July 24, 2024 - 10:00am
The figures are staggering: two million women in England and Wales will be affected by male violence every year. That’s one in 12, and the situation amounts to a “national emergency”. The numbers are contained in an analysis of violence against women and girls by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), published yesterday.
It’s made headlines, not least because senior officers are highlighting the role of “toxic” misogynists such as the influencer Andrew Tate, who is facing charges of rape and sex trafficking in Romania. They’ve revealed that officers dealing with violence against women are in touch with counter-terrorism teams, comparing the risk to young men being radicalised by terrorist organisations.
I have long argued that there is a link between domestic violence and terrorism. Nor am I in any doubt about the impact of misogynists and online porn on the behaviour of boys and men who abuse women. But there is a bigger picture here, and we’re in danger of being distracted from it. The word missing from the NPCC report is “impunity”. For years now, it has been clear that the vast majority of rapists and abusers have nothing to fear from the criminal justice system.
In February, statistics emerged trumpeting the fact that the number of rape prosecutions in England and Wales increased by 54% in the 12 months to June last year. But the devil is in the detail: they rose from just 1,410 to 2,165. Around three-quarters of defendants will be convicted, but it’s a fraction of the almost 70,000 rapes reported to the police each year. The volume of domestic abuse incidents is much higher, around 900,000, but results in just over 50,000 prosecutions.
The reasons are quite clear, and I’m afraid the police are squarely in the frame. Over a long period, their ability to deal with sexual and domestic violence has been severely compromised by the presence of flagrant offenders in their own ranks. Wayne Couzens was a serving Metropolitan Police officer, protecting embassies and carrying a gun, when he abducted, raped and murdered Sarah Everard. David Carrick, another member of an elite diplomatic protection squad, raped at least 12 women and used his position to terrify them into silence.
Last year, it was revealed that more than a quarter of 548 Met officers accused of domestic and sexual misconduct were continuing to work without restrictions. Indeed, the Casey Report, commissioned after Everard’s murder, recognised that the Met’s vetting processes do not “effectively root out bad officers”. It also pointed to the force’s failure to identify “clear warning signs” among recruits, such as previous accusations of indecent exposure or domestic abuse.
What do perpetrators have to fear from police forces that either fail to recognise or tolerate such extreme misogyny among their officers? No wonder women who reported rape found themselves treated as suspects, told to hand over everything from their mobile phones to school reports. After an outcry, there are now restrictions on how much personal information detectives can demand, but the inevitable result of decades of victim-blaming has now been laid bare.
One in 20 adults will be perpetrators of violence against women each year, according to the NPCC report. (Adults? Surely they mean men.) The resources needed to identify and prosecute this volume of offenders are mind-boggling, but it’s too easy to point to creatures like Tate. The police must bear a heavy responsibility for a situation in which millions of abusers and predators are walking around without any fear of arrest, let alone conviction.
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.
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SubscribeI don’t think the New Arrivals know who Tate is, nor do they care.
If you are going call someone a ‘toxic misogynist’ then you need to say why, since terms like these are too often used to denigrate people who are simply traditionalist in their view of gender roles.
My observations show that women who like labelling men “toxic misogynists” and are constantly whining about “patriarchy” and “sexism” are extremely toxic themselves. My explanation is that this kind of women thus try to rationalise their unenviable personal situation, avoiding any responsibility for said situation and resorting to blatant blame-shifting and other similar tricks.
Btw, such women never say a word about misogyny or patriarchy in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan , to name but a few examples.
A “toxic misogynist “ is a man in a traditional marriage who denigrates his wife.
And a woman who dénigrâtes her husband?
The statistics are plainly b*******ks
And you know this because?
They may well be, but from the article it’s hard to know. It would be more helpful for an Unherd writer to unpack them a bit. After all, it is Unherd – it shouldn’t just be reinforcing and amplifying a mainstream narrative that we’ve all already heard on the news. Surely it should be questioning that narrative.
Tate has absolutely nothing to do with violence towards women.
Most such violence happens within marriages, usually with alcohol involved, working and sometimes middle class.
Tate made his money out of young single men, much more likely to fight with each other.
Yes, it’s rather absurd to depict the situation with violence against women as a phenomenon caused by a single person.As if there was never violence before Tate and all violence would disappear if he is convicted and goes to prison. (And it seems that the “if”is rather big in this case).
This primitive stance is not just stupid, but also outright pernicious, as it deflects the attention from the root causes of violence against women and the problems related to law administration and law enforcement in this area.
But Tate is teaching young men that women exist to please men sexually. These young men also watch a lot of porn that teach them that women enjoy being slapped, strangled and spit on. This, to put it mildly, does not produce healthy men who can have a loving and respectful relationship.
My point was that attributing the problem of violence against women to one person is a primitive approach which deflects attention from the root causes.
Ditto porn. To believe that Tate is the reason for men to watch porn is rather one-dimensional, to put it mildly. Porn has existed for millenia and will exist in some other form for many years ahead – without any involvement of Tate. Plus, a lot of soul searching should be done as to why exactly people resort to porn.
Btw, the cause and effect could be interchangeable here: could it be that men turn to porn because they cannot – for many reasons – find a loving and respectful relationship?
Could one of these reasons be the spread of the narrative about “toxic masculinity”, “male chauvinism”, “patriarchy”, etc., especially trying to “find” them where there are none?
Are men eclusively the ones to blame for the huge number of women who absolutely voluntarily put themselves on Only Fans and find this absolutely normal?
To conclude: there is a wide array of reasons why violence against women and porn exist. All these reasons should be analysed and addresed in a realistic way, rather than pointing a finger at the bad guy du jour and chanting, “Let’s all hate the bad guy. He is the root of all evil”.
Enormous amounts of sex is cheerfully indulged in by women on a regular basis so it makes the minority of instances where the women don’t consent difficult to prove absent clear evidence beyond the woman’s claim. It is rare for people to consent to have their goods taken from their home without recompense or for them to be beaten up – convincing issues of consent don’t usually figure in such trials.
Therein lies the problem. Of course it will be infuriating for a woman who has been raped not to have her word taken as gospel but to be questioned to try to establish if there is clear evidence to support her claim and to ensure there is no evidence that tends to undermine it. Despite some unsavoury characters existing in the police most officers will simply be trying to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to enable a successful prosecution to take place. Unfortunately, it is clear from the statistics quoted that often the answer is that there isn’t.
Unfortunately this is a message activists like the author are reluctant to accept and prefer to fall back on conspiracy theories to the effect that it is malevolent men standing in the way of more convictions rather than accepting the inherent difficulty of proving that something enjoyed by millions of women has in any particular instance not been agreed to.
I would agree with you in that it’s absolutely indispensable to make the difference between feelings and the principles of law.
Being a victim of crime, especially a violent crime, like rape, is terrible. And we all feel compassion for the victims and understand how difficult it is for them to fight for their right to be heard and to see justice done.
At the same time, law, including procedural law, should be applied in all its entirety, regardless of the feelings that people might have, even if these feelings are absolutely justified.
While we are on the subject: it never ceases to shock me how A. Tate has been presented as a criminal for such a long time, while he has not been convicted of any crime – at least, not for now.
Whether we like or loath someone, the presumption of innocence applies to them to the same extent as to anyone else. And I can see a dangerous precedent here: just because someone is unlikable and labelled a “misogynist “ gives rise to describing him almost automatically as a convicted criminal. What a slippery slope!
I regard rape as the second most heinous crime but one problem is that convicting the wicked men that do this is especially difficult.
Unless a victim has the wherewithal and courage to report immediately to the police and undergo what I should imagine is a very unpleasant examination, it will not be easy to establish whether sex, never mind r@pe has occurred.
If a man coerces a woman through threats, it must be hard to prove.
Many cases will come down to “she said, he said” and, I have no doubt, that many terrible attacks are neither reported nor are convictions achieve, least of all when those involved are intimate partners.
I don’t know the solution. I don’t believe giving up on the presumption of innocence is wise; in fact, I think it would be a disaster. I don’t know how to help those victims who fail to get justice.
I’m always sceptical when faced with another emergency involving one of the favoured victim groups, so I checked some of the statistics. To my surprise, there were nearly 70,000 rapes reported in 23/24 (not hate crimes or other conflated offences). To my bigger surprise they were only 16,000 reported in 2012/13.
That is a staggering increase in a really very short period. However the prosecution rate at 3% (using the figures in the article) is consistent with police performance in other areas. Burglary prosecutions are around 3.9%.
It seems the thrust of the article is entirely correct. The police are deflecting abysmal performance. It’s a shame it has to be framed in culture war terms.
The culure war is a big part of it. The ‘defund’ movement in the States began over the lie that cops are targeting minorities, ignoring that certain minorities are exponentially more likely to be involved in crime and, as such, far more likely to have encounters with police. Virtually all of those encounters end with live suspects being arrested. It is the belligerent few, and more are not black than black, who escalate matters. First, cops are treated as the enemy and when they predictably retreat, people like the author want to call them the enemy again. You can’t have it both ways.
For years now, it has been clear that the vast majority of rapists and abusers have nothing to fear from the criminal justice system.
No kidding. This is echoed across the Western world, certainly here in the US, where criminals are enjoying an elevated status and prosecutors base their campaigns on NOT prosecuting. Small wonder that rape and abuse would be included alongside theft, assault, and even murder as crimes that are hand-waved.
Govt is failing its constituents. It is doing so at scale, to the point where one logical conclusion is that the failure is intentional, its motive to destabilize society. and turn law and order into one more thing to blame on white supremacy or the patriarchy or some other ethereal boogeyman. Also, the UK continues to import a culture in which women are second class on a good day.
How many men are affected by male violence each year? We need to know this in order to contextualise the extent of violence against women.
Well said!
Surely the conclusion would be the same? Let’s say males are hurting males at even higher rates than they are hurting females (very possible, maybe even probable). We know female rates of violent crime are minuscule in comparison to male violent crime rates. The inclusion of male violence against men could only reinforce the conclusion that male violence is a huge problem and needs to be addressed.
The difference is that it ceases to be seen as patriarchal oppression, or some sort of war by men (in general) on women (in general). Recognising that most men are not violent in normal circumstances, and indeed are socialised not to be, would also undermine « toxic masculinity » arguments.
So it gets us closer to the truth, and away from biased narratives.
Most criminals will have held down a job at some point. This doesn’t mean that the organisation they work(ed) for tolerates the crime.
I think the first question we should ask is do the police know what a woman is.
Tough on crime and the causes of crime. But what are the causes of crime?
Are they variations of human wickedness and lack of self-restraint, or are they the results of deprivation or oppression? If the latter, how can the perpetrators be punished?
It is indeed a question of numbers. The amount of crime perpetrated becomes so huge that the police, courts and agencies are overwhelmed.
The ‘solution’ – though the task of government is really to find settlements – is for crime effectively to be permitted within certain parameters.
270 men arriving on the Kent beaches in one day? ‘Assist’ the ‘processing’ by removing the term ‘illegal’ from the description of them.
Shoplifting is now at such levels that it must only be a matter of time before the self-service model of shopping is abandoned and replaced by the return of open-all-hours type stores; the sort of arrangement that older folk may remember Sainsburys having in 1960. But with the addition of Arkwright and his goods heavily protected by shutters and Granville replaced by private
Dark Age warriorsguards out of the Tate mould.It’s now a simple matter to find pubs in seaside towns that have ‘security’ on the doors in the evenings; something that would have been unknown there in the 1960s.
This was simply a feminist diatribe against men. Not remotely informative or objective.
The real indicator is not Andrew Tate himself, but the fact that he became so famous and wealthy overtly promoting his misogynistic line.
There is a global war on women, where are the good men?
I guess it would be easy to prosecute rape and sexual assault if most cases involved repeat-offenders jumping out from behind a hedge at the local park, but most cases are nothing like that, and interpersonal complexities provide serious problems which can never be fully resolved.
As such, low conviction-rates are to be expected.
Relevant?
FROM THE QURAN – 33:50
“Prophet, We have made lawful to you the wives whom you have granted dowries and the slave girls whom God has given you as booty;…”
FROM THE QURAN – 23:5,6
“…who restrain their carnal desires (except with their wives and slave girls, for these are lawful to them…”
This really doesn’t follow – any more than showing that if a rare police officer once stole something, the whole police force is soft on stealing as a result.
We need to know so much more to be able to evaluate this bald statistic.
First of all why « affected by » not victims of? Were they not all actually victims, but perhaps witnesses who were « affected ».
Second, how is violence defined? Is all of this physical violence? Or does it include non contact acts interpreted as violence. Swearing, name calling, insults, silent treatment etc. The definition of violence is no longer as clear as it once was.
Third, how severe is the violence? Does it include stupid actions by teenagers which are wrong but don’t have serious consequences (if a girl slaps her boyfriend for cheating on her, is that violence so defined?)
Fourth, we need to know more about the gender balance of such violence. Amongst teenagers boys seem to be victims as often as girls. Amongst adults different researchers reach different conclusions on whether men or women are the the more frequent perpetrators of domestic violence.
Obviously there are serious cases which need to be seriously dealt with – but it may not help to portray this as widespread behaviour committed only in one direction.
Where is your proof for these outrageous ‘stats’ please?
In spite of the title – which is clearly politically driven – the report does recognise that women are not the only victims. Even « male victims » get a mention.
There is also recognition that identifying the primary perpetrator isn’t always easy.
From the report – one of the aims:
Interesting read for a bit of balance:
https://www.ncdv.org.uk/domestic-violence-abuse-against-men/
Another article about violence against women so of course your comments are all over it: minimising, questioning & ‘providing balance’ in a totally dishonest & frankly pernicious manner.
‘The word missing from the NPCC report is “impunity”.’
Indeed. Impunity for perpetrators but also for those working within the judiciary, not solely within the police. The wrongful conviction of the innocent Andrew Malkinson meant that a rapist was left free to reoffend, for decades. Andrew Malkinson was failed unforgivably – as was the public.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-66310919
Compare the photofit of the wanted man with Andrew Malkinson’s photograph.
Is there now a prosecution pending or would that be considered an unnecessary further embarrassment for the police, the judiciary and the CCRC?