Natalie Fleet was only 15 when she got pregnant by an older man. At the time, she says she didn’t really know how to describe what was happening; didn’t see herself as being groomed, or as a child still not legally old enough to consent. If anything, she worried that she might be the one who had done something wrong, given she was the one being called a slag and a slapper. Only now, more than two decades later, does the newly elected Labour MP for Bolsover feel able to say publicly that an experience about which she apparently still has nightmares was statutory rape.
Having met the force of nature that is Fleet five years ago when she first stood unsuccessfully for election, I’m struck but not surprised by her courage in volunteering a story that perfectly illustrates what a complex crime rape can be to investigate, and how horribly common abusive behaviour is – or at least, how common it would look if everyone was as willing to talk this openly about it.
Violence against women is now a national emergency, according to a new report from the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), which feels like a strangely belated statement of the painfully obvious. In 2022-2023 reported cases of domestic and sexual violence, stalking, harassment, exploitation and child abuse in England and Wales were 37% higher than in 2018-2019. This leap is only partly explained by greater willingness in post-#MeToo times to report things that, as Fleet says, might not always have been previously understood as crimes.
What else, apart from greater willingness to disclose what was always happening behind closed doors, explains why life appears to be getting more dangerous for women rather than less? Deputy chief constable Maggie Blyth’s warning, that young men are being radicalised by online misogynists peddling aggressive messages about women, grabbed the headlines, and it’s certainly a toxic phenomenon that deserves to be taken seriously. Of course there’s more that parents and teachers can do to challenge this apparent backlash. The same is true for the big tech platforms, which, as ever, did too little too late to dissociate themselves from the likes of the disgraced YouTuber Andrew Tate, now facing trial on charges of rape and human trafficking in Romania and the UK. Of course it’s ominous that one in six young men under 29 say feminism has done more harm than good, according to research by King’s College London, or that under-25s were less likely than pensioners in a Crown Prosecution Service study to realise that people might not be free and able to consent to sex even if no physical force was used. Some boys growing up in an overtly feminist world seem to be developing views that would have shamed their grandfathers.
But Tate is arguably more symptom than cause of a misogyny that still runs deep, and according to the NPCC report, the average age of perpetrators of rape, sexual violence or domestic abuse is a hardly teenage 37. Though offenders may be getting younger, for the most part these are grown men not lost boys often repeatedly and systematically attacking, harassing and seeking to control women. Each year, a shocking one in 20 adults in England and Wales – so about 2 million – will be perpetrators and one in 12 women will be victims. The awkward question this report doesn’t answer is how many offenders are doing it largely because they can; or, in other words, because they’re still unlikely to get caught.
While the arrest and charge rates in rape cases thankfully now seem to be rising according to the NPCC findings, the courts are so hopelessly logjammed that victims of violence in all its forms can wait years for justice. Along the way, some will inevitably choose to drop their cases rather than live with something so traumatic endlessly hanging over them. Probation services are overstretched, prisons full to bursting, women’s refuges and social services underfunded, and police so overwhelmed that difficult, sensitive investigations still often fall to inexperienced officers. A separate deep dive published this week by the London victims’ commissioner, Claire Waxman, into stalking offences – up 11-fold in the capital since 2016/17, partly because of a change in the way domestic harassment cases are recorded – found only 9% ended in a charge, caution or other form of community resolution. There’s plenty here for the new chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to consider, in her ongoing review of everything that might be going wrong under the bonnet of British public services. That’s before we get to the highly publicised failings – and in some cases shocking convictions – of police officers themselves. There’s something distinctly jarring about forces describing violence against women as a system-wide challenge they can’t solve alone, true as that may be, when sometimes policing has been literally part of the problem.
Yet there is hope in this latest plan. The last government’s decision to designate violence against women and girls a national threat was one of the better ideas to emerge from a Conservative Home Office. It pushed police to treat the issue as a high-level strategic challenge, like terrorism or organised crime, rather than an inexplicably vast stream of unrelated cases. Yvette Cooper, the new home secretary, has taken a close interest in a Metropolitan police project to identify and pursue the 100 most dangerous offenders in London, which could be expanded to other forces if it proves successful. Essex police are experimenting with a preventive programme, identifying patterns of behaviour likely to end in domestic violence and intervening early, offering perpetrators help to change in return for close monitoring to protect potential victims. They measure success in fewer women getting hurt, not more convictions. But we’re still a long way off a criminal justice system in which women are confident of being taken seriously, and hardened perpetrators are genuinely afraid of getting caught. The latter is now the missing piece of the jigsaw for a new prime minister who never fails to remind us he was once director of public prosecutions.
What women often want to know is why some men seem to hate us so much, as if by understanding we could somehow make it stop. But in the absence of a satisfactory answer to that painful question, what’s crystal clear is that crime flourishes when it goes unpunished. The culture in which our sons grow up matters; of course it does. But it is rigorous law enforcement that ensures the things some men do to women have visible, inexorable consequences. Let’s see how fast the culture changes once they do.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
