 times in two weeks, most of which were running along my road. There is an underlying acceptance that this behaviour will not change and so we are just to expect it. Of those 97% who have been sexually harassed, “96% admitted to not reporting those situations because of the belief that it would not change anything”.
So, addressing these concerns, “Priti Patel insisted that the UK government was committed to preventing violence against women”. The government have also launched the “tackling violence against women & girls” strategy for 2021 following previous strategies in 2010, 2016, and 2019. There is also the introduction of Domestic Abuse Act 2021 which aims to help reduce the risk of violence against women and girls in a domestic context. This is all positive development towards helping protect women against violence, yet, how is it that women are protected when the violence comes from the police or the government itself. Sarah Everard was assaulted and murdered by police officer, Wayne Couzens, after he falsely arrested her with an aim to kidnap.
Women are sexually harassed in the street, in bars/restaurants, in the workplace, on public transport, quite literally anywhere that they can exist there is an example of sexual harassment. Even online, “a report from the Fawcett Society found 45 per cent of women who had experienced harassment encountered it online through sexual messages, cyber harassment and sexual calls.” There is more stress on women to report when they are harassed rather than preventative measures put in place to attempt to stop the harassers. The argument that harassment cannot be prevented because there is no stopping it is merely a perpetuation of the ‘boys will be boys’ mentality and that men have uncontrollable urges and so preventative measures cannot be enforced.
Violence against women has been ingrained in UK culture for so long that it is not surprising that this level of harassment has been left to be underlying and overlooked as commonplace. Marital rape was only considered illegal after the case of R v R [1991] UKHL 12. So until 1991 it was considered legal for a man to rape his wife. A survey carried out in 2018 for the End Violence Against Women coalition highlighted some alarming misconceptions from people in Great Britain about rape.
There is a shocking lack of education around what constitutes rape, some which seem highly unreasonable. Under no circumstances when a person is asleep should assaulting them not be rape, and yet 6% of people surveyed believe this to be the case. There is a desperate call for sexual health and education in this country, harassment needs to be taught in schools as unacceptable and then this truth supported by law and government. The sheer fact of the matter is that the government is failing to protect women and girls against violence, “while there were 52,210 rapes recorded by police in England and Wales in 2020, only 843 resulted in a charge or a summons – a rate of 1.6%.” Women are discouraged to pursue rape charges because of many reasons, the mistreatment during police interviews, the trauma of having to give evidence and see their attacker, the repercussions of a trial- if it gets that far- and being accused of giving consent.
According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the year ending March 2020 it was “estimated that 4.9 million women had been victims of sexual assault in their lives. This included 1.4 million who had been raped, or had faced attempted rape” with “98.5% of the rapists identified as men”. Furthermore “in the year to March 2020, 207 women were killed in Great Britain. This means about one in four killings were of women.” Women are at risk every single day, not only on weekends, and not only on nights out. Maybe its time to retire the caveat of women not walking alone, not wearing earbuds, carrying their keys as a potential weapon, not jogging at night, not wearing provocative clothing, not drinking too much, not being too flirty, not going on blind dates, not “leading men on”, and most definitely do not come across as “asking for it”. And instead merely hold men accountable.
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