Organised Gender Crime: Al Capone vs Rape
By Robert Anderson
PHOTO/Sijeka
Last week, Mick Duthie, head of the Met’s Sex Crime Unit, Sapphire, unveiled a new set of initiatives. As a flagship force, the Met sets the standard for policing across the country. Unfortunately, in the case of Sapphire, the standard has hardly been glittering. Sex crimes reported to Sapphire have dropped by 14 per cent compared to last year. It is not that fewer women are being assaulted in London; it is simply that fewer women are coming forward to a force in which they have no confidence, with good reason. Last month a former Sapphire officer pleaded guilty to a catalogue of misdemeanours, from failing to investigate reported rapes to not pursuing suspects and falsifying police records. This has left 11 suspects at large. Gold-standard for policing? Hardly.
Now the Met’s getting tough on sex crime. Apparently. In an interview with The Guardian, Duthie claims the force would adopt ‘Al Capone style’ tactics to combat sex crime. Suspicion rises immediately: Italian-American mobsters are not known for dismantling the structures of patriarchy. Proposals included monitoring suspects and ‘picking them up’ for other minor crimes, alongside use of licensing laws to close venues ‘generating’ high numbers of sexual assaults. Forgive me if I’m being dense, but how does a pub ‘generate’ sex crime? It hasn’t got any hands with which to grope, or any mouth with which to catcall. Also, pubs don’t have penises. I was under the impression that men commit sex crimes against women. With hands, voices and penises. It seems that, yet again, the forces mandated to protect women are party to the continual effacement of the perpetrator. Displacing the true responsibility which lies solely with the perpetrator, the Met are undertaking wonderfully PR friendly, high-visibility tactics which further distance the sex offender from his crime. As the average victim-blamer will attest, the removal of drink and women from a situation may reduce assaults. Unfortunately, as a study by Psychology of Women Quarterly found, only 2.2 per cent of rapes occur in bars. “Ah yes, but isn’t the focus on the shadowy figure stalking the lone blonde home from a night out, sporting grubby mac and devilish leer?” Sorry, but the same study found that only 3.6 per cent of rapes occur outside. Furthermore, more than 80 per cent of rapists are known by the victim. So let’s play scenarios: the likelihood is that a sex offender will be someone the victim knows and the attack will occur somewhere that is neither in a bar or between a bar and elsewhere. So at what stage will closing down the bar have any effect on sexual assault?
For sure, bars and clubs are havens for less violent but profoundly demeaning instances of sexual assault. As evidenced by the Facebook group ‘Misogyny Overheard at Oxford’, Camera seems to be a hotspot for wandering hands and casual sexism. Would closing the place reduce sexual assault at Oxford? Simply, no. Would assaults continue to occur at Wahoo, Bridge or Park End – yes. Sex acts don’t occur because women are in particular clubs. They occur because sex offenders want to commit, and believe they can get away with, assault; the grope in Junction this week will become the sexist slur in the Bullingdon next week.
The perpetuation of offender-effacement and victim-blaming are also painfully evident in particular portions of Duthrie’s statement: “We need to educate people that if they go out and get hammered they are vulnerable, vulnerable to being assaulted, vulnerable to falling over and vulnerable to being raped.” The smooth conflation of responsibility here is staggering – apparently a woman is equally as responsible for tripping over as she is for getting raped.
While getting rapists off the streets is all well and good, it does nothing to change the fact that 93 per cent of rape cases don’t result in conviction. As Vivienne Hayes, CEO of the Women’s Resource Centre, told the Huffington Post Duthie’s plan will change little: “Keeping offenders off the streets by charging them with unrelated offences achieves absolutely nothing by way of changing attitudes or preventing future offences. It completely negates justice for survivors, heightening women’s feelings of disenfranchisement towards the Met Police.”
It is clear that this interview confirms the fears of those who have lost confidence in the police. Policy makers and enforcers continue to lay the onus upon the victim, not the attacker. They are happy to commit resources to ineffective policies and, most importantly, still cannot ensure that a victim of sexual assault will receive the justice they deserve.
Anonymous
31/10/2012 at 22:07
Recognising that it is possible for a woman to reduce her risk of being raped by taking certain precautions does not amount to ‘blaming’ her for being raped, just as saying people should install burglar alarms to reduce the risk of theft doesn’t amount to blaming them for being robbed. This ideological false dilemma (rape is caused by rapists vs rape is caused by women) applied by feminists does not help impartial. sober discussion of how rape can be prevented.
Anonymous
01/11/2012 at 12:28
There is quite a clear difference between crimes against a person’s property and against their body. ‘Installing’ women with rape alarms transmits a markedly different ideological message to advising home security. The argument that walking down the road with your I-phone out is equally as provocative as parading around in a mini-skirt is extraordinarily demeaning to a woman’s bodily rights – property can be taken and replaced while sexual abuse, physical or otherwise, is an affront to a woman’s very personhood. By placing greater emphasis on what women ‘should’ be doing to prevent rape simply participates in a culture which, whether you would like to admit it or not, seeks to distract attention from offenders. It doesn’t seem that this article is encouraging women to place themselves in particularly dangerous situations, or is dismissing the need for circumspection and attention to personal security. The issue seems to be that the police should be tackling the reason why certain places and situations are dangerous, and that reason is that people commit sex crime, not because women put themselves at risk. Any neglect of the former which puts emphasis on the latter is, frankly, counter productive to the wholesale re evaluation of societal attitudes to sex required to reduce sex crime.
Ed Seabright
03/11/2012 at 00:17
In response to the first commentator: Of course spreading information about how to avoid crime can be a valid and indeed important thing to do: the first thing any man or woman does when arriving in a new place is to find out which areas are safe or dangerous. The issue here is that the entire focus of anti rape campaigns and laws revolve around how women should change their behaviour to avoid being raped, which in a society where the vast majority of reported rapes, let alone all rapes, go unpunished, is completely missing the point. Awareness campaigns and especially police campaigns which focus on the behaviour of women perpetuate a culture in which rape is viewed as an unavoidable fact, and that the burden of preventing rape falls on the women. Most women are acutely aware of the possibility that they might be raped, and live with this fear for most of their lives. In this context, constantly putting pressure on women to change their behaviour, be it how they dress or how they choose to spend their evenings, is absolutely a way of placing the blame for rape on women.
Look at the context. Rape convictions are impossibly low. Women and girls who report rape are routinely ignored (see the Rochdale atrocity). Men pressuring women into sex is laughed off or excused (guys will be guys right?). Saying that these kinds of measure do not amount to victim blaming is being impossibly narrow minded and naive.
Andy
26/11/2012 at 00:07
This article (along with other similar ones) always seem to suggest that it is a simple choice between giving advice for how to avoid being a victim of crime (apparently synonymous with “victim blaming”) and preventing the crime through the use of the law.
However, it completely fails to suggest in any explicit manner how the effectiveness of the latter could be significantly improved; there are occasionally stories of the police shockingly letting victims down but this is a only a rare factor.
Conviction rates are routinely trotted out with no real context provided. While we live in a country that requires proof beyond reasonable doubt, many of the 80% cases of claimed rape (I wasn’t clear whether these stats were from convictions or not) that involve two people who know each other will naturally be very hard to achieve convictions for. When it is one person’s word against another, how do you suggest proof beyond reasonable doubt is achieved? Even in the current situation, many innocent men can have their lives destroyed by being made the subject of such claims.
Put simply, there is no clear way for the law to prevent rape. Accepting this and giving reasonable advice for helping to minimise riks is not the equivalent of passing the blame; it is a realistic recognition of the situation rather than some unhelpful idealistic view. It is very far from perfect, but it is the most effective course of action available.
If you have any implementable suggestions that you feel should actually be invested in then please share them instead of just going on the attack.