I was on my way to the gym at 6am one winter morning (allow me this small flex) when a van pulled up alongside me. The driver rolled down his window and started talking at me — I looked nice, he said (false! I’d only been awake 11 minutes, I looked barely animate), where was I going, he wondered, “hey sweetheart! Stop and talk!”
It was dark and I was on my own walking through a Hackney council estate. My general technique in these situations is to just keep walking, face forward, don’t engage, don’t show emotion. Like most women, it’s a technique I’ve honed over years of “smile love”s and “show us your X”.
The tides are, of course, turning on catcalling. Last December, Redbridge council became the first in the country to issue a £100 fine to a man for catcalling. In March this year, MPs approved plans to make street sexual harassment an official crime — the bill, which has government backing, will mean that catcalling, following someone or blocking their path could carry a sentence of up to two years in prison. And today, speaking to the Standard’s chief political correspondent Rachel Burford, Chief Inspector Louise Jackson said she was in “no doubt” that the roving police squads who’ve been patrolling the streets of Redbridge every night of the week, targeting catcallers and handing out the £100 penalties, would be rolled out across the entire capital.
The scheme — which includes signs across the borough warning that ‘cat-calling is now an offence’ — was implemented after a survey of 1,843 women in the area found that 91 per cent had experienced catcalling and 62 per cent reported being followed by a man. This, after last year’s tragic murder of 35-year-old Zara Aleena, who was pursued by her assailant through the streets of Ilford.
I’m lucky; I have rarely felt unsafe and, finding themselves ignored, few men have taken the trouble to persist. But I am always annoyed by these encounters. It’s the audacity that sends an electric prickle of rage up my spine — imagine feeling so secure in your rights, so safe in the knowledge that your voice deserves to be heard, that you think it’s totally fine to shout at a stranger on the street. I simply do not understand — where are your manners? From the age of two, when I first started to form sentences, I was taught not to interrupt, not to bother people and not, under any circumstances, to shout at strangers (on the street or otherwise).
It’s hard to believe that men aren’t also taught this — if I ever have a boy child, they’ll be told, like I was, that failing some kind of life or death event you do not shout at people on the street. Unless you’re, say, walking down Caledonian Road and the person walking towards you happens to be on fire, and they simply haven’t noticed then it’s disrespectful, and you have no right.
On that particular winter morning, the rage was closer to the surface than usual. I was in a foul mood already — I’d just dragged myself out of bed, it was so early, so cold and so dark. After a minute of the van crawling along beside me (a minute is a long time in this situation), I snapped. I stopped, turned to the van, took my headphones out and screamed “oh just f*** off”. The two men sat stunned for a moment, then they started hurling abuse at me (“b***h, s**t” etc), then they drove off. What exactly they hoped to achieve by driving alongside me in their van I will never know - but surely they didn’t think I’d enjoy it?
On her recent visit to Redbridge, accompanying the police unit who was tackling catcallers, Burford told me that many of the local men who she approached for comment treated the whole thing with thinly veiled disdain — there were eye rolls and some suggestions that police time would be better spent on other matters. This attitude isn’t just the preserve of men —over the years many women have lined-up to proffer a counterintuitive take on it all, that catcallers are harmless and that being catcalled is basically flattering.
The fact is, though, the act has very little to do with flattery or flirtation. It is a display of dominance, part of a matrix of behaviours and attitudes which together create a world that doesn’t feel safe for women.
When I say ‘it’s the audacity that annoys me’ what I mean is that underpinning the act of catcalling is an attitude of entitlement (‘I feel I have the right to do this’) and a disregard for the impact that these actions will have on the other person. Left unchecked, who’s to say that these two things — entitlement and disregard — won’t drive the perpetrator to do worse than just catcalling? Multiple studies over the years have shown that perpetrators of all crimes — especially of sexual offences — start ‘small’ (flashing, for instance) but that their behaviours escalate in severity the more they’re left unchecked. It was the same with Wayne Couzens, it was the same with serial sex offender Pawel Relowicz, who murdered 21-year-old student Libby Squires in Hull, and it was the same with Zara Aleena’s assailant, Jordan McSweeney.
For those of us on the receiving end, it’s death by a thousand paper cuts — one lone incident isn’t likely to make a huge amount of difference; you might feel momentarily afraid, ashamed or angry. But multiple incidents, over years? Then fear, shame or anger become the background noise to your life. No one should have to live like this.
I’ve been groped in public places throughout my life (in bars, on the street, on the tube etc), I’ve never reported these incidents because I accepted that they were a part and parcel of womanhood. That acceptance is a direct result of the period that I grew up in — when I was a girl, in the 90s and early 00s, you were taught to just deal with it — ‘these silly men can’t help themselves!’
I look back now and flinch. Young women and girls deserve so much better than that — and if the way to deliver for them is to employ roving police patrols to target catcallers before they graduate onto bigger crimes, then I’m all for it.
