Is There an Alarm Bell Loud Enough for Women at Risk?

Why do we continue to ignore them?

The man who admits he raped and murdered London resident Sarah Everard was jokingly nicknamed ‘The Rapist” by colleagues, three years before he was hired by the Metropolitan Police.

Wayne Couzens was allegedly given the nickname because he made female employees at the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC) feel uncomfortable. It has also emerged from the Independent Office for Police Conduct that Couzens was accused of flashing (his genitals) on two other occasions, events which look like they weren’t fully investigated by his employer at the time.

Nice, huh?

Not only do we have two serious incidents being brushed off, but when female colleagues at the CNC mentioned his inappropriate behaviour (as they must have done), it was treated as a joke by the other men. We don’t have to imagine what Couzens must have been doing for those women to speak up at all, because most of the time we just ‘put up with it’.

Obviously, there’s now an ‘outcry’, calls for resignations at the top, and promises of a public enquiry into the vetting processes, but for Pete's sake — what does it take?

The ‘head in the sand’ approach happens in the wider population, too.

The Femicide Census looked at women murdered in the UK between 2009 and 2018, and found that at least 1,425 women were killed by men; of those murders, 62% were carried out by men who were currently or previously in an intimate relationship with the victim. Almost half of these men had known histories of violence against women, including murder, and there was prior abuse of the victim by them in at least 611 cases, (59%).

Astonishingly, violence or other abuse had been reported to police in almost a quarter of these murders, meaning that not enough was done to prevent the men from becoming increasingly violent and the women weren’t taken seriously.

And how many of us have worked with guys who were known to behave inappropriately yet not much was done? The guy who always stands too close? The one who stares at your breasts or comments that he can see your bra? The married client who keeps asking you out, the boss who implies he wants something in return for giving you the best shifts, the customer who touches your bottom every time you go near him. The list goes on.

While no one’s saying these cases will escalate to physical violence, “creepiness” can cause distress for women, often because we don’t quite know how far the person will take things. A 2016 study described the response to creepiness as -

“…anxiety aroused by the ambiguity of whether there is something to fear or not and/or by the ambiguity of the precise nature of the threat”.

In other words, it’s not ‘nothing’ and jokey responses to these situations fail women.

Thanks to social conditioning, many women don’t report inappropriate behavior because they “don’t want to appear rude”.

In talking to women for my book, time and time again they reported a reaction to inappropriate behaviour that was rooted in putting themselves second — not wanting to make a scene, trying not to ruffle feathers, avoiding a family split, and so on.

In other cases, the backlash of getting someone in trouble at work is enough to silence us, no matter what we’re putting up with.

“You’ll ruin his career” is a common response and “Just stay away from him” a widely-accepted ‘solution’ to the problem. By the time a woman complains about a man’s behaviour at work, you can almost guarantee it’s been going on for a while, and often, other people know about it too.

Yet what do we do?

Not a lot it seems, until someone really steps over the line and then all hell breaks loose. Police forces promise ‘thorough’ top-to-bottom investigations, and blue-chip companies issue press statements and company-wide training pamphlets.

The UK government has spent millions on committees to look into the widespread problem of sexism at work, but really, how much proof do we need? Unison, a UK public service union, has been describing sexual harassment as an “urgent workplace issue” for several years now, while the Trades Union Congress produced its “Still Just A Bit Of banter?” report on sexual harassment back in 2016.

Meanwhile, prompted by hundreds of schoolgirls who’ve had enough of sexism in schools, the government undertook a rapid review of the situation only last month. Speaking to nine hundred schoolchildren, as well as leaders, teachers, governors, parents, and stakeholders, the review has revealed how prevalent sexual harassment and online sexual abuse are for children and young people.

A glimpse of how long such abuse had been going on unaddressed comes with the admission that “It is concerning that for some children, incidents are so commonplace that they see no point in reporting them.”

Perhaps more damning were the findings that many adults underestimated the scale and seriousness of the problem and pupils saw no point in reporting abuse because nothing would be done about it. Additionally -

“…especially girls, told us that they do not want to talk about sexual abuse ….the risk of being ostracised by peers or getting peers into trouble is not considered to be worth it for something perceived by children and young people to be commonplace. They worry about how adults will react, because they think they will not be believed, or that they will be blamed.”

(There’s that social conditioning again.)

We are failing girls and women when we leave it till the eleventh hour to deal with sexism in any form. What we see when we’re eventually prompted to act is always just the tip of the iceberg.