Natalie Fleet was just 15 when she was impregnated by an older man. At the time, she says she didn’t know how to explain what was happening. She didn’t think she was being trained, or that she was a child who wasn’t yet old enough to legally consent. Instead, she worried she’d done something wrong because she was being called a “slag” and a “slapper.” Only now, more than 20 years later, as the newly elected Labour MP for Bolsover, can she publicly say that the experience that apparently still haunts her nightmares was statutory rape.
Having encountered this force of nature five years ago when Fleet first ran for office and lost, I was impressed, but not surprised, by her courage in coming forward with a story that so perfectly illustrates how complex investigating the crime of rape is and how horribly common abusive behavior is — or, at least, how common it could be if everyone was willing to talk so openly about it.
Andrew Tate is perhaps more of a symptom than a cause of the misogyny that still persists today.
Violence against women is now a national emergency, according to a new report from the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), but it feels like a strangely belated statement of a painfully obvious fact: between 2022 and 2023, the number of reported cases of domestic violence, sexual violence, stalking, harassment, exploitation and child abuse in England and Wales increased by 37% compared to 2018 and 2019. This spike can only be partly explained by, as Fleet says, a greater willingness in the post-#MeToo era to report things that might not have necessarily been understood as crimes before.
Other than an increased willingness to disclose what has always gone on behind closed doors, what else could explain why life seems to be becoming more dangerous for women, rather than less? Deputy Police Commissioner Maggie Bryce’s warning that young men are being radicalised by online misogynists who spread offensive messages about women has attracted attention, but there is no doubt that this is a harmful phenomenon that deserves to be taken seriously. Of course, parents and teachers can do more to counter this apparent backlash. The same can be said for the big tech platforms, who, as always, have acted too late to disassociate themselves from figures like Andrew Tate, the disgraced YouTuber currently on trial in Romania and the UK on charges of rape and human trafficking. Of course, it is ominous that a King’s College London survey found that one in six young men under the age of 29 said that feminism has done more harm than good, and that a survey by the Crown Prosecution Service found that under-25s were less likely than pensioners to recognise that a person may not be free to consent to sex, even if physical force is not used. Some boys who grow up in an overtly feminist world seem to be developing views that would shame their grandfathers.
But the Tate case is perhaps more a symptom than a cause of the misogyny that still persists. The NPCC report finds that the average age of a perpetrator of rape, sexual assault or domestic violence is 37, hardly a teenager. Perpetrators may be getting younger, but the vast majority are adult men, not lost boys who repeatedly and systematically attack, harass and control women. A shocking 1 in 20 adults in England and Wales – around 2 million people – will be a perpetrator every year, and 1 in 12 women will be victims. The troubling question the report leaves unanswered is how many perpetrators do it mainly because they can – in other words, because there is no hope of getting caught yet.
While arrest and prosecution rates for rape cases are thankfully on the rise, according to NPCC findings, the courts are hopelessly overwhelmed and victims of all forms of violence can wait years for justice. In the process, some will choose to drop their cases rather than have the traumatic events haunt them forever. Probation services are overwhelmed, prisons are full, women’s refuges and social services are underfunded and police are overwhelmed, with difficult and sensitive investigations often being left to inexperienced officers. Another detailed study of stalking crime, published this week by London’s victims’ commissioner Claire Waxman, found that although there has been an 11-fold increase in stalking crime in London since 2016/17, due in part to changes in how domestic harassment cases are recorded, only 9% have resulted in a prosecution, a caution or some other form of community resolution. There is plenty to consider for new Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves as she continues to investigate what is going wrong in the UK’s public services. And that’s before we get into the highly publicized gaffes and, in some cases, shocking convictions of police officers themselves. There’s something distinctly unsettling about police portraying violence against women as a systems-wide problem that they can’t solve alone. And while that may be true, sometimes the police are literally part of the problem.
But there is hope in this latest plan. The previous government’s decision to designate violence against women and girls a national threat was one of the better ideas to come out of the Conservative Home Office. It encouraged police to treat the problem as a high-level strategic challenge like terrorism or organized crime, rather than as an inexplicably huge number of unrelated cases. The new Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has expressed a deep interest in the Metropolitan police’s project to identify and pursue the 100 most dangerous criminals in London, which could be expanded to other police forces if successful. Essex Police is experimenting with a prevention program, identifying patterns of behavior that lead to domestic violence and intervening early, offering perpetrators help to change in exchange for close monitoring to protect potential victims. They measure success not by the number of convictions, but by the number of women victimized. But we are still a long way from a criminal justice system in which women feel confident they will be taken seriously and repeat offenders genuinely fear getting caught. The latter is the missing piece of the jigsaw for the new Prime Minister, who is constantly reminded that he was once Director of Public Prosecutions.
Women often want to know why some men hate us so much, as if if we understood, we could somehow stop it. But while there is no satisfactory answer to this painful question, what is clear is that crime will flourish if it goes unpunished. The culture in which our sons are raised matters. Of course it does. But it is strict law enforcement that ensures that what some men do to women has visible and unavoidable consequences. Once the culture changes, see how fast it changes.
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