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WOW2 - March 2023: Women Trailblazers and Activists, 3-17 thru 3-24 [1]

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Date: 2023-03-18

March 21 , 2021 – In the UK, a pilot program launched by women in Nottingham, aimed at making misogyny a hate crime, took a big step forward when the government announced that police forces across England and Wales will be required to collect data on crimes apparently motivated by hostility towards women. In 2015, a hate crime commission set up by Nottingham Citizens, allied with the national civil society alliance Citizens UK, held a meeting of community leaders, local officials, and members of the public, in a packed room at Nottingham Trent University. Melanie Jeffs, then manager of Nottingham Women’s Centre, listened to discussion of different forms of hate to be examined: racism, homophobia, disability hate crime, and so on, then: “I suddenly found myself saying ‘what about women?’ What about all the things that women experience simply because they are women: being threatened, touched, stalked, whistled and generally made to feel uncomfortable in public spaces. We had learnt to accept this as part and parcel of womanhood – but maybe we didn’t need to? Surely this should be part of the hate crime spectrum too?” In 2016, under then Police Chief Sue Fish, Nottinghamshire became the first force in the UK to record public harassment of women – groping, using explicit language, or taking unwanted photographs – as well as more serious offences like assault – as potential misogyny hate crimes. The force charted the scale of the problem for the first time and tailored their responses. Since the pilot began, reports of harassment increased by 25%, and in the first two years 265 misogyny hate crimes were recorded. Researchers from Nottingham and Nottingham Trent universities in 2018 found that 75% of those who reported incidents had a positive experience, although harassment of women and girls, particularly from black and minority ethnic groups, in public spaces across the city remained endemic, with nine out of 10 respondents either having experienced or witnessed it. Initially belittled as “arrests for wolf-whistling,” Fish was refreshingly blunt when she first spoke to the Guardian about the pilot in 2016. “Some trivialise it and say: ‘Oh, so I can’t chat up a woman now.’ But I think there’s a significant difference between ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ and ‘Do you want some cock?’ This is about the unacceptable abuse of women because they are women and it has to stop.” O ver 2,000 officers and call handlers received training, much of it done by Martha Jephcott, cofounder of the women’s group Love and Power: “I remember I made a slide of all the different things women did to make themselves safe, walking in the middle of the road, keys through the knuckles; obviously the people I was training were predominantly men and at the beginning it was so obvious to me, but I had to get them to see it.” By August 2016, ‘Mel’ Jeffs, the woman who spoke up at the first meeting, had received hundreds of threatening messages and derogatory remarks about her appearance on Twitter and Facebook. Jeff said she “brushed off” most of the messages, but “There is one that I’m having discussions with the police about … People think it’s completely acceptable to target women this way.” Nottinghamshire Police said, “We will be speaking to one of the perpetrators to reiterate the seriousness of their actions.” Reflecting on the scheme in 2021, Fish remembers women saying they felt proud to be from Nottingham. “What we heard in feedback from women’s centre was that women walked taller, they had their heads held high, their shoulders back, it was very physical. As opposed to what we’ve heard very viscerally [since Sarah Everard was killed by a police officer in March 2021] about how women make themselves smaller and less visible.”

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/18/2158840/-WOW2-March-2023-Women-Trailblazers-and-Activists-3-17-thru-3-24

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