“It’s crisis upon crisis,” says Dr Shonagh Dillon, CEO of Aurora New Dawn, a charity that provides services for victims of domestic and sexual abuse in Hampshire and the Thames Valley. Organisations like hers have not yet fully recovered from having to deal with the increased demand caused by Covid, and now they are braced for a flood of new calls for help. Back in March 2020, government ministers were warned by MPs, charities and campaigners against domestic violence about the deadly impact lockdown was likely to have on vulnerable women and children. “Stay home” was a bitter message for women who suddenly found themselves shut up, 24 hours a day, with abusive partners. And lo and behold, calls to the national domestic violence helpline rose by 60%, some of them made by concerned neighbours who heard alarming noises from next door.

Dillon recalls the early days of lockdown, when staff trying to deal with a deluge of calls from desperate women had to wait weeks for the government even to designate them as key workers. I tell her about sitting in on remote meetings organised by City Hall in the spring of 2020, as charities and local authorities struggled to respond to the crisis: attempts to set up emergency accommodation to save women from injury and worse were being frustrated by government departments, each of whom — Home Office, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government — claimed it was someone else’s responsibility. Perpetrators fully exploited the situation, telling police officers summoned by a 999 call that they couldn’t enter the family home because someone inside had Covid. They put trackers on phones and cars in case a woman managed to escape on the rare occasions she was allowed to leave the house, to go shopping or take the kids to the park. Social workers moving women to emergency accommodation had to learn how to check for such devices to prevent the victim being followed.

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Today it is not lockdown that is being exploited, but the high cost of living. Anxiety about making ends meet is creating ideal conditions for coercive control, a form of abuse that is not as widely understood as physical violence. Of course, the two often co-exist, with a history of financial abuse being revealed only when a victim is being treated for physical injuries. Money problems do not cause abuse but they make it worse, providing extra “leverage” for men who are already threatening and isolating their partners. “My abuser would check accounts when I had the debit card,” one survivor of financial abuse told Women’s Aid. “If I was food shopping, he would ask how much I’ve spent to see if I was truthful as he had already checked online. He would not top up the gas and electric meters so I had to spend all day with no gas or electric.”

Dillon is all too familiar with how coercive control operates. Survivors have told her about men who say: “You’re not feeding your kids. They’ve got holes in their shoes. I’m going to tell social services you’re a bad mother.” That is a terrifying threat to make to a woman who, through no fault of her own, is struggling to put food on the table or having to rely on charity shops to clothe their children. They already feel intense shame about their supposed shortcoming as mothers, something perpetrators understand very well and are eager to exploit. Women fear losing their children above all else — and abusive men can sound very plausible. How can a woman prove she’s not to blame — that money is being kept from her deliberately — when her partner sounds so reasonable to outsiders?

Shortage of money increases the pressures within relationships in other ways, as men who can’t afford to go to the pub or a football match spend more time at home. Researchers used to wonder why intimate partner abuse rises during big sporting occasions, such as the football World Cup, speculating that perpetrators were punishing women when their team lost. The answer turned out to be much simpler: domestic abuse increases whenever men spend more time at home, which is why the big rise during the Covid lockdowns came as no surprise to anyone. There were a spate of domestic homicides — 16 in three weeks — in the first month of lockdown.

Eventually, the government noticed. Covid “acted as an escalator and intensifier of existing abuse”, a joint report from the Home Office, National Police Chiefs’ Council and College of Policing belatedly admits. “It seems to have been weaponised by some abusers as both a new tool of control over victims and… as an excuse for domestic abuse and even homicide.” Two men, Anthony Williams and Hussein Egal, blamed stress caused by Covid when they were charged with killing their wives. Egal inflicted 70 injuries on his wife, Maryan Ismail, after (he claims) she had threatened to throw him out for having the virus. Williams strangled his wife to death, and then pleaded guilty to manslaughter, having told the police that lockdown restrictions had had a negative impact on his mental health. He received a reduced sentence of five years. It remains to be seen whether, in a few months times, men accused of murder will claim they were driven to it by anxiety about not being able to pay the mortgage.

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Homicides were not the only deaths linked to domestic abuse: there were also 38 suspected suicides of victims in the first year of the pandemic, a phenomenon so under-researched that we do not have previous years’ figures to compare it with. It attests to the desperate circumstances some women found themselves in, locked in with their abusers, as well as important questions about whether the women’s actions were voluntary.

Surely, surely, ministers would never make the same mistake again? But that appears to be exactly what is happening. “The suicide rate will definitely increase,” Dillon predicts. “It will happen if women can’t flee safely.” She asks herself every day how she can help victims, knowing that her organisation is struggling with its own costs, including soaring heating bills. Some of her employees are single mothers and survivors of abuse, and the cost of living is already hitting them hard. “I’m worried about my staff,” she says. Most earn between £24,000 and £26,000 a year, when they could get more than £30,000 in less stressful occupations. “We are going to lose staff hand over fist. We’re constantly fire-fighting,” Dillon says wearily.

Women’s Aid has addressed the looming crisis in an August report, offering a stark warning: “The cost of living is preventing women from fleeing domestic abuse.” Two-thirds of survivors told the organisation that abusers were using the cost of living increase as a tool for coercive control, “including to justify further restricting their access to money”. Almost three-quarters said that shortage of cash had prevented them from leaving. With private rents beyond the means of most victims, and mortgages prohibitively expensive, women feel trapped. “I feel like my only option to keep my kids is to go back to the marital home where he nearly killed me,” one survivor told the organisation.

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Two months ago, a group of charities said they were “disappointed” by the lack of government action on tackling the cost of living crisis. Women’s Aid is calling for mortgage payment holidays for victims, an emergency domestic abuse fund, and discounts on energy bills for organisations that provide services for women and children. Refuge has asked for the £20 universal credit uplift to be restored. The government says it is working across departments to ensure that victims, survivors and their families are fully supported, citing a £230m investment in its Tackling Domestic Abuse Plan.

What the government did not say, however, is just as important. The plan was announced in March, under a different administration, and some of the money is earmarked for long-term projects such as training to recognise abuse. The vast scale of the economic crisis has since become clear, yet one of Liz Truss’s first actions as prime minister was to abolish the role of women’s minister. The decision has been criticised by some Conservative MPs, including the chair of the women and equalities select committee, Caroline Nokes. Having a dedicated women’s minister gives us a voice — and also acts as a brake, forcing government departments to think twice about the impact of policies on women and girls.

If the government is planning a substantive response to a situation many women regard as an emergency, it is keeping very quiet about it. This time round, with so much evidence of the disastrous consequences of its predecessor’s tardy action in lockdown, it has no excuse. Another crisis is playing into abusers’ hands — and there is very little time left to save their victims.

This might seem an uncontroversial policy for organisations providing accommodation for female victims of domestic violence — but that was far from the case. Research by Dr Shonagh Dillon, CEO of an organisation that supports victims of domestic violence in Hampshire, found that service providers “understood that they risked their funding if they spoke up in objection to trans women in female-only spaces”.

And so in the summer of 2020, I wrote to Sophie Linden, Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, warning her about the chilling effect of Sadiq Khan’s mantra that ‘trans women are women’ on organisations that might seek funding from City Hall. I didn’t get the clear assurance I sought so in October that year I wrote to the Mayor, asking whether he believes that single-sex spaces are lawful in certain circumstances and necessary for the protection of the most vulnerable women in London.

It should have been an easy question to answer: back in 2009, when he was a Labour MP, Khan voted for what became the 2010 Equality Act and its list of exemptions, one of which allows organisations to provide single-sex spaces. In my letter to the Mayor, I said we are entitled to know if he has changed his mind about a piece of legislation that’s vital for the protection of women. That was sixteen months ago — and he still hasn’t replied.

My sacking as Co-chair of the VAWG Board came the following summer. I was aghast at the insensitive way it was done — by email, on a Friday afternoon when the entire country was stunned by a horrific mass shooting in Plymouth the previous evening. The killings were carried out by a young man who appeared to be an incel, a phenomenon I had written about in Home Grown, my book on the links between misogyny, domestic violence and terrorism. I was in the middle of doing broadcast interviews, explaining the background to the harrowing events in Plymouth, when the email arrived from City Hall. Within days, more than 4,000 women had signed a petition calling for my reinstatement. They’re still waiting for the Mayor’s response.

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At the time, Linden dealt with press inquiries, insisting that my removal was due to a restructure and had nothing to do with my views on transgenderism or any other issue. In a phone call, she apologised for the way I was informed and asked me to stay on as an ‘advisor’ to the board. I couldn’t see any point, given that I would no longer have any influence over the agenda. All the while, violence against women was reaching epidemic levels, with the number of rape reports in London climbing to a ten-year high in March 2021.

In that very month, Sarah Everard had been abducted, raped and murdered by a serving Met Officer. On the morning after Cressida Dick revealed the news that Ms Everard’s remains had been found, I received a phone call from Linden. Somewhat to my astonishment, she said she was calling to ask me what Khan should say about it. A few weeks later, I got another call from Linden, asking what the Mayor should say about VAWG during his campaign for re-election.

None of this inspired confidence in the regime at City Hall, to put it mildly. I kept on raising important issues, however, such as the Met’s egregious failure to identify sexual predators within its own ranks. I insisted that senior officers should attend the next meeting of the VAWG Board to tell us how they intended to deal with violence committed by police officers, and I called for a public inquiry into misogyny at the Met. I got no support from City Hall; suffice it to say that I wasn’t surprised by the series of scandals that culminated in Dick’s sudden resignation earlier this month.

After my phone conversation with Linden in August last year, amid a blizzard of emails cancelling all my scheduled meetings at City Hall, I agreed to write to her formally. I reiterated my view that the board needs a Co-chair who isn’t a salaried employee of the Mayor, and asked for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to my question about Khan’s support (or otherwise) for the crucial exemption in the Equality Act. In a pattern I’ve come to expect from the current administration at City Hall, Linden did not write back for five months.

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In a letter that finally arrived earlier this month, Linden says that she and Khan “have always been clear that the commissioning of all of our services will be based on the best interests of the user”. But if we are talking about a women’s refuge, who is the user? Many of us would say it means natal women, but here is Linden’s answer: “It is vital that anyone seeking refuge is able to access the services they need and that women, including trans women, fleeing abuse from men should be able to access spaces where they feel safe”. (My italics.) If the Mayor intends to fund separate refuge spaces for people who are transgender, no one would argue with that. But does he?

I also doubt whether service providers will feel reassured by the legalistic language in Linden’s letter, which stands on its head to avoid offering an unequivocal endorsement of single-sex spaces: “Our approach in commissioning services does not penalise any agency that is working within the boundaries of the law… No agency we fund is required to act any differently from the requirements of equalities legislation.”

So what happens if the board of a refuge has a different interpretation of the Equality Act from the Mayor? If the CEO refuses access to a male-bodied trans woman, prompting howls of outrage from activists, will her organisation be treated by City Hall as “working within the boundaries of the law”, or accused of transphobia? Would any service provider funded by the Mayor dare take the risk?

There is one significant revelation in Linden’s letter. In a major climb-down, City Hall now accepts that the VAWG Board needs an independent Co-chair. It’s back to the status quo, in other words — but I’m not going to be reinstated. Despite offering fulsome thanks for “the vital work you have done for women and girls through your role on the VAWG Board”, City Hall has been having discussions about appointing an “external expert”. Members of the board will be ‘notified’ when an appointment is made.

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Forgive me thinking there is a bitter taste to all this. Khan went on supporting Cressida Dick, calling into question his judgement, long after I pointed out that the Met’s culture was mired in misogyny. Now Dick has gone and the country’s biggest police force has been left rudderless. Four and a half million women and girls live in London, where they face quite unacceptable levels of violence, yet the Mayor’s attachment to gender ideology appears to mean that no one at City Hall can talk about women without instantly adding ‘including trans women’.

More than ever, women in London need someone to stand up for their rights and make sure their voices are heard. As a feminist who believes in biological reality, that person evidently won’t be me.

Last week, testimony from pupils at Highgate School, Latymer Upper School, Dulwich College and elsewhere was circulated online from a website called Everyone’s Invited, a name that is bleakly witty. The allegations are posted anonymously by those at both private and state schools and universities across the country: but the media emphasised the private schools, where the cognitive dissonance is more dramatic, and the photographs are better.

There are stories of forced fellatio, emotional bullying and rape, drunken and sober. It is repulsive to read, and the schools had to respond. They will listen to The Times, if not the students, whose parents pay £21,600 a year. Allegations were reportedly ignored or soothed away with conundrums such as: we believe you — but will others? Now Dulwich College has called the police on two of its own pupils and Highgate offered an apology and promised to commission an independent review: the medium guns, then, and they need them, because anger is building.

The term “rape culture” is used to describe what is happening in these schools, and this makes me uneasy. The very phrase seems to offer the possibility of mitigation, for rape is the only crime in which this race for mitigation exists: if everyone is complicit, no one is guilty. Is a culture convictable? Is it punishable? I would be amazed if there were more sexual assaults in public schools than in state schools, even as the word entitlement is also used of these children: why would there be? Who is not entitled when it comes to young female bodies? Sexual assault: the great leveller.

There will be hand wringing and an offensive and cosmetic penance. Let us see how many careless teachers are sacked, how many teenage rapists jailed. There will possibly be a handful of out-of-court settlements, and then — nothing much at all. And that’s for the public school girls. Will the girls from state schools get any justice worth the name? The experience of the victims of the Rotherham grooming scandal suggests not. The victims will carry their burden alone; many will break, not under the burden of the crime, but under the burden of the disbelief: a double abandonment. That is usually the way.

For the private school pupils, though, it is different. Their stories lead the news pages, which may give them hope, but the defensive propaganda has already begun, as it does when these institutions, entwined with the British state for centuries, feel themselves threatened. They can afford skillful PR. They are selling a dreamland, after all; but a dreamland for some is not a dreamland for others. It has begun to roll out already; and there will be more of it.

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My teenage son is not a rapist, wrote an anonymous mother in a Sunday newspaper, of an anonymous son that no one is calling a rapist: call him then a straw rapist. Do not blight a generation of schoolboys with upsetting allegations of rape, they say, ignoring the basic truth that rape is upsetting, and should always be treated as such. I would call these the old guns. There is an element of tribute in the reporting of the crisis for the public schools, even as this is described as “the next major scandal” for the country. But gawping is not justice. It is, quite often, a way of not seeing. It is entertainment.

And people, and journalists, will gawp. I was educated at a minor public school: almost half of newspaper columnists are, which is probably why our journalism on this subject is not better. We circle the fountain of inequality with jealous eyes; we rarely challenge it. Shame can still a pen. So can envy. Even progressive newspapers do not attack private schools as they should (it is not education they offer — if they did it would be cheaper — but social privilege) because so many journalists are educated there, and so are their children. Better to be a hypocrite in private than a fool in public. If you want justice, don’t look at us. We’re banging on the door too.

We do this because they are enchanted castles: it is no coincidence that Hogwarts is quite obviously an English public school, and strictly selective, though all fees are paid by the magical government, magically. Free public school standard education for all and an elite which includes everyone: that might be the most fantastical thing J K Rowling ever wrote.

But that enchanted girdle that public school winds around your future will only extend so far if you are female. The pay gap between the privately educated and state school educated university graduate with the same class of degree (7%-15%) does not exist for women, according to Engines of Privilege by David Kynaston and Francis Green, the definitive polemical book about private schools. Those girls who walked out of lessons last week in protest, might turn to this next.

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But first, there are allegations like this: “In year 9, a teacher said to a class of 13-year-olds that ‘wife’ stood for ‘washing, ironing, fucking etc.’ It came to a head for me when I was sexual assaulted by my then boyfriend and his friend at 17. I tried to confront them about it and was told I was ‘over-reacting’.” That is the race for mitigation, but they wouldn’t call it that. They imbue it subconsciously, completely, and without critical thought. Perhaps it will matter this time. But, again, I doubt it. William Knowland, the Eton master fired for his lecture The Patriarchy Paradox — “saying smash the patriarchy amounts to saying smash human nature and biological reality” (a straw mob now?) — had support for his reinstatement from thousands of alumni, and boys.

It is ageless. What should be a moment of genuine crisis, a catalyst for change, borne on the rising tide of domestic violence under the pandemic and the singular, shocking murder of Sarah Everard and the police’s response, will likely ebb away. The private schools at least have the resources for counselling, if they are minded, which is part of their ocean of privilege; the state schools do not. I grieve for all victims, but will the state school girls even be heard amid the clamour?

Perhaps, if we are lucky, we will learn exactly what has happened in these schools, and whether the privilege they inculcate in their pupils has contributed to something ignoble, and terrible. We will learn what happened in all the schools where girls are unsafe, and how to make them safe. Or will we learn that — as I think more likely — men of all classes like to harm women when they can get away with it, and they can get away with it as easily in an enchanted castle as anywhere? It is a kind of equality: of misery.

From as far back as 2002, victims described being attacked in the back of his vehicle. Yet nothing was done until 2007, when he was arrested, questioned, and released without charge. His victim, a 19-year old, has described how the police laughed at her when she told them about her injuries. It was the same story for all those other women who had flagged down Worboys’ cab after a night out assuming they’d be safe in his black cab. Investigating officers generally presumed the women were drunk, incapable and unreliable. The victims were blamed and the cabbie allowed to drive on.

Shocking new light on this cascade of police failures is laid out in Predator: Catching The Black Cab Rapist, a Channel 5 documentary airing tonight. Among other grim revelations, is the recording of a police interview with Worboys following that complaint in 2007. Officers can be heard bantering with the cab driver rather than interrogating him. Laughing and joking with him, they appear to be helping him construct a defence to the woman’s allegations of drug-assisted rape. One even says: “I thought maybe she’s sort of come a bit undone at the front when you was helping her …”

In turn, the victim, during her questioning, was made to feel like she “deserved it”.

It was only the following year, after a pattern was finally noticed amid all these reports, that Worboys was properly interrogated and, at last, charged with several assaults. Then, in March 2009, Worboys was convicted of one count of rape, five sexual assaults, one attempted assault and 12 drugging charges. He had pleaded not guilty, and still shows no remorse for his crimes.

The civil case against the Metropolitan Police brought by two of Worboys victims found that there were “serious operational failures” during the investigation. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report into the investigation was a critical opportunity to bring about change in police culture. But all that was recommended in terms of sanctions were “words of warning” for some officers.

It’s an appalling example of poor policing. But you would have thought, wouldn’t you, that 12 years after Worboys was finally convicted, the force might have got their house in order? Sadly, I think that, if anything, things have got worse. The police have a consistently pitiful record when it comes to dealing with violence towards women, and their excessive reaction to the Sarah Everard protests the other weekend does little to dispel the feeling that perhaps they are part of the problem.

Between 2012 and 2018 across England and Wales, almost 1,500 complaints were filed against police officers, special constables and police community support officers (PCSOs) across 33 forces involving accusations of sexual misconduct, including sexual harassment, exploitation of crime victims and child abuse. These officers and special constables, remember, do swear an oath to “cause the peace to be kept and preserved and prevent all offences against people…”

Of these cases, 371 were upheld, resulting in the sacking or resignation of 197 individuals. One case involved a Devon and Cornwall officer, who was sacked following accusations that he attended a victim’s address, stripped off uninvited, and joined her in the shower.

Another is that of Peter Bunyan, a PSCO based in Penzance, who was convicted of three rapes and one count of sexual assault against two victims in 2016 and jailed for 16 years. Bunyan had previously spent time in prison after being convicted of having sex with domestic violence victims and a woman with mental health difficulties while on duty.

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In data published in the Observer, figures from the Royal College of Policing’s current “barred list” – officers who have been dismissed from a force and are banned from joining another – show that nearly a fifth of offences inlude abuse of position for sexual purposes, domestic violence or harassment against the public and colleagues. Of the 555 officers barred since the list was introduced in December 2017, more than 1,100 reasons for dismissal are listed of which more than 200 involve sexual, harassment or domestic abuse offences.

Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act in 2019 show that police officers are seven times more likely than doctors or teachers to be dismissed for sexual misconduct. Now this is, admittedly, a small percentage of the service — but this is only the visible part. Police action lawyers will tell you that vulnerable victims rarely follow through on a complaint against a police officer, and rarer still that such complaints are held up by the courts.

I have interviewed several women over the years who have reported being asked out on dates, or just blatantly for sex, by the police they have called out to a domestic violence or rape complaint. I have also heard far too many stories from women in prostitution about police sexually assaulting them during an arrest, or asking for “sexual favours” in return for letting them go free. And I will never forget observing a rape trial and overhearing the police officers in the case joking outside the court about the “sexual positions” the victim must have enjoyed during the attack. Last week, one young officer shared an internet joke of a similar ilk with his colleagues, as the search for Sarah Everard’s body continued.

Not long after a serving police officer was charged with Sarah’s murder, Oliver Banfield, a probationary police officer based in the West Midlands was given a non-custodial sentence and ordered to pay just £500 compensation having been found guilty of a violent assault on a woman walking home following a night out.

Banfield was seen on CCTV shouting “slag” at Homer as he wrestled her to the ground using police training techniques. Homer, who suffers depression and panic attacks as a result of the attack says it was though Banfield was “fulfilling a violent cop movie fantasy”.

The attack took place in July 2020 but Banfield was allowed to continue to work as a police officer until he was sentenced. Police took eight weeks to follow up on the report about one of their own colleagues and to visit the scene of the crime. It was left to the victim to persevere with her request to have access to the CCTV footage which police had failed to do. As Homer commented after the sentencing, “It was like I had reported a missing cat.”

And, so, public confidence in the police when it comes to sexual and domestic abuse is at an all-time low. Women just don’t trust them. Earlier this month, the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) lodged a super-complaint to the Police Inspectorate highlighting systemic failures women are experiencing when reporting domestic abuse perpetrated by police officers. Officers, it is alleged, manipulate the system and act in bad faith.

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This tendency is underlined by Nogah Ofer from CWJ, who describes the prevalence of certain behaviours within the Service as springing from a “locker-room culture” in which violence against women is trivialised and loyalty towards fellow officers and concern about impact on their careers are paramount. The Centre has been contacted, for example, by almost 50 women who say they have been seriously betrayed by those tasked with protecting them when they reported domestic abuse and sexual offences committed by police officers and staff. These cases are currently being investigated by the same police force that employs the accused officer.

The rape conviction rate, meanwhile, is stuck at an all time low. It might as well — and I am beginning to sound like a stuck record now — be decriminalised. In an attempt to correct this, in 2018, Met Commissioner Cressida Dick announced that the police had decided to abandon its policy of automatically believing those who report sexual assault.

The “I believe you” policy had been introduced in 2011 in response to low conviction rates. It was a simple way to reassure victims that they would not be automatically accused of lying — something which had been exposed in the 1982 film A complaint of rape. This fly-on-the-wall documentary by Roger Graef film featured a woman with a history of psychiatric illness being bullied and cajoled by a bunch of male officers as she tried to report a rape. They dismissed her story as “the biggest bollocks” they had ever heard. The screening of the film triggered a change in British law and a more sensitive approach to rape cases.

However, three years ago, Dick dismantled that in favour of the “open mind” approach. It was in response to a series of high-profile failed cases, including the Carl Beech fraud. But Dick also said at the time: “If [the allegation] is a long time ago, or it’s very trivial, or I’m not likely to get a criminal justice outcome, I’m not going to spend a lot of resources on it.”

In other words, this pretty much gave police licence to disregard those cases in which a woman may have been previously sexually active with the accused, or had been drinking, or had dared to dress as she wished. Naturally, it had little effect on the conviction rate. It just shifted the blame back on to the victims.

But as a shadow report on rape compiled by a number of leading women’s organisations found last year, to address that extremely low rate, no new laws or policy are necessary, rather police officers need to up their game under the existing framework. It was a lack of training, persistent sexist attitudes from officers, and a failure to hold police accountable which led to those endless blunders in relation to Worboys and similar cases, not the law as it stands. And this still hasn’t been addressed.

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Right now, as this shocking documentary airs, it feels like things are getting worse for women. The CWJ is contacted by a constant stream of women who report drug-assisted rapes, which never progress to the “risk averse” CPS. Calls to Refuge during lockdown have been up by an appalling 60%. And now our streets don’t even feel particularly safe, as all those women last weekend were protesting. The police are seen to be very much part of the problem.

Which leaves women in a pretty desperate position. Worboys may be set to spend a while yet in jail but there are many other predatory men out there getting away with it. And unless there is a radical shift in that locker-room culture, and accountability and how women are dealth with, those men will continue to feel as invincible as the black cab rapist

But even if we seem to have collectively decided that The Donald was a political blip, best consigned to the dustbin of history, his utterances live on. In 2015, before he was even elected, Trump declared that the US needed “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”. His statement was met with horror at the time. Today, though, it’s not just become a meme, but also mutated into a form of political debate.

Last week, in response to Sarah Everard’s murder, Green Party peer Baroness Jones of Moulscoomb called for men to be subjected to a curfew after 6pm. Baroness Jones argued that this would “make women a lot safer” and reduce “discrimination of all kinds”. Effectively, then, she was proposing a total and complete lockdown of men until we can figure out what’s going on. The Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford then made noises about the “dramatic action” needed to mitigate a “crisis”, and how his government would be “prepared to consider all measures”.

The proposal itself excited much discussion in the usual places, despite (or perhaps due to) having so many self-evident shortcomings as a policy. Baroness Jones herself has since admitted that the idea was “not an entirely serious suggestion”, while Drakeford was forced to clarify that Wales was not in fact considering a curfew on men.

But even if the bien-pensant world has agreed to pretend that Trump never happened, there’s something startlingly Trumpian about seeing elected UK politicians floating obviously absurd policy proposals. As the former President’s enemies never tired of pointing out, his utterances often bore only a glancing relation to reality. His detractors were infuriated by this, as well as by the way his supporters didn’t seem to care. But it’s possible that they were missing the point, because communication is by no means always about reality.

Many everyday exchanges are what linguistics experts call “phatic communication”. This is better known as small talk: utterances that don’t convey factual information, such as “the milk is in the fridge”, but rather establish a mood. Utterances such as “Good morning” or “Lovely weather we’ve been having” are less about the morning or the weather than about conveying the message “I’m here and I’m friendly”.

Trump’s distinctive contribution to modern politics was his expert deployment of something like phatic communication in a political context. That is, statements that delivered a kind of mood music, with some relation to policy issues, but which usually did little to alter the facts on the ground.

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For example, consider his assertion on February 28, 2020 that “one day, it’s like a miracle – [Covid] will disappear.” More than a year (and a new President) later, this hasn’t happened; the assertion only makes sense if understood as a piece of wishful thinking, aimed at conjuring a feeling of positivity about reality reordering itself in accordance with Trump’s desires. I think of this as “phatic politics”: a kind of willingness, despite the reality, to say whatever will convey a mood that feels appropriate, or is likely to achieve the desired effect, in a given moment — regardless of the facts on the ground.

In January last year, just before Covid struck, Eitan Hirsh drew a distinction between politics and “political hobbyists”. Politics, in Hirsh’s formulation, is about making things happen, such as the Suffragettes’s campaign for the female franchise, or a local group fundraising for a new community centre. Hirsh characterises political hobbyists, on the other hand, as predominantly white male graduates, who consume politics as a form of entertainment without themselves being involved in any concrete effort to bring about substantive change.

The style of phatic politics I’ve just described was Trump’s signature presidential style, but it’s typical of all hobbyist consumers of politics — because it implies that there is no real connection between what you say about real life and life itself. In Trump’s case, the slippery relationship between utterance and reality was complicated by his actually being the US President; but for most political hobbyists, there really isn’t much connection between the policies they advocate and those which are adopted by governments. This frees hobbyists to treat policy as a vehicle for self-expression. It means you can call for paedo-hanging or male curfews with impunity, as a way of conveying how strongly you feel about a subject — for the simple reason that your ideas will never be implemented.

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By Mary Harrington

Over the last year, this style of politics has become so widespread that we’re now witnessing its group manifestation: phatic protest. That is, public demonstrations that often convey deeply felt emotion, but without a specific policy aim in mind.

Both the death of George Floyd and that of Sarah Everard have triggered such inchoate responses. Both events were, of course, deplorable. They both implicated police officers — precisely the citizens charged with ensuring public order and safety — and prompted a sense that the very structures of social order are institutionally hostile to a particular identity group. And in both cases, horror at an unjust death has fed a groundswell of public anger at this perceived injustice.

But also, in both cases, the outcry has been as formless as it has been sincere. After all, it’s all too easy to agree that the world treats specific groups unjustly, and feel deep anger about this, while remaining unsure what specifically we should do about it. And in the absence of any consensus on what we should do, we’ve seen the rise of phatic protest; that is, political engagement oriented more toward expressing a feeling than demanding policy change.

In the vacuum left by this uncertainty over what exactly we can do about something as endemic as violence against women, or the seemingly intractable issue of racial injustice, we’ve seen huge sums of money raised seemingly overnight by crowdfunding websites. Black Lives Matter raised more than $90 million in 2020, while Reclaim These Streets raised over £500,000 in just a few days, despite providing little information about fundraisers’s identities or how the money will be spent.

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'Slam poetry' is all rhyme no reason

By Mary Harrington

I have no reason to suspect that the motives of Reclaim These Streets are anything but decent. But it is still startling to see half a million pounds raised in a matter of days by people who don’t even put their names on the crowdfunding website. And this sense of powerful grassroots energy in search of an organisational focus points to the most troubling feature of phatic protest: how vulnerable it is to being hijacked.

The initial outrage at racialised police brutality last summer rapidly became a vector for activists seeking to abolish prisons, capitalism and the nuclear family. Similarly, while Reclaim These Streets seems to be organised by local councillors and other women local to the Clapham area, rumours are swirling about Antifa infiltrating at the Clapham Common vigil.

It’s hard to be sure, but it’s at least possible that someone who takes an “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bastards) placard to a candlelit vigil for a recent murder victim didn’t have mourning a horrible death uppermost on their mind. The next day, a protest was organised by Sisters Uncut, an existing group affiliated with broadly the same political agenda as the one which has colonised BLM — that is, to abolish prisons, undermine capitalism and so on. (I call this the Dismantle Everything lobby.)

By its leaderless, heavily emotional and agenda-less nature, then, phatic protest attracts would-be revolutionary vanguards who do have specific policies they want to bring about — even if these are at odds with whatever has prompted the mass outbreak of public feeling. It is not obvious, for example, how defunding the police would improve women’s safety in public; but as night follows day, Dismantle Everything has already suggested that doing so would be a helpful response to the Sarah Everard vigil.

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Why aren't we at it like rabbits?

By Mary Harrington

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that our politics has come so adrift from any sense that we might actually effect political change through activism. After all, we’ve spent the last year cut off from social contact, on the receiving end of unprecedented and authoritarian public laws, wondering what our distant leaders will foist on us next. It’s no wonder, then, that so many of us have given up on political agency in favour of political hobbyism, and that political activism over the last year has focused more on emotion and symbolic action — taking a knee, clapping for carers, leaving flowers — rather than substantive change. For if there’s a unifying subtext to phatic policy, it’s a sense of powerlessness: wishful thinking as a substitute for action.

But if we’re to recover a sense of political agency and democratic participation, that’s going to mean weaning ourselves off political hobbyism. In other words, less clicktivism, less arguing over Westminster court politics and instead grounding ourselves in reality. If you’re horrified by women’s lack of safety, you would do better to join the council to push for better street lighting, or help out at a local women’s refuge, than to pretend that wildly authoritarian policy kite-flying by C-list politicians is an adequate response to profound systemic issues.

Until we make this adjustment, we’ll continue to only stir ourselves from our online torpor for diffuse, emotive public protests over intractable problems. And as long as this remains true, mass politics will achieve nothing more constructive than rolling out the red carpet for Dismantle Everything.

It is hard to imagine how this could look worse. The man charged with abducting and murdering Everard is a serving police officer; and the Independent Office for Police Conduct is now investigating the Met over its handling of various matters relating to the case. All week we women had been asking ourselves why we don’t feel safe in public spaces, why we so rarely report assaults to the police and why we get so little justice when we do.

Here, in one picture, was the bleakest possible answer: women don’t feel safe because the police are against us, just as they were against the vigil even taking place. Earlier on Saturday, the organisers of Reclaim These Streets had formally cancelled the gathering, saying that the Met “would not engage with our suggestions to help ensure that a legal, Covid-secure vigil could take place”. A representative of the police said: “We take no joy in this event being cancelled, but it is the right thing to do given the real and present threat of Covid-19.”

But the “real and present threat of Covid-19” had not seemed to apply to last summer’s Black Lives Matter rallies, which were policed with an admirably light touch (so light that in Bristol, protesters were able to topple the hated statue of slaver Edward Colston and chuck it in the harbour while the police looked on). And a week ago, in Glasgow, police seemed to take a much less aggressive approach to Rangers fans, who packed their bodies into a heaving mass of virus-sharing celebration.

We know that outside events are low-risk for Covid transmission. So an outside event where women quietly mourned together at a safe two-metre distance from each other is not a plausible superspreader event. Put these things together, and there’s an ugly undertone that when male-dominated crowds occupy public spaces, they’re exercising an essential human right; but when women do it, they do not.

This suspicion only grows when you consider the immediate police reactions to Everard’s disappearance, which included telling women in Clapham to “be careful going out alone”, an echo of the advice given in Yorkshire when the police were failing to capture Peter Sutcliffe. Women were outraged then, just as they are today: why should their freedom be curtailed because of a violent man’s actions?

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Sure, it’s appropriate to urge vigilance when an active offender is on the loose; but it would also be appropriate to warn men that those acting suspiciously in the area will be challenged by police. This would send a message to perpetrators that they’re being watched, and another to women that they’re being protected. Somehow, though, that never seems to happen, because only women’s presence in public spaces is conditional.

This effectively means that men commit crimes, and women get policed for them. And look at who women are policed by. Less than a third of officers are female — and notwithstanding that the Met currently has a female commissioner in Cressida Dick, the police have a track record of appalling failures when it comes to serving women.

Look at the Rotherham care scandal, where men were permitted to carry on exploiting the most vulnerable girls by police who dismissed the abuse, disgustingly, as “p*** shagging” (so much for the pretence that their inaction was down to fear of “inflaming racial tensions”). Look at John Worboys, free to continue raping women because police ignored his victims’s testimony. One woman recalled police laughing when she described her injuries. Look at the collapse in convictions for rape, which Harriet Wistrich of the Centre for Women’s Justice has described as “sending out a message that rape is decriminalised, virtually”.

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The Clapham vigil could have been a moment for police to show solidarity with women, to make a public commitment to deep reform. Had the Met cooperated with Reclaim These Streets in the first place, we might now be seeing pictures of officers standing alongside the protesters in a moment of communal grief. But the Met didn’t do that. Instead of helping to organise a safe and peaceful demonstration, it created a vacuum into which the reckless and vicious could rush.

Anti-lockdown speakers hijacked the stage, showing their typical sensitivity to the value of human life by making a dead woman into the vehicle for their idiocy. The anti-austerity organisation Sisters Uncut promoted itself to a leadership role in the protests — as though a group that previously defended Tara Wolf, a transgender woman convicted of assaulting a 60-year-old woman, has any moral authority on the issue of male violence against women. Now they can point to the actions on Clapham Common and make statements such: “Police are perpetrators of individual and state violence against women”.

The police’s own failures have made it easy for the hard Left to luxuriate in the pretend feminism of anti-law-and-order. But only people with no real fear of becoming victims can afford to treat “abolishing the prison industrial complex” as a serious political ambition. The police, courts and penal system all let women down disastrously; but “abolishing” those things isn’t going to make women safer. Women have a right to policing that treats us fairly and protects our freedoms and interests.

Before Saturday, the police had a heavy burden to convince women that the service could be part of the solution to men’s violence against women. After Saturday, the burden is a boulder. It’s hard to see what, exactly, can fix such a toxic situation — though if I were Cressida Dick, I might start by begging feminist legal groups (such as the Centre for Women’s Justice) for root-to-branch recommendations on making policing work for women. Every woman who becomes a victim of men’s violence deserves justice under the law; the police’s manifest errors can’t be a reason to let that slip away, least of all for Sarah Everard and the people who love her.

I have walked the streets of London and Liverpool on my own for the past 20 years, at all times of night, rarely giving it a second thought. So reading women’s accounts of their everyday experiences, and talking to the women in my life about theirs, is a glimpse into an alien world. I am left with the terrible, bleak feeling that it will be impossible to ever make women feel adequately safe.

There is a kind of stereotyped masculine response to these female fears. That is: they are irrational. Murder, especially the murder of women, and especially the random murder of women by strangers in the street, is vanishingly rare. You are far more likely to be hit by a car on your walk home. So if you worry about it, goes this response, you are wrong.

This response is not exactly wrong, but it misses the point by a distance. It’s absolutely true that murder is rare in the UK; you are less likely, as a citizen of the UK in 2021, to be murdered than almost any other human in history. The Crime Survey for England and Wales puts the UK’s homicide rate at about 1.1 per 100,000. For comparison, according to the UN, the USA has something like 5 per 100,000; Brazil, about 27.

In the UK, and many other countries, the number of murders per year has been dropping since at least 1990. Going further back, there was a surge in the later years of the 20th century, but on a longer timescale the trend is clear: you were many, many times more likely to be murdered for most of human history than you are now in the UK, or in most other countries.

To carry on in the same stereotyped vein, if you are a woman, you are even less likely to be murdered. Of the 695 people murdered in England and Wales in the year to March 2020, 506 of them were men. And for the specific issue of murders on the street, by strangers — the fear we’re dealing with — the disparity is greater still: 154 men were murdered by strangers, and just 23 women. 

All this is true. But that doesn’t mean that the streets feel safe for women.

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From Covid to crime: how media hype distorts risk

By Tom Chivers

For one thing, it’s not just getting murdered that women fear. They fear getting abducted. They fear being raped. They are made by men to feel uncomfortable. Men yell things out of cars at women as they drive past, or follow them as they walk home, shouting out to them. One woman I know finished a half marathon as a bunch of men at the finish line loudly rated the attractiveness of the runners (“would, wouldn’t.”) 

I’m a bit sceptical of surveys like the recent one which found that 97% of young women have been sexually harassed, because the definition of “sexually harassed” varies, and I’d say some of the things they include in their data are borderline. But I bet that most women have some stories like the ones above. 

It’s mercifully true that almost none of those cases will escalate into murder, and few into actual violence. But, equally, I don’t think it’s irrational to be unnerved, in a world where these things happen reasonably regularly, and so to avoid being out alone after dark. 

If men being threatening is the main driver of women feeling unsafe, you might think that we have a clear way to move forward. Simply get men to stop being threatening, and women will feel safe. But I worry that will fail, on two grounds. One, I don’t think it’s possible, and two, even if it were, I don’t think it would work.

The first trouble is that we bump up against the law of large numbers. Imagine that the average woman walks past 200 men in a day. I expect working women in large cities see much more than that, in non-pandemic times, but others who are at home or who live in small communities see far fewer, so perhaps that number’s about right. In a year, that’s 73,000 encounters; in a decade, 730,000. Even if only a tiny fraction of men are dangerous or threatening, women will occasionally encounter them. 

Forget “not all men”: even if it’s “almost zero men”, there are enough to make women feel threatened. And it’s probably not almost zero men; it’s probably some relatively small but non-trivial fraction of them. (Or, even worse, a larger fraction of men, but only some of the time, for instance when drunk.) How many incidents per decade would it take to make you anxious? One? Two? 

There’s more than just this going on though. We’re also battling against human psychology.

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By Tanya Gold

In the US and UK, crime has been falling consistently for 30 years. In America, there are something like half as many violent crimes per person per year, and about half as many property crimes, as there were in the early 1990s. In the UK, the crime rate has fallen to something like a quarter of its 1996 peak.

But in both the USA and UK, most people believe that crime is increasing. The percentage who think so has dropped in the UK over the last 10 years, but still, nearly two-thirds of adults think that crime is more common now than it was a few years ago. Almost 80% of US adults think there is more crime now than a year ago. People’s perception of the risk of crime is only very loosely tied to the actual risk of crime in their country. Bringing it down — making people safer — will probably only have a relatively small effect on how safe people feel.

What’s more, while it is true that things like traffic accidents are much more common, humans are much more likely to be scared of dramatic, rare risks than common ones: “They worry more about earthquakes than they do about slipping on the bathroom floor, even though the latter kills far more people than the former,” wrote the security expert Bruce Schneier back in 2006. 

Schneier also points out that personified danger, dangers with identifiable victims, is far scarier than anonymous, statistical risks. 10,000 faceless people dying of diabetes will never get to us in the way that a single named child ill with bone cancer will. If there’s a human agent behind the risk, that’s even worse. And risks that we don’t choose, risks that are beyond our control, are scarier than those we choose. High-profile murders by strangers meet all of these criteria. They are almost designed to scare us. 

And we will always keep hearing about them, once again because of the law of large numbers. There are about 70 million people in the UK. If we get the risk of murder down to an unrealistically low one-in-70-million per year, we will still hear about them once a year, because they will make the news. The news will never dedicate 100 times as much coverage to diabetes deaths as they do to street murders, because that’s just not how the media works or, really, ever could work. A newspaper headline of “100,000 aircraft landed safely yesterday” would not sell many copies.

More than that, women tend to be more risk-averse than men. I want to be really clear about something: this is not “irrational”. There’s no optimal level of risk aversion, no correct amount to be worried. But it is an empirical fact that although men are more likely to be victims of crime and violence, they are less likely to be worried about it. 

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That makes sense. Even if I do get jumped in Finsbury Park as I walk home some night, there’s some deluded bit of me that thinks I could fight, or at least run. I would feel like I have some control, and risks we think (rightly or wrongly) that we can control are less scary. Most women do not have that feeling. It is hardly surprising that the world is scarier for women.

Plus, we’re diurnal animals. The night is frightening for us, and has been since before we evolved from our common ancestor with chimps. You don’t have to go all evolutionary psychology to think that being alone on a dark street is going to be scary for humans, whatever the real risks are.

Women also differ widely in their responses to things. There is a great essay by Scott Alexander, called “Different Worlds”, talking about how the same situation will be perceived entirely differently by different people. We all have different levels of threat-perception, and almost all signals we receive from the world are ambiguous. Some people will read some behaviour as dangerous, some as benign.

I read this story, about a woman’s reaction to unwanted attention on a train, and it felt threatening and unpleasant. But perhaps some other women might think it was harmless flirting. And the survey into sexual harassment I mentioned above included “being stared at” as sexual harassment, but I remember some female friends, when they were single, telling each other about that guy at the bar “checking you out”. The line between flirty “checking out” and harassment-level “being stared at” will be different for different women. Which is entirely normal and unavoidable. But it does mean that some women will be much more likely to feel threatened than others. Which will in turn mean that it will be harder to reach a point where all, or enough, women feel safe.

What can be done? Certainly men could be more aware of behaviour that might seem threatening. And doing whatever we can to reduce the level of crime, improving rape conviction rates, reducing workplace harassment and stigmatising the sort of creepy behaviour I talked about above — those things are good in their own right, and probably will have some effect on how safe women feel. I’ve seen women suggesting curfews for men — I’m not sure how seriously — and no doubt that would lower the incidence of attacks, although it’s not really proportional or realistic; it would involve punishing an awful lot of innocent men for the actions of a terrible minority. As would restricting alcohol sales, given that at least half of attackers in violent crime are under the influence.

Fundamentally, we are fighting too many things — especially the law of large numbers, a sensationalist media, and human psychology — for it to be realistic that women will ever feel safe enough. Men will never understand how women feel; but even worse, we may never be able to entirely change it.

It wasn’t that late when Jacqueline got off the bus. At 9.23pm on 17 November, she crossed a busy main road, not realising she had been spotted by Peter Sutcliffe, a 34-year-old lorry driver. Sutcliffe later told the police that he had just finished eating a portion of fried chicken in his Rover when he saw her. “I decided she was a likely victim,” he said.

She was only 100 yards from safety when he drove past, parked his car and hit her on the head with a hammer. He dragged her into a lane that led to some rough ground, struck her again but paused when he heard someone walking past. Then he returned to the attack, using a screwdriver to slash and stab her several times. Jacqueline had just become the final victim of the man known as the Yorkshire Ripper.

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A week ago, a women’s group, Leeds Spinners, placed a plaque close to where Jacqueline died. It bears an inscription that tries to fill in the character of a young woman most of us only know, if at all, as a victim of one of this country’s worst serial killers. The gesture gained extra poignancy when Sutcliffe’s death at the age of 74 was announced on Friday. He outlived his last victim by almost exactly four decades.

Rage at the incompetence of West Yorkshire police lives on, though. Sutcliffe was careless, leaving so much evidence that he was interviewed by detectives on nine occasions — but never once put on an identity parade or arrested in connection with the murders by the Ripper squad.

After Sutcliffe’s death, West Yorkshire’s current Chief Constable, John Robins, made a belated apology for mistakes in the inquiry. But even then he couldn’t resist a whinge. He complained that the hard work of bringing the Ripper to justice had been overshadowed by the language used by the upper ranks, who had described women as pawns and seemed to belittle the death of prostitutes.

Robins’s apology was all very well, but his force didn’t bring Sutcliffe to justice. The arrest was made in Sheffield in January 1981 by a traffic patrol from South Yorkshire, who were suspicious about the stolen number plates crudely taped to his car. And it’s not as though the language used by senior officers in the 1970s was incidental to the conduct of the investigation. On the contrary, it reflected a deep-seated misogyny that led to indefensible judgements about the victims and persuaded senior officers to doubt — and in some instances ignore — crucial evidence. To put it bluntly, some of the early victims, while definitely not involved in prostitution, didn’t meet West Yorkshire police’s exacting standards for female conduct. One woman had a black boyfriend! Another went to the pub without her husband!

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From early on in the case, detectives and the press wrongly assumed that the killer’s motive was a hatred of prostituted women. It didn’t bear a moment’s scrutiny: the first four attacks, all in the second half of 1975, had nothing to do with women who were selling sex. It did, however, appeal to the detective in charge of the inquiry, Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, who was convinced he was hot on the heels of a latter-day Jack the Ripper. He overlooked the fact that Sutcliffe’s first three victims, who all survived, were attacked in quiet residential streets and a country lane nowhere near Leeds’s red light district. One was a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Tracey Browne, who provided a photofit of her attacker that turned out to closely resemble Sutcliffe. But detectives decided she was too young and had been in the wrong place to belong in the series, thus ruling out a vital piece of evidence.

Another early victim, 46-year-old Olive Smelt from Halifax, also offered crucial testimony. She encountered Sutcliffe twice on the night of the assault in August 1975 — first in a pub, where he made an obscene remark, and later when he spotted her on his way home. Sutcliffe stopped his car and spoke to her again before striking her twice on the head with a hammer. He was slashing her buttocks when a passing car scared him off. Mrs Smelt described her attacker as around 30, with dark hair and a beard. She was also certain that he had a local accent. Sutcliffe was 29 at the time and matched her description closely.

Unfortunately, detectives were sceptical about Mrs Smelt’s value as a witness. In a secret report summarising the murders, she was dismissed in astonishingly pejorative language: “She is of loose morals,” the report declared, adding that “it was her usual custom … to visit public houses in Halifax on her own”. What detectives really believed about Mrs Smelt was revealed in a slip by then Chief Constable, Ronald Gregory, who described her in a newspaper article as “a prostitute”. It fitted the “prostitute killer” narrative and damaged Mrs Smelt’s credibility in the eyes of the inquiry, even though it had nothing to do with reality.

Sutcliffe’s fourth victim, and the first to be killed, was 28-year-old Wilma McCann, a mother of four. She was not involved in prostitution either. But Sutcliffe was tired of having his attempts to kill women interrupted and he targeted her in Chapeltown, a red-light area in Leeds where kerb crawlers didn’t attract attention. His fifth victim, 42-year-old Emily Jackson, whom he attacked in January 1976, was selling sex in Chapeltown as a result of a family financial crisis. Sutcliffe had realised prostituted women were easier targets, desperate for money and willing to get into his car. Mrs Jackson was the second woman to die, and her injuries were horrific.

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By the following year, evidence that should have led to Sutcliffe was mounting up. In October 1977 he made his biggest mistake, leaving a brand-new £5 note in the bag of one of his two Manchester victims. In a rare piece of effective detective work, officers traced it to a consignment of notes that had gone to a small number of firms in West Yorkshire, one of which employed Sutcliffe. He was convinced the game was up, but the line of inquiry petered out. Even so, Sutcliffe was a local man with a Yorkshire accent, his appearance matched photofits produced by another surviving victim, Marilyn Moore, and his car had been spotted in red light districts hundreds of times.

Yet when a junior detective, DC Andy Laptew, interviewed him as part of the £5 note inquiry and suggested that Sutcliffe deserved further investigation, Oldfield banged the table with his fist. “Peter Sutcliffe is not the Yorkshire Ripper,” he shouted, threatening anyone who disagreed with a return to traffic duties. There was a reason for Oldfield’s bizarre behaviour, though not a good one. Increasingly desperate about his failure to catch the killer, Oldfield was easy prey for an amateurish hoaxer who sent him anonymous letters and a tape. The man had a distinctive Wearside accent, something none of the survivors had described — but hey, what did they know? I questioned the tape’s authenticity when I first heard it but it flattered Oldfield, addressing him personally and reinforcing his ideas about the killer’s motives.

In the summer of 1979, he decided to ignore the surviving victims, with their regrettable personal habits, and release the tape to the public. West Yorkshire police wasted £1m on a publicity campaign, asking people to look out for a killer with a North-East accent. In Halifax, Olive Smelt was outraged; she told me so when I interviewed her after Jacqueline’s murder in 1980. But a floundering investigation had taken a catastrophic turn and three more women — Jacqueline, Barbara Leach and Marguerite Walls — would die as a result.

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West Yorkshire police’s apology has come too late for Mrs Smelt, who died in 2011. But I’m troubled by Robins’s claims about modern policing, not least the idea that misogynist attitudes have been “consigned to history”. It is true that police forces have better technology than they did in the 1970s, but I see no end to victim-blaming. The “short skirt” defence in rape cases has been replaced by a “digital strip search”, where victims are asked to hand over medical records, school reports and mobile phones, allowing detectives to access intimate photos and messages.

The result is evident in crime statistics: around 55,000 women report a rape to the police in England and Wales each year, but there were only 1,439 convictions in 2019-20. Victims are still being discredited and having their stories disbelieved; it’s more sophisticated than West Yorkshire police’s division of Sutcliffe’s victims into “innocent girls” and the rest, but the underlying impulse is pretty much the same. The situation is so dire that the Victims’ Commissioner, Dame Vera Baird, has argued that rape is being decriminalised.

In Leeds itself, women challenge Robins’s assertion that policing is now “wholly victim-focused”, ensuring that “those harmed by crime are at the heart of what we do”. His force operates the controversial “managed approach” to prostitution, allowing men to kerb crawl in Holbeck, a light industrial area to the south of the city centre, without fear of arrest — as long as they stick to certain hours. It didn’t prevent the murder of a young Polish woman, Daria Pionko, who was kicked to death in Holbeck by a sex buyer in 2015.

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The commercial sex trade always attracts predators, putting women who sell sex at risk, while local women say they are pestered for sex while out shopping or on their way to work. Last week a local headmaster, Ben Mallinson told the BBC he was afraid one of his female pupils would be abducted by men looking for sex, as several had already been propositioned. Holbeck is only four or five miles from Headingley, where Jacqueline Hill was murdered by a man who hated women, yet it now seems to be operating as a “managed misogyny” zone.

It has been painfully clear for a long time that Hill’s death and those of other women could have been avoided if West Yorkshire police had put aside their prejudices and listened to Sutcliffe’s surviving victims. On this tragic anniversary, it is hard not to think of everything Jacqueline might have done in those four lost decades: the friends she would have made, the career she might have have followed, and the children she could have had.

It is also hard to contemplate the fact that women in Leeds and other parts of the country still don’t feel safe from predators, let down by a criminal justice system that seems incapable of locking up violent men. Misogyny is as entrenched as ever — and I’m as angry now as I was when Jacqueline was murdered all those years ago.