By Kieran McCartan, Ph.D., David S. Prescott, LICSW, & Kasia Uzieblo, Ph.D.
Working to prevent sexual abuse
is a difficult and challenging endeavour. The nature(s) of sexual offending is
complex and difficult for people to comprehend at times – why would someone rape?
Or sexually assault a child? Professionals in the field often hear that people
who commit sexual abuse are mad, bad, or sad, and some of them are, but not
all. As we have discussed over many years, sexual abuse is common in society,
too common for the people who commit it to be abnormal, random strangers.
People who sexual abuse live and
work in our communities and are often people we know. This can present challenges
for us as communities, since sexual abuse is so common it has been normalized
in some quarters (for example, see previous blog posts regarding abuse within
religious institutions, sports, and university campuses). This is not
acceptable and should never be.
The seeming acceptability of
sexual abuse weakens victims’ motivation to seek justice and get support; they
often feel that they will not be heard and will not get what they need from the
criminal justice system. In the UK, this has often been the case with police
not always investigating cases or pushing cases to the Crown Prosecution
Service. In the end, victims feel unheard, unsupported, and disenfranchised.
Over the last couple of months suspicion
towards the legal system has gotten worse with the prosecution of Wayne
Couzens, a serving police officer, who abducted, raped, and murdered Sarah
Everard in London and the Met (London’s police force) response to the case. One
wonders whether trust at the institutional level can be rebuilt and what are
the consequences for female victims of sexual abuse if they do trust the
system, the police, or society to take the offence seriously.
Although it hasn’t received much
coverage in the US, the Everard case has galvanized the UK. Sarah Everard was
walking alone, home from a friend’s house in London early this year during the
height of the national lockdown when she was stopped by Wayne Couzens a serving
(but off duty) police officer, who “arrested” her under COVID-19 legislation.
He convinced her to get into his “unmarked police car”, which was a rental car,
where drove her out of London, raped, and murdered her. The footage was caught
on CCTV as was additionally footage of his movements and behaviour.
As the case unfolded, it turned
out that Couzens had a history of misogyny, engaging with prostitutes, exposing
himself to strangers, and other antisocial behaviour that the police where
aware of but did nothing about. It became public during his sentencing (he
received a life sentence) that colleagues knew about his actions and referred
to him as the “rapist”.
There were warning signs. The
response from the Met police force stopped short of a rogue case explanation,
but we
know that’s not true, as there have been
other cases of serving and retired police officers engaging in sexually
inappropriate and sexually abusive be haviour. The real is issue for the police
is that they did not acknowledge his worrying behaviour which then gives the
impression that they do bot take sexual abuse seriously. To make matters worse
the Met suggested that women who did not feel safe being stopped by a police
officer should be “shouting
out to a passerby, running into a house, knocking on a door, waving a bus down
or, if you are in the position to do so, calling 999.” This response
has been criticized across the board and is seen as the ultimate example of the
problem, it suggests that the Met police force does not think that it needs to
change, does not take responsibility for what happened, and (again) suggests
that victims are responsible for their own safeguarding. This case has has
completely undermined trust in the police in the UK and makes victims less
likely to report sexual abuse cases, and if they do make them less likely to pursue
convictions.
What should the Met have done? How can they rebuild trust and accountability? There are several enquiries going on currently into what was known by who, for how long and what was, or was not, done about it. But these all take too long and there needs to be a short/medium term response. The police need to:
- Admit that they mishandled the case.
- Accept that there are issues with members of the police, the same way that there are members of any organisation, and pledge to do more about it internally.
- Consider how they assess potential candidates to the police as well as monitor and check in with serving officers.
- Recognize their severe public relations problem and spend time in communities finding out what their perceptions of the police and surrounding expectations are as well as how they can change them.
- Confront misogyny within the police, the way that they have started to deal with race and ethnicity, and develop realistic standards hat officers must attend to.
While we recognize that there are
good and proactive police officers and that this case is a rare, extreme example
it does highlight that there needs to be more done around misogyny, sexism, and
attitudes to sexual abuse within the police. Victims need to know that they
will be supported by the police and that reporting sexual abuse is more than a
paper exercise.
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