Rebecca McQuillan: Will there ever be a time when women feel safe?

Then there was the story of an Aberdeen electrician who was imprisoned after being found guilty of putting hidden cameras in the bedrooms and bathrooms of 17 women over a 10-year period. He watched them having sex, in the shower and using the loo. He might never have been caught except that one victim discovered a device under her bed.

Will there ever be a time when women are safe from depraved men?

I’ve yet to ask a woman about her own experience of sexual harassment and assault without being told of a litany of experiences, ranging from verbal street harassment to being touched on dancefloors or on public transport, to being “flashed at” (what a travesty of a euphemism) up to the most serious forms of sexual assault including rape.

I once confidently believed things were improving for women and girls, but I’m older now and if not wiser, then more sceptical. Women have become more outspoken about endemic harassment and abuse, certainly. Of the women I know who have been raped, none has ever reported it, but there is a growing willingness on the part of victims at least to talk to the police, even if the conviction rates for sexual offences remain depressingly low.

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But we cannot confidently say that women have become safer. Men are not collectively to blame for this, but the sizeable minority who are do a lot of harm. Those heart-stopping stories of women being abused, brutalised and even murdered by men just keep on coming, week after week, month after month.

A woman is killed by a man in the UK every three days. In barely over a month this summer, Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, were stabbed to death in Southport, Carol, Hannah and Louise Hunt were murdered in a crossbow and blade attack in Hertfordshire, and an 11-year-old girl was stabbed along with her mother in Leicester Square. There have been many other assaults and murders besides these. So commonplace is the violence that some deaths pass almost unmarked.

There were nearly 62,000 reports of domestic abuse in 2022-23 in Scotland and nearly 14,500 sexual offences last year - both offences where females are very often the victims - and those are just the reported incidents.

Assaults and harassment by different individuals in different parts of the country may seem unconnected but they are not. They all illustrate the problematic attitudes that a persistent minority of men have towards females. The Zero Tolerance campaign to eradicate violence against women and girls identifies gender inequality as the root cause of all this abuse. It points to “unequal access to economic, social and political power, objectification of women and unequal distribution of caring responsibilities” - deep-seated sexist norms in other words - as creating the conditions for it. Other forms of inequality, like being subjected to racism, exacerbate it.

And so we teach our daughters to fear. We don’t want to take away their innocence but we have to arm them with knowledge to help them stay safe from the predators who would do them harm.

I’m looking right now at a series of block graphs that say it all. They depict the difference between men and women when it comes to how unsafe they feel. In daylight, after dark and on public transport, the fear level among women towers over that for men. The Office of National Statistics data shows that women are dramatically more likely than men to be subjected to catcalls, whistles and unwanted comments, to be shouted at or insulted by strangers, or to suspect they are being followed.

It’s a complacent person who imagines that the march of progress will tackle this blight. Looked at from a historical perspective, the long-haul job of changing public attitudes, improving the lower status of women and challenging victim-blaming, has barely begun. Hell, the Scottish Social Attitudes survey as recently as 2019 revealed that 30 per cent of people thought a woman who wore very revealing clothing or got drunk on a night out was at least partly to blame for being raped.

Police Scotland’s That Guy campaign (“don’t be that guy”) aims to reduce offences against women by talking to men about male sexual entitlement.

A survey showed that a significant minority of young men were fans of self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate (Image: PA)

Tackling the unequal treatment of women is the right approach but we need to get much more serious about misogyny. The UK Government proposes to treat “extreme” misogyny as a form of extremism, though has yet to define it. In Scotland, there was rightly anger when hate crime legislation came in offering no special protections to women. A new Misogyny Act is promised. As Baroness Helena Kennedy says, some abuse is already criminalised, but “some behaviours are so normalised that law enforcement officials fail to act".

We can’t do nothing just because it’s hard to do something, especially at a time when a worrying gender divide is emerging among young people on a range of issues relating to feminism and women’s rights. 

Recent research by Ipsos and King’s College London found not only that young men were much less likely than young women to think feminism had benefited society, but that a significant minority were fans of Andrew Tate. Overall, only six per cent of Britons who have heard of Tate think favourably of him, dropping to two per cent among men over 60, but it leaps to 21 per cent among men under 30. There is something deeply worrying going on when young men are 10 times more likely than old men to think a self-proclaimed misogynist is a great dude.

Horrid stories of abuse don’t happen in a vacuum. We need to push back hard against the creep of misogyny or see our dream of a safe world for women and girls slip away.