It's definitely NOT up to women to fix the male threat of abuse and attack

 

Once again  (as I did back in March) I find myself blogging about a subject that scares the living crap out of me as the father of a daughter. That, again, we find ourselves on the wrong side of a hideous act perpetrated by a man (a policeman at that) against a woman, and an equally hideous response from those in authority who have callously once again failed to miss the key points in this crime. 

In fact the response from the head of the Metropolitan Police ("Flag down a bus for assistance!" - Do you see any buses in the picture to the left?) was just breathtakingly awful, short sighted and almost laughably inept. But no one's laughing. I'm certainly not, and I'm sure that any woman within sight of this awful comment wasn't taking it as some sort of lightbulb-pinging-above-head revelatory moment either. 

As the header in this post says, it is not up to women to fix this problem - and probably the wisest thing I've heard all week surrounding the cowardly murder of Sarah Everard was from a former Psychology Professor, stating that the main problem is that we do not tackle this issue early enough, and should begin to build on the foundations of a respect for women and girls right back as far as nursery and early years in boys. 

I entirely agree, and I also think that it's not the sole duty of education systems to reinforce that respect from an early age, it is absolutely the duty of parents (both parents) of boys to raise their kids to treat everyone respectfully, and to cut through the sort of behaviour that, left unchecked, leads to nastier stuff later on. 

My daughter has to deal with the stupid early-teen-level shit that boys think is utterly hilarious on a daily basis. On her walk to school there are the inevitable cat-calls (worse if she's having to wear PE Kit) so I now have to walk her to school myself to ensure it doesn't happen (sadly I can't walk her home from school so she still has to put up with it). Notably, it's always boys plural not "boy on his own" that usually does this sort of stuff (back to the 'cowardly' comment from earlier on). You can imagine these lads have the sort of dads who think "Give us a smile, love!" is a harmless comment made jocularly when a lone female happens to pass by when all that comment achieves is to make said female feel uncomfortable at least, at worst threatened. 

And that's a large part of the issue. In some boys and men, there is a disconnect between what they think is harmless and funny and what a girl or a woman would think constituted cat-calling or verbally threatening behaviour. The disconnect sometimes goes so far that verbal can turn into physical. Blocking the path until they get the validation or response they require. Both my wife and my daughter have been in situations like this and all we can do as her parents is try to coach her in the safest ways to get out of situations like that when really it shouldn't happen at all. 

In school things are worse. When I was at school, if a boy hit a girl, or verbally abused a girl, sometimes things would go unchecked but quite often other boys, and sometimes girls themselves, would intervene to nip that behaviour in the bud. Teachers would also take instances like this more seriously, but this was back in an era when teachers had far more effective measures for dealing with stupid shit like this. I'm not advocating the return of corporal punishment, but I feel that teachers are now inadequately able to metre out any kind of effective punishment other than the removal of said boy from said class, or from school altogether (something that most boys wouldn't blink an eye at, particularly if they're already having problems elsewhere and at home, so exclusion achieves nothing). 

I think because I grew up as a council estate kid with no strong male influence (no father figure), I didn't see women in the family any differently than they saw themselves. I also find it way easier to be in women's company than I do men's purely because I can't engage in that brainless 'banter', though like most men there have been instances and incidents in the past that I look back on where I've also been guilty of that stupid behaviour, not so much at school but definitely at college and uni. I'm not coming at this from the direction of "I can do it, so you can too" but I'm definitely coming at this from the direction of recognising and acknowledging that society is broken, and blame is being metered out against the wrong people entirely. 

On Twitter, women have been universally pissed off with the weak response to this crime (life sentence, sure, but then all the revelations that colleagues knew all too well that this foul bloke had a 'reputation' yet did absolutely nothing to report him to his superiors or put that behaviour in check in any way). Rightly so, their anger and exasperation is entirely justified, and their fight will go on.