FOLLOWING the death of Sarah Everard there has been a clamour for more laws to protect women. Most of these concerns relate to fears expressed by women, but should we police society based on fear?

Some in parliament have called for misogyny to be made into a hate crime. Holyrood decided against this when passing the new Hate Crime Act. But had this vote come a few weeks later, with Ms Everard’s death hitting the headlines, would we have had a different outcome?

The policing of personal relationships and interactions has been developing for some time, so it is no surprise to see that Downing Street has reacted to the murder by announcing that bars and nightclubs will have undercover police officers watching out for, “predatory and suspicious offenders”. Which nightclubs they’re talking about at the moment is not clear. Nor is it clear what a “suspicious offender” is.

Justifying this move, Boris Johnson explained that the Ms Everard case had, “unleashed a wave of feeling about women not feeling safe at night”, adding that, “We must do everything we can to ensure our streets are safe”.

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It’s interesting how few actual crime statistics have been used so far in this discussion. Few, if any, figures on the number of murders or rapes, for example, are discussed. Nor is it mentioned that when it comes to homicide rates, London in comparison to most cities in the world is remarkably safe already. Where this rate has increased in recent years it relates to knife crime and the killing of young men.

Discussions about fears rather than facts appear to be driving this discussion, helped by surveys that lump together serious violent acts with lower level harassment. The meaning of harassment is often extremely broad and at times includes jokes and winks.

Often discussed as an issue for all women, the picture we are receiving is one of constant fear based on the everyday experiences of women. But how everyday is this problem?

A barely discussed YouGov poll found that around half of women in the UK said they had been sexually harassed at some point in their lives. Most of this came in the form of a sexual joke or a comment about attractiveness. When asked about harassment in the last five years the figure dropped to 19 percent.

Now, nobody wants to diminish the effects of even relatively minor hassle but does this count as an everyday experience?

And it is not clear from this or other surveys what the women who have had some form of harassment think should be done about it, if anything. Do they want the police hanging around nightclubs or new misogyny laws passed?

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The key problem appears to be that within this discussion the only voice that has influence is the victim voice. The many women I know who think the discussion about protecting women is ridiculous and patronising are simply not heard. Rather it is the voice of the fear entrepreneurs, the activists and ideologues who have hijacked Ms Everard’s death who are engaged with.

In the past, fear-based policing was the preserve of right-wing reactionaries. The fear of inner-city black youth, for example, led to the panic about mugging and the police harassment of entire communities. At the time the left denounced this as a backward panic.

Today, politicians continue to make hay out of fear politics, but it is often so-called liberals and radicals who are at the forefront of calls for this fear-based policing.

Policing should be based on facts not fear. The more we develop fear-based politics and policing the more we risk heightening the levels of fear within society, something that will exacerbate the spiral of authoritarianism and the policing of personal interaction, the likes of which we have never seen before.

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