#129 Institutions are failing Women: Joan Smith
“There is something profoundly wrong with the Criminal Justice System in this country.”
Listen Here (transcription below):
On this episode of the FiLiA Podcast, Joan Smith talks to FiLiA’s Sally Jackson about the many ways in which our patriarchal system fails Women who have been subjected to violence from men.
Joan Smith is a novelist, journalist and human rights activist. She began writing about violence against women after covering the murders carried out by Peter Sutcliffe in the north of England, which she described in her book Misogynies. She is also the author of the Loretta Lawson crime novels, two of which were filmed by the BBC. She is a former Chair of the English PEN Writers in Prison Committee and has been Co-chair of the Mayor of London’s VAWG Board since 2013.
Her latest book is Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists.
Follow Joan on Twitter at @polblonde
Transcription:
Sally Jackson from FiLiA in conversation with Joan Smith.
S – Joan is an author, a journalist and a human rights activist. Tell us a bit about your background. What made you, as a journalist and a writer, get involved with violence against women and women’s rights and those sort of areas?
J – It wasn’t a deliberate decision. I grew up and was a great feminist girl and young woman and I came from a very working class background and was an only child. My father always said – it doesn’t matter that you’re a girl and from a working class background, you can do anything – and I believed him.
I had a burning desire to change the world and became a journalist after I left university. I trained on a newspaper in Lancashire and then got a job on a radio station in Manchester. Most of the stations were Piccadilly radio. This was towards the end of what had become known as the Yorkshire Ripper murders.
I suddenly found myself working in a city I didn’t know at all. Where two women had been murdered in that horrible series of killings and I was working shifts. I immediately found myself in this kind of duel role because I was being sent to cover the murders both in press conferences, hearing the police and other journalists. Most crime reporters in those days were male.
I was also driving around the city late at night. My shift pattern was until 1.30 in the morning. At the same time, I was being told by those same police that women shouldn’t go out at night. They seemed to have no sense that women had jobs, my job was pretty unusual, there were Nurses, doctors and cleaners who had no choice but to go out at night.
I think if anything fired me up, it was that. Also the growing despair, the sense that they weren’t going to catch him, that they were completely and utterly hopeless.
While I was in Manchester, a couple more women were murdered. There was that notorious hoax tape released which always seemed to me to be very unlikely to be genuine. I did say that at the press conference when they played it for the first time. There were very few women at those events. All the senior cops were male, all the journalists were male and women had very little voice so when I applied for a job at the Sunday Times I said – we’ve really got to l look at these murders and the mess the police are making of it – and we did that.
I was haunted by that case; I still am in lots of ways. There’s been a lot of attention on it in the last few weeks because of Sutcliffe’s death and the Netflix film has created a lot of attention about the way the police behaved.
It would have been very hard to live through that time in the north of England and not be profoundly affected by those murders and what it said about the way women are regarded, still are regarded in this country.
S – Some Feminists I know who were living in the north and were aware not just of what was happening but the reactions to that and the way in which society was dealing with it and that it was women’s job to keep themselves safe and not society’s job to find and convict the perpetrator.
Coming from a family that said you could do what you want and learn what you want, it must have been quite a culture shock to go from a supportive home into the world of male policing and male journalism and their attitudes towards women.
J – You’re right, it was a hell of a shock. It had been a shock from the moment I started to train as a journalist in the sense that, the expectations on women in those days, when I arrived at the local paper they were saying to me quite casually – I’m afraid you’ll have to do all the reporting on court cases and going to council meetings when I’m sure what you really want to do is features and fashion – I’m saying – no, that’s not what I’m here for.
The casual sexism, it’s hard to think back. It’s not that long ago when there were all these assumptions about women. The constant battles about what women were supposed to be doing, what jobs they could do on the paper.
Then being plunged into the heart of this case.
When I went to the Sunday Times, we decided to get hold of the police report of the murders which had been kept secret. We knew that the report had been circulated around the world to other police forces to see it they had similar cases.
About a year later we got an envelope from the States, from the FBI and they said this is what we’ve got and we had the report.
What was absolutely staggering and amazes me to this day, was the way the police had written about the women they were supposed to be protecting. You realise they had these extraordinary prejudices about women.
That’s how they got it wrong because the first few attacks were not in red light areas, they were on women who just happened to be out on their own but the police were absolutely convinced that this was about prostitution. I didn’t think it was, I thought it was about vulnerability.
They described one woman who was living in Halifax who had gone for a drink with a woman friend on the night she was attacked, they said she had loose morals because she went to the pub without her husband. Another woman who was attacked had a West Indian boyfriend and he became a suspect. One of the few things we knew about the perpetrator was that he was white.
You just realise that they didn’t like these women very much. The men out there whose job it was to protect them and to track down this awful killer actually didn’t like the victims very much at all. It was profoundly shocking to see and of course it had a huge influence on the enquiry because what it meant was, because the senior cops didn’t have much time for the survivors, they didn’t listen to their evidence. At least three of the survivors said that he was a local man with a Yorkshire accent. But they thought they knew better and went haring off after this hoaxer from Wearside in the North East and derailed what was already a bad investigation. Two or three more women died as a result of that really bad decision.
How could you not get involved after having that experience?
S – There’s something sadly relevant about today and women who experience violence today and the police listening to them and listening to their stories. When we look at our atrocious record of sexual violence, that theme of just not listening and more importantly, believing women, doesn’t seem to have changed very much.
J – You’re absolutely right. One of the things I do apart from being a writer, I chair the Mayor of London’s Violence against Women and Girls Board which draws up the Mayor’s strategy. I’ve been doing this since 2013.
It draws up the Mayor’s strategy to reduce domestic and sexual violence in London and that means I have regular meetings with quite senior members of the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and also women’s organisations and I look at the figures very regularly.
In England and Wales, around 55,000 women report rape to the police every year and what happens to those rape reports? It’s a big thing for a woman to go to the police and say she’s been raped. The most recent figures are, that of those 55,000 women who report, fewer than 1500 result in a conviction.
You’re always being told you have to have safeguards for men and that sort of thing. But what about all the women who were reporting really serious and life changing and life threatening in some cases, crimes and are not getting justice?
As Dame Vera Baird, the Victim’s Commissioner has said – one of the things that this is doing is probably creating serial offenders because we know that men who get away with a crime will escalate.
One of the few cases where rapists get convicted in this country is when they are serial rapists and a number of victims who are not connected to each other. Then the case is more likely to be believed.
What you have is a situation where, when a woman reports a rape, much of the investigation focuses on her and her background. There’s been a lot, quite rightly, outrage about this. A woman will be asked to hand over her mobile phone, the information on that phone will be trawled to see if she has sent intimate pictures to her boyfriend. Has she exchanged texts to the man who eventually attacks her. It seems to me that that concentration is completely wrong, The person who should be under intense scrutiny and whose credibility should be questioned is the alleged attacker. The police are not even asking them to hand over their phones to see if they have been accessing violent pornography.
To this day, there is this not believing women and assuming that women are not reliable witnesses. I’m sure the police and the CPS would say that’s not true but how on earth do you get to a situation where 53 and a half thousand women are reporting rape and none of those women are seeing any kind of justice?
There is something profoundly wrong with the justice system in this country.
S – With those numbers I imagine the 53 and a half thousand women having been through that process and it not being helpful or successful for them, unfortunately if they experience another incident, they’re not going to go back and report again are they?
J – No, there’s a disincentive. For years now we have had the police and people involved in the criminal justice system saying – we really want women to report, we know it’s hard. We’re only talking about reported rapes here, we know that the actual number is much higher.
What has happened is and I’ve watched the figures go up every year, more and more women are going to the police and reporting these crimes and the result has been collapse in the prosecution and conviction rate. Instead of the system welcoming these women and making sure they get justice, the system has buckled under the load of reporting. To some extent that’s because of a lack of resources.
You’ll remember famously that Theresa May as Home Secretary, cut the number of police because she listened to people who told her that crime was going down. That’s true in some areas, it’s not true with violent crimes against women. There is undoubtedly a resource problem. I think it goes much deeper than that.
That leads me onto something I feel incredibly passionate about which is; why is this not a political issue? It just amazes me that MPs aren’t deluged with their constituents saying – what are you going to do about the failure to hold men to account?
S – Thinking about it as a political issue, it’s not going to be very long before we have local elections so there may be local politicians contacting people asking for their vote.
Do you think that ‘on the doorstep’ that violence against women is something that is raised by people? How do we ensure that our local and national politicians are aware of how much this impacts every woman’s life?
J – I think you’re so right to raise that. I’m a member of the Labour Party for most of my adult life and done a lot of knocking on doors both in London and the North of England on behalf of Labour and I don’t think anybody has ever raised this as an issue on the doorstep. It doesn’t come up.
I don’t know if that’s because women themselves don’t see it as a political issue or whether it’s a kind of despondency about even raising it, nobody seems to do anything about it. It just amazes me, given how bad the figures are in this country.
Really the criminal justice system in this country is failing women and has been for a long time. I’m talking mainly about rape. There is a failure in the justice system to do its job in relation to what’s happening to women. It’s astonishing that that isn’t a political issue. People should be knocking on doors and being asked – if we vote for you what will you do locally, at a local council level and also Westminster, to actually impress upon the government that something has to be done. There has to be a sea change in the way that crimes are treated and that women have to get justice.
Local councils can do things; I know they’re very strapped for cash at the moment. There are political questions that include: Are refuges being funded? Are we looking regularly at the rates of domestic abuse and sexual violence in our local council area? Are local council representatives talking to the local police about how they’re dealing with those crimes?
I think all of that should be happening and I’m not sure it is.
S - Recognising women who are experiencing violence within their home, then they’re probably not going to be able to share that information on the doorstep but it seems to me there’s a duty on our politicians to actually find out what’s going on locally because it’s not a big secret any more. We know the levels of violence against women so politicians themselves should be talking to local specialist services and what’s happening in some of the minoritised communities and how supported are they around violence against women.
We have the violence against women sectors working so hard and putting so much effort into keeping women safe and that being quite separate from what the politicians deciding on a local level.
J – A minor example, where I live in West London, when the first lockdown happened, one of the things that happened here was, I would go for walks in the morning and the parks were closed and there was tape over the benches and you couldn’t sit down, the playgrounds were closed. The local council had decided that it was unsafe for people to mix outside, so it arbitrarily closed the local parks.
What I happened to know because of the work I do is that reported domestic violence happened to be above average at that time. I was saying – hang on a minute, what about all the women who can only get away from abusive men by saying they want to take the children out or the women who want to call their mother or friend and can’t do it because they’re locked in a flat with their abuser.
That failure to marry up those things. There was a lot of fuss about it and after a few days the council changed its decision and re-opened the parks.
But it’s a really good example of how policy is made without taking into account the effect on vulnerable women.
It occurred to me the other day – how often in a local council meeting is there a discussion about levels of violence against women in the local area. I don’t think that happens very often. They might discuss funding refuges.
Local politicians should know these statistics, they’re available, they’re not difficult to find and they should see it as part of their job to address it.
S – If it was something affecting the male half of their constituents, they would be well informed.
J – Yes, it’s very frustrating. There’s such a long history in most countries of what is regarded as political being decided by the political class. It’s changed now, there are far more women MPs and councillors.
I think there’s a hangover from that period. Whether the bins are emptied is seen as an issue for politicians and all kinds of things like that but for some reason violence against women isn’t seen as a political issue. It’s part of crime and shoved to one side.
S – You touched on earlier about women having their phones looked at. The fact that women might have exchanged messages with someone is what you would expect, most women know the person who is being violent towards them. It just doesn’t make sense when you look at the evidence and the behaviour of our criminal justice agencies.
J - No-one has properly examined the assumptions that arise from that. Sometimes intimate texts might be found on a woman’s phone and an exchange from the man she is now accusing. The automatic assumption is well she exchanged those messages so she agreed with whatever happened.
There’s a massive failure to understand consent. The fact that a woman sent a text three months ago which is sexual in nature can’t possibly be taken as consent for a sexual act months later which she might change her mind about. That text doesn’t tell you anything about genuine consent. Sometimes the police themselves express anxiety about this.
A senior officer in London, some years ago, mentioned to me, a woman from a central European country who was living in London, had reported a rape to the police and they had been asked to take her phone. They found 800 messages in her original language. They didn’t know what they said because they didn’t speak that particular language. When the case went to the CPS, the CPS said – you have got to get all of those 800 messages translated. There was no evidence that they had any relevance to the case whatsoever. The cop said, the police doesn’t have endless resources to get all of this translation done. He also said – how do I know how a 19-year-old girl from that country speaks on-line to her friends and what it means.
So, there’s a lot of unspoken assumptions there. There’s been a rush to assume that anything that’s on a woman’s phone is relevant and I think that really does need challenging.
It says a lot about the unspoken assumptions about women that are still going on.
S – Yes, a determined effort to say – look there it was her fault all along – rather than spend the time finding the guilt of the perpetrator.
J – I think there’s an obsession with the credibility of the witness. There might be questions about that if there is evidence takes them in that direction. But it seems from the very beginning there is a search for material to undermine the credibility.
Women were asked to sign what is known as a Stafford form which is a blanket consent for the police to look at their school records, their medical records. Work records, their computers. This is trawling back to what women were doing when they were 10 and 11 years old when they might be 35 years old when this event has happened to them. It’s an extraordinary testament to the lack of trust.
It goes back to what we were saying, not listening to women and not trusting women and the idea that women are somehow untrustworthy.
S – We know about the increase in murders during the first lockdown. The whole idea of staying safe during lockdown has a whole different meaning when someone is subject to domestic abuse.
J – Yes, in the first lockdown it was very much that home was a safe place to be. Lots of us were saying and writing and saying – hang on a minute what about those who are trapped at home with an abuser.
We haven’t talked much about migrant women who might already be in a very difficult situation when the lockdown happened and already isolated and become even more so because of the effects of lockdown.
I was listening to meetings that were taking place at City Hall talking about how emergency accommodation could be arranged. All of that was left, during the first lockdown, to local authorities. They had the headaches of, when women were identified either from themselves or contact through an organisation – how do you contact them safely, how do you get them out of that situation without the abuser being able to find them. All of that was left to local authorities.
It’s very likely that because of language and cultural background who were isolated would become even more so. This time round Boris Johnson did mention the impact on victims of domestic abuse. That took a huge amount of effort from a lot of people to make that an issue that the government was prepared to think about.
S – As you say, it’s the vulnerable women who are the most affected by this. I was thinking about homeless women or women with insecure housing and it was the local authorities who were left to sort it out. In the first lockdown we were immediately looking at the street homeless or people who were sofa surfing and were unable to do that because of lockdown arrangements.
Here we are in lockdown three and it doesn’t seem to be happening so much and we’re in the middle of winter and it just seems that those women and men are forgotten about.
J – It does and it almost seems as if the government have limited capacity for thinking about problems. There was a huge effort in the first lockdown to get homeless people off the streets which was a very good thing but there doesn’t seem to have been any long term thinking about it.
I’m aware of it, there was a shocking number of homeless people on the streets including a lot of women. This time round they seem to have understood that they have to think about domestic violence and are prepared to put some money into that. But they’ve let the homeless issue slip. Is it not possible for the government to think about more than one thing at once?
S – It comes back again and again to listening. Working in women’s rights, what seems to happen fairly often is eventually we will get a policy decision and we think – yes – when actually this is a decision we’ve been saying to governments for years – this is what you need to do – if they just listened to feminists in the first place, so many people’s lives would either be saved or made safer much earlier.
J – Yes, I think that’s right. There are plenty of experts and I’m sure a lot of us didn’t want to spend most of our lives having to think about this. The expertise is there both at local and national level.
It’s such a mountain to climb because even when you get a ground breaking piece of legislation like in December 2015, the new law on coercive control, which was very important in recognising a form of abuse that many women have experienced and criminalising it and laying down penalties and the police and the CPS have been so slow in bringing cases.
I looked at some figures this week and for 2018 or 2019 the prosecutions had gone up to 17 and a half thousand relating specifically to coercive control legislation but that’s a drop in the ocean compared to the number of women who had suffered that and it also makes me think I’m very glad the government is going to make non-fatal strangulation and stand-alone offence. This was because there was a huge amount of pressure including in the House of Lords very recently so they’re now going to attach it to a Police and Sentencing Bill next month, we hope.
The problem with non-fatal strangulation, because it was a specific offence, it was often charged, if charged at all, as common assault. I think the maximum penalty for common assault is two years and two months in prison but actually two thirds of people convicted don’t even get a custodial sentence.
It looks as though this new offence, as a stand-alone offence will have a sentence of 7 years which a great improvement.
But then there’s the question as to how are the police going to investigate it, how are the CPS going to charge it so it’s a very long road. I don’t want to in any way undermine the efforts of getting changes in the law but we’re still dealing with a criminal justice system that is very slow to even use the tools they are given.
S – It’s so true, but without the resourcing behind it, the training for the police and the CPS, the ability to support women who do come forward and report these acts and the resourcing of women’s services, it’s such a long road to make a difference.
I’m reminded that long ago we have acts around sex discrimination and racial harassment, it doesn’t mean we don’t have sex discrimination and racial harassment now in 2021.
It’s not that the legislation is not worth having but there’s a lot that has to go with it to make it work.
J – Yes, and if we look at the Domestic Abuse Bill which in some ways is a very welcome piece of legislation as much for the recognition of domestic abuse as a separate offence. But we all know and the government have been told that a crucial group of women have been left out of that. Women without resource to public funds, women with insecure immigration status and they’ve been told time and time again and they have not responded.
It is very much two steps forward and one step back.
You can see that there are certain vulnerable communities that just don’t seem to register with the government. I’m almost lost for words when I think about it.
S – If we do move forward and we do have this important legislation, it’s so important that it protects all women and not just some women who it’s easier to protect. Homeless women will have multiple issues as well as violence.
J – In a way that takes us back to where we started. The attitude to victims affected and undermined the investigation because the police did not like the victims very much. They got it into their heads that certain types of women almost brought these things onto themselves. Later when women who had nothing to do with prostitution were being murdered, the police were extraordinarily overt about how he was now attacking ‘innocent’ victims.
You wouldn’t get that overt sexism and scorn in the present day.
There’s always been this unconscious search for the perfect victim which also means there’s a group of women who don’t get the same kind of protection from the criminal justice system. A lot of those women are women who don’t speak English as a first language or have insecure immigration status. It’s not as overt as it once was but I think the criminal justice system still has the problem with thinking that its job is protect all women not just the ones who make ‘good’ victims.
S – It’s not a system that is built for women in any way. We weren’t thought of when it was first designed. It makes me think, we do like, at FiLiA, to raise the issues affecting women’s lives but also to be active about it. What can we do? What can women get involved in that would help to either support women who are experiencing violence or challenge the system that is not listening.
J – This has to become a political issue. When people are being asked to vote for a particular candidate they should be asked: If you’re elected, what will you do to support refuges in your area? What will you do to reach vulnerable women in your area? What will you do in Parliament to make sure the voices of women are being heard? How would you like to see changes in the police service? How would you like to see changes in the CPS?
I think these are questions that most politicians have never been asked by their own constituents. If they actually felt that this was an issue that affected their votes, I think that would make a lot of difference. It would not be that hard to do.
While the Domestic Abuse Bill was being debated in Parliament, there were very good MPs like Jess Philips who raised a lot of issues that we’re talking about.
I wonder how many MPs actually got an email from constituents or a letter asking – what are you going to do? Migrant women and vulnerable are being left out of this Bill.
For me, after spending years of my life writing about this and trying to raise awareness, I think it has to be a political issue and not simply regarded as something women go on about and the rest of the political body doesn’t have to think about it.
S – So, not party political in any way, just using our power as constituents to speak for ourselves and other women and contact our MPs and local councillors and hold them to account and ask those questions.
J – Yes, they expect to be asked questions about rubbish collections and the state of the roads, they should also be expected to answer questions about: Is there enough refuge provision? What is happening to it?
Local politicians should be aware of crime statistics. There is a wealth of material that could be used here which is finding out how many women are raped and sexually assaulted in this area? How many of those cases actually lead to a prosecution? What are the levels of domestic violence in this area? What provision is there for them?
Maybe I’m asking too much. I just want this to something not just we as women talk about but something that politicians regard as part of their everyday business and responding to this.
Basically we have a huge failure in the criminal justice system and that should be right at the top of the political agenda.
S – It’s only by getting it to the top of the political agenda that we’re ever going to be able to do anything about it.
J – Absolutely and you can see how effective this is. You’re right, it’s not a party political issue. Theresa May, when she was Home Secretary, always talked about doing something about domestic violence and violence against women. She did change the law, she brought in FGM protection orders and we spoke about coercive control becoming a criminal offence.
So, it isn’t a party political issue but you can see the impact something like the Labour MP Jess Philips standing up in parliament and reading out the names of women who were killed by men in the past 12 months.
That has been really effective and we need more of that. We need to make connections from that. It’s not just one MP who raises that once every year, we need other MPs listening to that and thinking – I have a role in that, I should be doing something about this.
S – It’s a really important part, thinking about femicide itself, we are looking at charities collecting that data and giving us that information to understand the level of femicide in the UK. We’ve worked with other countries who, likewise, have a femicide census or something similar. It shouldn’t be charities and NGOs that are relied on to collect that information. Why is that not important to the government?
J – It is extraordinary; Karen Ingala Smith did amazing things with the Counting Dead Women project which has then become the femicide census.
Again, there’s really important information there about how many women are killed by a man known to them, who are in a relationship with them or had been in a relationship with them.
Also, an extraordinary element of that is the number of matricides, the number of women killed by their own sons and other familial relationships.
What we’re getting is a much more accurate picture of who is a danger to women and how often that is centred within the family.
So all that information is there and as you say, it’s been left to NGOs and civil society organisations to collect and publish that information. If it mattered to governments, they should be doing it as well.
S – And if not doing it, putting some resourcing into it to ensure it continues and we’re able to get the most out of that information.
J – And changing policy in relation to that information. Now that it’s become clear publicly that home is not a safe place for lots of women.
How could the government, in the first lockdown ignore the fact they were effectively telling women to stay home with their abusers?
If there was joined up thinking there, that should have been right at the front of ministers’ minds when they announced the first lockdown. It clearly wasn’t.
S – There we go back to not listening to women.
J – That’s the theme isn’t it?
S – Thank you for your time and all the work you do for women. You consistently speak up and stand up for women. We really appreciate that.