The month-long pilot trial sees female officers jogging out of uniform in targeted locations across Surrey with the aim of discouraging drivers and passersby from cat-calling and verbal sexual harassment. The scheme has even resulted in 18 arrests already.
What is this new operation, why do we need it?
Insp. Jon Vale, lead for Surrey’s violence against women and girls’ safer spaces, attributes the need for this new operation to the “far too common” casual harassment and cat calling seen not only in Surrey but globally, hoping it will deter offenders. A survey on violence against women and girls from Surrey County Council unearths some hard to follow statistics: they show that 94% of women experienced some form of violence and 49% went unreported; 62% felt unsafe in public places, and 44% reported sexual harassment.
Results from the operation report that one of the officers was beeped at within ten minutes, with another vehicle slowing down and making gestures thirty seconds later.
Are cat callers criminals?
Despite cat-calling and verbal harassment not being categorically criminal, these behaviour patterns may transfigure to more serious and violent crimes, therefore it is essential to eliminate that risk early. If someone has the audacity to shout obscene things at women from a car window, who knows what they may do when they aren’t behind it? Vale shrewdly observes how these apparently ‘innocuous’ acts can have a massive impact of women’s day to day lives and shatter their confidence to go out and jog altogether.
Although, there is legislation that criminalises public harassment, or more specifically, “A person who pursues a course of conduct which amounts to harassment of another person, and which they know or ought to know amounts to harassment” – if sentenced, you can expect six months in prison or an unlimited fine but you rarely, if ever, see people imprisoned for cat-calling.
Harmless? Or harmful?
After asking my female friends who jog if they’ve ever experienced any unwanted attention and harassment while simply exercising, it seems many avoid main roads altogether to escape “men looking at me, saying things, shouting out of their windows”. When asking them, and myself, how it makes them feel, many descriptors were: “diminished”, “degraded”, “fuming”, “embarrassed”, and “ashamed”. One of the police officers, Abby Hayward, who undertook this trial even questions, “What are they getting out of it?” and warns that these behaviours are just precursors to dangerous behaviour, but they are fixable.
Is women’s safety not worth police time?
Naturally there has been backlash to this endeavour. The ‘Boxing Saves Lives’ organisation have displayed opposition to this, saying “Have they got nothing better to do than to go finding new and inventive ways to be oppressed?” The Free Speech Union also voiced their concerns about wasting police time. On social media, they highlighted high crime statistics for shoplifting/robberies and suggested that the police pay attention to things like knife crime instead of ‘prowling the streets in search for lawful but disapproved remarks’. Isn’t all crime and its prevention individually important? Statistics for theft and knife crime are worrying, of course, but why isn’t 94% of women experiencing sexual violence also worrying? Much of this type of crime goes under the radar unlike other violent crimes which is why this trial is so welcome and important in the battle to eradicate violence against women and girls.
The Free Speech Union and other opposers don’t gauge how much of a blow to confidence cat-calling and verbal assault can be; some people even categorise this conduct as complimentary, if shrouded in a little abrasiveness. It is neither a compliment nor flattery, just degrading and derogatory.
When schoolchildren are targeted, how can schools help?
It is not uncommon for school children to be beeped at. I remember dreading the days when I’d walk home in my PE kit; by the age of 15 my friends and I would not even acknowledge the beeps or the phrases we couldn’t quite make out because it was ritualistic and routine by then. If anything, the afternoons we didn’t experience any abuse was rather strange and we were even offended — we internalised these casual comments and they were totally normalised, a terrible and damaging way for teenage girls to think.
Education boards should be proactive in dedicating areas of the school curriculum to the signs and dangers of sexual harassment. However, at my time at school I don’t recall cat-calling or verbal harassment being explicitly condemned or mentioned; it appears that the issue is worsening because no one is talking about it, letting it fly under the radar. Though in 2020, the government announced statutory PSHE teaching relating to Relationships and Sex education, promising in a document, “that children should know the concepts of, and laws relating to, sexual consent, sexual exploitation, abuse, grooming, coercion, and 14 harassment”. This is a promising step towards dissolving medieval views of ‘harmless’ cat-calling; instilling better values into the next generation will mean that one day women can walk, jog, leap and bound anywhere without feeling like a zoo animal.
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