Recently we saw the killer of Sarah Everard receive a whole life sentence for her murder and with the sentence came the usual rhetoric from the politicians and media alike.  I could tell you how I feel as a former police officer, but I just don’t think that really matters, others have said it but what they say, undoubtedly with conviction, seems rather hollow.  What matters is that another life has been taken as a result of male violence, not just violence, male violence.  I don’t disagree with those that want to make the streets safe for women, reclaim the streets, I don’t disagree with the ‘me too movement’, but somehow, I feel that the fundamental issue is being missed.  Somehow, I think that all the rhetoric and calls for action concentrate too much on women as victims and looking for someone or some organisation to blame.  There seems to be a sense created that this is a problem for women and in doing so concentrates on the symptoms rather than the cause.  This is a problem for men and our society.  Let’s not dress it up, pretend it could be something else, use terms like ‘not all men’, it is a fact nearly all violence, whether that be against women or men is perpetrated by … you guessed it, men.

I was watching a tv programme the other day about migraines and as it transpires there are millions of migraine sufferers around the world, most are women.  It seems as a man I’m in the minority.  One of the interviewees, a professor was asked why so little had been done in terms of research and finding a cure.  He was frank, if it had been a male problem then there would have been more done.  I’m not sure I totally subscribe to that because there are lots of other factors, after all prostate cancer a major cause of male deaths seems to have received comparatively little coverage until recently.  But he made me think, if men, particularly those of influence accepted there was a problem would they be inclined to act? We call for more females in policing, we call for more females in the boardroom, predominately because we want to make things look a little fairer, a bit more even. We still have a massive gender pay gap in so many businesses and the public sector, we still have accusations and proven cases of sexual harassment.  We still have archaic attitudes to women in so many walks of life, including religion.  Words are great, useless but great. If you own the problem, you find solutions, men don’t own the problem and that is a problem.

So, it seems to me, that we are looking in the wrong place.  Removing Cressida Dick as the head of the Metropolitan Police service isn’t going to change things. Blaming the police as an organisation isn’t going to change things.  Look around you, look at all the scandals, all the sexual offences against women, against children.  Look at where the perpetrators are placed in society, in positions of trust, as members of a variety of organisations, organisations that traditionally we thought we could turn to in our need. And look at the gender of those that commit those crimes, almost always men.

The solution to all of this is beyond me.  As a criminologist I know of so many theories about why people commit crime or are victims of crime.  Some are a little ridiculous but are a product of their time, others fit quite nicely into different circumstances, but none fully explain why.  There are no real certainties and predicting who and where is almost impossible.  Somehow, we need our leaders, predominately men, to grasp the mettle, to accept this a problem for men.  If we owned the problem, we might start to tackle the causes of male violence, whatever they might be. Maybe then we might start to address the symptoms, society will be a safer place, and nobody will need to reclaim the streets.